These two pastors have a strategy for shutting down the smut industry: convert its customers one by one.
When Craig Gross and Mike Foster visit pornography trade shows, they usually walk past picketers holding signs protesting the events. But the co-founders of XXXchurch.com are there for a different reason: to reach porn addicts, smut purveyors and the women who are exploited by this $13 billion-a-year industry.
Once inside, they and their wives set up a 10-foot square booth, where they share Christ, give away free Bibles and Internet screening software they developed (X3Watch-now with 170,000 users), and challenge visitors to take the Seven-Day Porn Challenge-to go a week without viewing erotic material. While they minister, friends at home fast and pray for their spiritual protection-and keep them accountable when they come home.
“Both Craig and I are aware that this is a very volatile issue,” Foster explains. “We don't want to be another statistic on the charts of people who have crashed and burned in their ministry-asking people to do one thing, but not even living it ourselves. That's just par for the course, whether it's porn ministry or pastoring a church.”
Gross and Foster have visited six such trade shows since founding XXX church.com in January of 2002, but the majority of their ministry time is spent speaking at youth and pastor's conferences, raising awareness in churches and building relationships with people in the porn industry.
“Pornographers recognize that we're not a good thing for their industry,” Foster says. “But because we have a relationship with them, and they see the consistency of our message, it's difficult for them to hate us.”
While serving in pastoral ministry before launching XXXchurch.com, Gross and Foster came to the realization that one way they could make a dent in the porn industry was not to lobby for laws against it, but to get people to stop consuming it.
“Because it has no outward symptoms like alcoholism or drug abuse, we tend to overlook just how many people are involved,” Gross says. “The Internet has taken pornography out of the seedy part of town and made it accessible in our homes.”
XXXchurch.com has gained the respect of ministers from Billy Hybels, pastor of Willow Creek Community Church, to Rob Bell, who leads Mars Hill Bible Church, a large congregation in Grandville, Mich.-not to mention the attention of news outlets from Wired magazine to ABC's Good Morning America.
Their ministry is not without its detractors. XXXchurch.com features a page full of hate mail-most of it from Christians who find their tactics too extreme. But Gross and Foster are unfazed-and point out that 16 percent of those who visit the site find it while surfing for porn. They say they have adopted their philosophy of ministry from Jesus Himself.
“We're trying to reach people who would never go to church,” Gross explains. “It would take us two weeks at church to do what we can do in five minutes at a porn show.”
by Matt Green
from Ministry Today magazine
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