The challenge is to equip youth to make wise decisions and face the world with confidence. The Challenge Faith traditions affirm that bearing children and forming families are among the most significant and satisfying tasks of adult life. In that context, encouraging adolescent sexual health is central. The challenge of guiding youth into sexually healthy adulthood is both complex and forbidding. Forbidding, because the most adverse consequence of sexual intimacy is no longer unwanted pregnancy but death.
Religious congregations can accept the challenge to foster adolescent sexual health in four ways.
In communities of faith and in families, we must be willing to face the difficult, potentially embarrassing issues and talk about sex. Parents worry that talking about sex with young people is tantamount to giving them permission to have sex. In actuality, talking about sex gives young people permission to talk about sex. How we talk and, indeed, whether we talk, shape the climate in the home and in the congregation. Few people breeze through adolescence without difficulties and dilemmas related to sexual and relational development.