Recovering Sex by Design

A Conversation with Dr. Juli Slattery

Juli Slattery is a clinical psychologist and the president and cofounder of Authentic Intimacy, a ministry devoted to reclaiming God’s design for sexuality. In 2020, Authentic Intimacy launched SexualDiscipleship.com, an online platform designed to help Christian leaders navigate sexual issues with gospel-centered truth in the understanding that “Sexuality is not a problem to solve, but a territory to reclaim.” Juli is the author of 12 books, and she hosts the weekly podcast Java with Juli.

How did you come to be a ministry leader specializing in sexual discipleship?

When I was about a year old, both of my parents had a pretty dramatic conversion to Christ. I felt called to do family ministry of some type, so I went through college and got my degree in psychology, and then my master’s and doctorate. I got married and started having kids right away, so I worked part-time while I was raising the boys.

Around 2007, I got a call from Focus on the Family, and our family ended up moving out to Colorado Springs to join Focus. That introduced me to media ministry and the skills of broadcasting and podcasting. Then around 2011, God took me through a really deep season, personally, of seeking him. Through that time, he burdened my heart for sexuality. I knew so many women who were struggling with different aspects of sexuality and didn’t feel like the church was addressing them. That, too, burdened my heart for this particular ministry. I had no idea what I was doing other than saying yes to what the Lord was calling me to. It’s been a learning journey for me and a walk of faith.

How do you define intimacy?

First of all, it has the quality of safety. When it’s safe, you can be known for who you are, and you’re moving towards people. It’s got three qualities—safety, vulnerability or unguardedness, and a connection of being known and moving towards others. I would define it with those three parameters, just being connected, life on life.

You wrote in your book Rethinking Sexuality: God’s Design and Why It Matters that every sexual question is ultimately a spiritual question. What do you mean by that?

Our view of sex is always going to come from our view of God. If you ask someone, What do you think about cohabitation? or, Why do you think sexual abuse happens? or, What does it mean to be sexually whole?, they’re not answering you in a void. Without even realizing it, they’re referring back to a larger worldview—how we define right and wrong, what we do with pain, if there is such a thing as sin and evil, or goodness and virtue.

And so every opinion you have, every sexual experience that you’re trying to make sense of, it’s going to come back to, What do you believe about God? A.  W . Tozer said that the most important thing about you is what comes into your mind when you think about God, because that sets the parameters for how you understand all of life. If we’re having conversations with people who have a different view of God, their view of sex is going to be different from ours, and so we’re not talking about the same thing. We don’t just want to minister or have debates on sexual issues. We need to get to the underlying beliefs about God that inform how we understand sexuality.

Then the second piece of that is that our sexual experiences, whether they’re good or bad, will also inform how we understand God. If I walk through sexual trauma, someday I’m going to have to reckon with the question of, where was God when that happened? And why would he have allowed that to happen? Or if I grew up in a church culture that says sex outside of marriage is wrong, or marriage is between a man and a woman, and I have same-sex desire, or my son is gay, I will have to revisit, What do I really believe about that? And, Is God a loving God if he would prevent people from pursuing that type of happiness?

It’s essential when we’re ministering to people to understand that if we just talk about the sexual issue without getting to the spiritual, we really miss the whole point. People are walking away from Christian faith because all they’re getting is a simplistic answer to a very complex and heart-wrenching issue. I think we miss a lot of opportunities when we answer the superficial question instead of getting to the spiritual streams that connect to that question.

That’s needed. I’m sure it’s easier said than done.

It is, and it isn’t. Pastors and ministry leaders know how to deal with spiritual issues but get flat-footed with the sexual issues because they don’t know how to make the connection in their own thinking. They also don’t know how to ask the right questions—to say that, yes, this is a sexual issue, but it boils down to wrestling with God at one level or another. So yes, it’s difficult to learn how to make those connections, but when ministry leaders can see that connection, they realize they’re probably more equipped to have these conversations than they think they are.

You have said that we’re all sexually broken.

I think we have a very simplistic understanding of sexual wholeness in the Christian faith. And because we have a simplistic understanding of wholeness, we also have a simplistic understanding of brokenness. Most Christians would define sexual wholeness as, I’m not looking at pornography; I saved sex for marriage; and if I’m married, sex is relatively good and we’re not cheating on each other. It’s like checking boxes.

