Faith & Intimacy

I've been attending The Belonging Co here in Nashville for several years. It's a church I genuinely love. I'm not writing this as a critique of any specific church. I'm writing it as someone who sits in Nashville's faith communities, loves them, and has spent years noticing a specific gap that most of them share. The prohibition side is well-developed.

Brittney and I both came from faith backgrounds that shaped us in ways we're still discovering. The convictions that formed us — about marriage, about faithfulness, about the sacred nature of covenant — are genuine and important. They also handed us specific challenges around intimate life that took years to fully understand. Not because the faith itself was the problem. Because of the gap between what it prohibits and what it never quite taught us to build.

I grew up in a faith environment that had clear things to say about sexuality — what it was for, what it was not for. The prohibitions were communicated with conviction. What was communicated with far less clarity was the invitation. The invitation that desire within marriage is not a concession to human weakness — but something created, designed, and explicitly celebrated in scripture. Here's what the text actually says.

I grew up in a faith environment that had a lot to say about what sex was not. What was communicated far less clearly was what intimacy actually is — what it looks like when it's fully alive, and what the body has to do with a life of faith rather than simply being a source of temptation to manage. This post is for the Nashville couples who know that feeling.