Tomorrow evening I start a new series at Ivy Central, Didsbury 7pm I’m calling FIRST LOVE.

When I was on holiday this year I had a dream that when I woke up I felt like God was saying we should look at the whole area of sex and sexuality and relationships, friendships, marriage, singleness, gender and so on. I’ve never really gone into these things though it seems everyone else talks about them all the time but my reason has been ‘I want to keep the main thing the main thing and just focus on Jesus and the good news.’ But who is the good news for? And how come the world does not see the church as its purveyor? It would be hard to disagree that one of the main reasons is for how we’ve gone about this.

I’d planned a one off teaching on singleness and dating but I felt like we had to go further and deeper into messy areas the church has traditionally made such a mess of discussing,  where there’s an incredible amount of hurt as a result.

So I want to start FIRST LOVE by looking at how we discuss what we’re talking about here, so we remember this is about people.

I’ve found Debs Hirsch’s book Redeeming Sex incredibly helpful here and I’m delighted she’s going to join us at Launch and has agreed to speak on this on what will probably be the final night of the series in November – so you can save all the hard questions till then.

One thing I recall from the book though is how she heard a Pastor once asked the congregation, ‘What does the Bible tell us about people?’

They said ‘We are all sinners before God.’

He replied, ‘Okay. Is that the first thing?’

They realised, ‘No. We’re made in His image.’

Debs said which way round we view people – and ourselves – primarily makes a huge difference here. So please come along if you’re ready and willing to listen to me and others including various other guest speaker in the series I’ll be privileged, unless you have an axe to grind or a stone to throw – in which case please feel free to stay home with the perfect people.