But when we really understand the story of sex that’s throughout Scripture, we see that sexuality and gender and marriage—all of it—were meant to be living metaphors that help us understand the depth of God’s covenant love with us. It’s a big concept that takes a long time for people to really understand. God has created this masterpiece with gender and sexuality, and our world is constantly vandalizing it so that we can’t even discover what it’s meant to look like. And what Jesus has come to do with all of life, including sexuality, is to restore that painting to what it was originally meant to look like.

And so there are a lot of people walking around whose behaviors are aligned with what they’ve heard they’re supposed to be doing, but who have a very twisted view of sexuality, and they never consider the ways in which they don’t understand the fullness of God’s revelation in sexuality and gender. We need to invite God to reveal our brokenness, and we need to be on the journey of healing and maturity and surrendering it all to the Lord.

I have heard you say, “It’s not about law, it’s about what God’s doing in history.” Can you elaborate on that?

I don’t want to downplay the fact that all throughout Scripture, sexual immorality is a big deal. So when I say it’s not about a behavioral code, I don’t want to downplay that. But God is revealing something to us through our gender and sexuality. And I think we fail to realize the massive spiritual battle that sexuality represents. Because when a society, or even an individual, gets sexuality right, there’s an intangible revelation of the beauty of male and female, of vulnerability and intimacy, of the beauty of covenant where there’s a promise, and of the beauty of ecstasy that all point to God and how he loves us. In today’s culture, even the average Christian doesn’t understand the concept of covenant in marriage.

Even in marriages that we celebrate and bless, if there’s a superficial understanding, God’s revelation is getting lost. The call of a Christian is to have a life fully surrendered to the Lord, and that doesn’t mean just behavior. Behavior comes out of identity. Behavior comes out of what I believe. Behavior may come out of my wounds—are they healed or not? And so a Christian may say, “Why can’t I stop looking at pornography?” but never ask the question, “Why have I not invited Jesus to heal my sexual wounds?” Or, “Why, if I’ve been a Christian for 20 years, do I still walk around with all the shame?” They may see their lack of integrity only in their behavior but never address the underlying things that tend to fuel that behavior.

If you look at all of Scripture, the whole story of the Bible is about God’s covenant with his people, his union and fellowship with his people. That’s the overarching narrative of all of it. And if you look at the overarching story of sex and marriage in the Bible, you see that sex and marriage and our experiences of sexuality are some of the most powerful physical ways that we make sense of God’s covenant love. The other way is family—God is my father. Those are the two pictures that God has embedded within relationship and creation that point to the most significant truth. I believe God created sexuality the way he did because he created us for that depth of intimacy and knowing and ecstasy and vulnerability in our relationship with him. If we didn’t have that, we could believe that God is a distant God and that he just wants us to obey, that he’s just full of wrath. But we have written within our experience, in our bodies, this revelation that that’s not true.

What changes would you like to see in how churches in general approach sexuality?

It’s really summarized in the concept of sexual discipleship. Many churches are thinking, “How do we get rid of problems?” instead of realizing that we’ve lost the conversation. We need to understand that everyone needs this territory to be recaptured by the love of Christ.

And we need to be comfortable talking about sex—not just in one sermon series, but having people share testimonies regularly and being a safe place for questions. We need to be a legitimate go-to place for everyone, every age and stage. Most church leaders have no training in this. They have their own questions and struggles and don’t feel like they have a safe place to go. So we need a culture shift. That’s what we’ve been trying to do at SexualDiscipleship.com—create opportunities and at least an online platform, if not physical places, for church leaders to get training in how we start to shift this culture.

Is there anything else you want people to know about you?

I don’t love talking about sex. But I feel like, today, this is the pathway to talking about God and to getting to the very tender, sensitive, and confusing places in people’s walk with God, whether they know him or don’t know him. I think a lot of us grow up believing that God wouldn’t want to know about this part of my life, or he’d be ashamed of me, or he can’t help me. I really want people to know that he is the healer. He’s the Redeemer, and he knows these things about you, and he just wants you to tear down the wall that separates him from some of your deepest wounds and questions.

My passion is not to win an argument or convince somebody about biblical sexuality. It’s to use the topic of sexuality and to press into your relationship with the Lord and the questions that you have that sexuality represents. That’s my greatest joy. That’s what keeps me doing what I’m doing. I love seeing people see the goodness of God and find freedom and healing. That’s what really motivates me.