Chandler church is ‘Bringing Sexy Back’

A king-size bed with a silky spread dominated the church’s stage. A sign outside the sanctuary doors warned, “PG-13. Parents strongly cautioned: Some content may not be suitable for all children.”

Listen to the pastor talk about the program

It was Week 3 of the six-week “Bringing Sexy Back” worship service series at Cornerstone Christian Fellowship Church in Chandler. More than 1,000 were packed into the 5 p.m. Sunday service to hear “What Every Woman Ought to Know” from author Shaunti Feldhahn.

For 45 minutes, she shared research she had done on men, including their fixations on pornography, their own need to be desired by their wives and men’s deep love for their wives that they struggle to express.

“Your sexual desire for your husband profoundly affects his sense of well-being and confidence in all areas of his life,” Feldhahn told host Ron Merrell, Cornerstone’s teaching pastor in a Q&A session. She insisted that 98 percent of men said their goal is not to have all the sex they can get, but “a feeling of wanting to be wanted, wanting to be desired. That is what really mattered.”

Using both a commissioned national survey and her own extensive interviews with men, she said a man is so “visually wired” that images of the women they see go into a “mental Rolodex of images stretching all the way back to his teenage years, and any one of the pictures is going to pop up at any time in his brain without warning.”

Since Senior Pastor Linn Winters introduced the series Aug. 12, weekend attendance at first four and now five services per weekend has climbed to past 6,500, or about 2,000 more than average. The series is promoted with an edgy Web site — www.howsexyami.com — and a Loop 202 billboard showing two sets of feet projecting from under bed covers.

“Our church has always been kind of a risk-taking church,” said the 27-year pastor, noting that people of other churches have told him his series is inappropriate, that “a church has no business talking about this, and they think it is some sort of a gimmick to get people in. They hate our sign. They think our sign is over the top.”

Need for the series came from within the church.

The church’s counselors told Winters they were noticing a “common thread in marriages” — pornography and infidelity — as they talked to couples. “We began to self-assess to see what really was going on.” They learned “there really was a significant number of families in our church who are struggling with pornography and with infidelity.” They began research, and Winters said he was astounded that Chandler was listed No. 4 in the nation for accessing “porn,” “sex” and “XXX” on search engines, according to a monitoring company that tracks Internet searches. “I don’t know why,” he said. “I was stunned.”

Winters learned a Granger, Ind., church had done a five-week series, “Pure Sex,” with an accompanying Web site — www.mylamesexlife.com — in February 2006 which first introduced the two sets of feet as part of the publicity. The response at that megachurch was huge, he said.

“We decided that was the same tact we needed to take,” he said. “They made a ton of stuff available to us.”

While adults are hearing about fantasies, women’s needs and men’s sexual wiring, the children coming to church are in a children’s center getting age-appropriate teaching tied to the six-week series. Meanwhile, Cornerstone is offering eight fall classes and gatherings on such topics as “Valiant Men, “Intimate Issues” and “Every Woman’s Battle.”

Winters, who has been married to his wife, Lisa, for 25 years and has a grown son, is preaching for most of the series. On Aug. 19, he talked frankly to men and had a silver sport convertible on stage to press his message. “I think the men have squirmed more than the women during the series,” he said.

“We say that God intended sex to be more than just two bodies rubbing together,” Winters said. “We have said when you look at pornography, we know there is more going on than just looking during that moment.”

Some weekends, the church’s wide stage features both the king-size bed and a small bed. “One analogy we use back and forth is that the world is really offering ‘little bed sex,’” Winters said. “The world really comes and says, ‘These are two bodies rubbing together’ and that is all it really is at the end of the day.”

But God, he said, intended that when men and women share a bed, their souls come together. “God says that when we begin to honor the soulishness of the sexual encounter, all of a sudden this thing changes and becomes what we describe as ‘big bed sex.’”

“We talk to people about what does that look like for a man to invite a woman, not to the ‘little bed’ but instead to invite her to the ‘big bed,’” Winter said. “What we have said over and over is that every woman longs to be invited to the big bed — but only a man can make the big bed.”

By the way, the king-size bed is being given away in a drawing Sept. 15 to all who attend the newly added Saturday service at 6 p.m.

“The world offers a little bed,” Winters said. “God offers big bed sex.”