The Briefing & Youth Ministry

NOTABLE QUOTABLES:

• Common Sense Media reports that American tweens spend on average more than 4 1/2 hours on screens a day, and teenagers spend a stunning nine hours per day. It is no surprise that the average age of first exposure to internet porn is 11.
  
• Snapchat, the social media giant used by 47 percent of U.S. teens, is notoriously used to send vanishing nude photos.
  
• Data from the Pew Internet and American Life Project suggests that 70 percent of 15- to 17-year-old internet users accidentally view porn "very" or "somewhat" often. According to the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, 64 percent of young people ages 13 to 24 actively seek out porn weekly or more often.
  
• Good parents everywhere know there is cyber danger out there, but TruResearch reports only 12 percent know their teens are accessing porn
  
• In 2014, the University of Cambridge published research showing how porn addiction mirrors cocaine and heroin addiction. Gray matter shrinks. Neurology is affected. A developing young mind is vulnerable.
  

PATHWAYS

• We cannot afford to play ignorant in this area especially with our teens. The danger is always assuming that "our kids would never get involved in this." The truth of the matter is that whether students are going after or it or not, it's pretty much busting down our doors (or screens) and inviting it's seductive, distorted worldview to come and play. We must be aware, honest, and we need to respond.
• At the heart of Pornography is an assault on the dignity and humanity of God's created people who were made in His image. It ultimately objectifies and degrades a person, removing their soul, and presenting a shallow 2-dimensional figure on a screen to be consumed.
• The solution isn't merely to "stop looking at it" (esp. for those who are currently giving themselves over to it). It is recognizing that we have disordered desire for something other than God and we're trying to fill that void with something else and it inevitably becomes an idol. Keller notes, "An idol, then, is anything more fundamental than God to our happiness, meaning in life, and identity. It is making a good thing into an ultimate thing. Idolatry is the inordinate desire of (even) something good."