The Cohabitation Dilemma Comes for America’s Pastors by DAVID J. AYERS for Christianity Today
GNN Note – Is it really a “dilemma”? This is not a new issue, by any stretch of the imagination. Not sure why this would be causing stress within the church as the Holy Bible is clear on this subject and, therefore, no dilemma should exist. It’s like the sexual deviants, there is no “dilemma”, we love them and explain to them the position of the Holy Bible. Either it’s acceptable to them or it isn’t. It’s not a person causing stress, it’s the rules of life, period. /END
More evangelicals are living together before marriage. Church leaders struggle to respond.
In early 2019, the internet was aglow with news about Chris Pratt and his fiancée, Katherine Schwarzenegger, moving in together. Media outlets cited the couple’s evangelical Christian faith as the reason they did not cohabit until they were engaged. Few suggested there was any contradiction between Pratt’s cohabitation and his status as a “devout Christian,” a “folksy, popular evangelical” who urged “living boldly in faith.”
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This may seem odd to those who recognize that Scripture forbids all sexual activity outside marriage. But the choice that Pratt and Schwarzenegger made isn’t contained to Hollywood—it’s the new norm among young, professing evangelicals across America.
While speaking to a large gathering of evangelical pastors in late 2019 in Pennsylvania, I asked how many of them regularly faced cohabitation in their churches. Most raised their hands. One told me that he had stopped conducting weddings because so many of his engaged couples were cohabiting and got angry when he addressed it. Another suffered bitter criticism from church members when he dismissed a church employee who refused to leave a cohabiting arrangement.
What I have seen for years in large national surveys and learned in interviews with a spectrum of pastors in 2019 corresponds with these anecdotes: Evangelicals, especially those under 40, increasingly see cohabitation as morally acceptable. Most young evangelicals have engaged in it or expect to.
