The failure of classic accountability
My thoughts here are mostly my own processing and regurgitation of the truly excellent book "Unwanted" by Jay Stringer. This book dissects a lot about how the modern Christian church has struggled to cope with the persistent undercurrent of sexual addiction in our culture-- and the recent and ongoing epidemic of addiction catalyzed by the internet, especially through easy access to pornography of every conceivable sort, and the romantic and/or sexual connections facilitated by various apps and sites. We are witnessing an explosion of broken forms of sexuality which leave broken people in their wake, and the church is struggling to find ways to be the place of refuge and healing that it is uniquely called to be.
Classic "accountability" mens groups, as I've experienced them, are well-meaning human attempts to help men grow in their sexual integrity, which are nevertheless almost always ineffective at that goal. Why is this?
Accountability groups are typically modeled on the paradigm and language of winning or losing. "Victory" or "failure", in this context, refer to whether or not the individual crossed their "bottom line" acting out behavior. Most of the conversation revolves around what victories and failures were had since the last check-in, in scope, frequency, and magnitude. The most common metric of "growth" becomes "time since last failure". The standard advice given when a man inevitably does "fail" is almost always some variation of "try harder": pray more, put on more blocks, bounce your eyes more, etc. It is quite easy for sexuality in any and every form to become pathologized in this kind of setting: I've heard many men share about how they noticed attractive women at the gym that day, and how that filled them with shame, or how they rushed to take off their glasses so they could stay "sober". Any kind of daydream or stream of consciousness that involves sexuality in any way becomes branded as yet another manifestation of soul-sickness, lust, perversion, etc, and just another example of how "sick" and "broken" the man is.
As a result of this single-minded focus on failure, accountability groups typically suffer from extreme topic fatigue. Regardless of how committed and enthusiastic men are at the outset of such a group, eventually the prospect of checking in regularly to report on failures in this very narrow area (around which most men already have a great deal of shame) wears on everyone, and the group typically starts to miss a few check-ins here and there, and soon dissipates into a vague guilt cloud of topic avoidance. After a while of being silent and not sharing about where they are struggling, the addictive patterns reestablish and little, if anything, truly changes at the heart level.
What is clearly missing in this type of approach is the radical, completely unintuitive way that God views sin. It baffles and relieves us to learn that God does not view us by any sort of metric like "time since last sinned", but views us before, during, and after sin with exactly the same overwhelming Love. It stuns us to discover that God is "for us", far more than we are "for" ourselves. Not only that, but we are scandalized and delighted to learn that He is for sex, for sensuality, for eroticism, as the one who invented all of these things. He thought it important to include in Scripture, for all cultures and times thereafter, vivid poetry about how intoxicating and lovely a man finds his lover's breasts! It becomes clear to us, when the Gospel really hits home, that God is quite uninterested in behavior management, and instead is after a total transformation and reclamation of the good things He designed. God is not against lust because he doesn't want us to have fun-- He's against it because it's such a cheap and toxic knockoff of the true erotic playground that He himself is so excited for us to experience and be nurtured in.
How could this shift transform and renew the sexual life of men in the Church? Let us follow God's heart, by celebrating where men are headed, not dwelling on where they've failed. Instead of constantly focusing on the inevitable potholes in the rearview, where God Himself doesn't pay any attention, let's fix our eyes on the majestic peaks ahead of us that mens' hearts are naturally thrilled to explore and conquer. Instead of feeding the sense of hopelessness and directionless that thrives when we focus on where we're broken (and which then goes on to drive men to seek out false intensity and excitement through sexual acting out), how about looking forward with vision to the things that we're excited and thrilled to fight for, to protect, to stand up for, as men who have been given enormous, cosmic purpose. As Rose Tico puts it, “we're going to win this war, not by fighting what we hate, but saving what we love.”
Another important point that Jay Stringer hammers home is that addictive behaviors, including sexual ones, almost always point to past pain and hangups that God longs to bring to the light and heal. So instead of pathologizing our own sexual nature and stuffing it down in various ways, healing can come by actually engaging the persistent fantasies, search terms, and behavior patterns, and figuring out how and when these patterns started. Rather than lumping everything remotely sexual into the box of "lust" which we desperately try to nail shut, I think we need to be willing to do the hard work of digging out that box and sorting out what in it is actually healthy, normal, and good.
Of course, some men are terrified to "listen to their lust" rather than just suppressing it tooth and nail, because they feel that getting close to the fire could get them "burned", by which they mean a return of the addictive behavior. And they're entirely justified to be afraid! It's exactly the kind of fear that Jonah had, knowing that he would be far safer staying in Israel than getting anywhere near Nineveh. But God's desire was for Jonah to be exposed to risk in order for the far greater reward of redeeming the precious, beloved treasure that Nineveh hid, the good things that God had made and was desperate to reclaim. Our calling, following God's model in and throughout history, is not merely to turn away from darkness, but rather to speak light into it and reclaim what once was lost.