I just finished thumbing through Josh McDowell’s The Bare Facts: 39 Answers to Questions Your Parents Hope You Never Ask About Sex. As you can tell from the title, it’s a book written with the target audience of junior high and high school students, parents, and youth workers. It addresses a touchy subject in the youth ministry community: sex.
The Bare Facts is simple in design, but immensely complex in content. It breaks down 39 questions that today’s youth have about sex, including:
- “Are abstinence and purity the same thing?”
- “Can sex affect my brain?”
- “Sex is so beautiful, how can it be wrong?”
- “I’m not a virgin. Is it too late for me?”
- And so on…
After asking the question, Josh breaks it down and answers the question based not just on biblical principles, but based on science and research as well. In that regard, it’s a great resource not just for the Christian community, but also for non-believers.
From a youth worker perspective, this book is hugely successful. Reading through the 39 questions, I think I’ve heard more than half of them in my time working with students. It’ll be a great resource to turn to when I don’t necessarily have the answer to a difficult question off the top of my head. I’m planning on doing a multi-week series about sex and dating with my boys this year, and The Bare Facts will be playing a big part in the planning of those lessons.
There is also a free teaching outline that goes along with the book. It is mostly aimed at a large group setting, but I can definitely see some applications for the small group setting as well.
I would recommend this book to any student, parent, youth pastor, youth worker, or teacher working with students. In fact, earlier this week I sent out an email to the parents of my junior high small group and told them about it. All in all, Josh McDowell has hit it out of the park with this simple, extremely useful handbook about the difficult questions when it comes to sex.
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