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Please state your name and what XXX Church strives to do in its ministry.
Craig Gross: My name is Craig Gross and I think XXX Church exists to raise awareness about the issue of pornography and deal with the prevention of this problem from happening. Also we deal with the recovery…mainly awareness, prevention recovery when it comes to pornography.
CG: I was a youth pastor and I noticed this common theme among kids in my youth group that they were struggling with this issue and nobody was talking about it. This was nine years ago yet it was something that didn’t get much attention and I just felt like it needed to be discussed. It was a simple idea to just create a website to help people. That’s where it all began nine years ago and its kind of taken off from there.
CG: Your typical religious groups stand outside and they argue and they yell and they tell people how they’re going to burn in hell. Our approach has just simply been to go where people are at and reach out to people in love. It just works so much better. If anything the response that we’ve gotten has just been “If you get too close to the fire you’re going to get burned”, just people saying that they can’t believe that we’d actually go to these places. We just try to reach out to people in love and we’ve seen it work in some amazing ways.
CG: Those people are just idiots, just no good. They’re pointless. It’s not what Jesus would do, we’re nothing like them. I think it hurts what we do because people associate us with them because we both have Bibles. People that stand out on corners that hold signs and yell Bible verses at people, I don’t know where we think Jesus did this kind of thing or where we thought that worked but you have no relationships with these people and no one takes you seriously. We might both believe in Jesus but I guess our interpretations are pretty far off.
CG: I think because it’s a secret for so many people. When you drink its very hard to keep that to yourself. 70% of people look at porn by themselves so it’s a very secretive issue that people never share so no one knows about it so you don’t want to talk about it. It’s not any more difficult to deal with than say alcohol or drugs but the secret issue of it makes it seem like its next to impossible so to speak. You think you’re the only one going through this but that’s just a lie, there are so many people going through this. There’s just very little wanting to talk about it.You think you’re the only one going through this but that’s just a lie, there are so many people going through this. There’s just very little wanting to talk about it.
CG: We launched in 2002 and I think the late 90’s is really where the whole web world kind of went through the roof, with the dial up Internet etc. I graduated college in ’96 and I didn’t have a personal computer. Those days seem so crazy and ancient now. We just address this issue online because that’s where we felt the biggest problems were with pornography. People said we were so far ahead of the curve but we really weren’t, we were reacting to an issue that was going on. I just think the whole world changed with the evolution of the Internet and we tried responding as soon as we could that there was actually a need to do this.
What has it meant to you to have musicians get behind this cause and take it on the road?
CG: If this is just a website or just a host of material online then it wouldn’t spread like it has. For us to see people that have taken the stage and have a platform, whether that’s bands or some athletes or anytime someone lends their stage to our cause it’s taken much more seriously in their world. It’s an honor that people would do that. When the lead singer of a band talks about his struggle and his accountability and integrity as opposed to “here’s somebody else to talk about this”, it means that much more because kids are there to see that band and I think that’s the cool thing. I think a lot of musicians don’t realize how powerful that microphone is. Kids want to copy whatever t-shirt you’re wearing so when you’re standing up for causes like ours I think its huge and its awesome to see that.
CG: If you do or don’t have a belief in God I think you have to realize that you can’t do this on your own, that there’s somebody else out there that can help you and just confessing it to God and saying “God I need your help” I think that the second thing would be then to find somebody else because there’s nobody I’ve met that has gotten over a struggle with pornography on their own, its just not going to happen. You’ve got to find somebody else that you can confide in and talk to who’s not going to judge you, basically a safe place that you can go to whether that’s a friend, a mom, a dad, a boyfriend, girlfriend, pastor. Some of the tools we have online like “X3Watch.” That’s only half of it though, we’ve got to connect you with somebody else. The third thing is you have to say “I’m willing to be done with this stuff”. The Bible says to run away from sexual sin. You can have accountability, you can have a confession to God but at the end of the day you have to make some choices to run away and take care of some of this stuff.
What does XXX Church have coming up this year that supporters can look forward to?
CG: We’re just continuing to work on a bunch of stuff on the site, just some new resources and videos. We’re working with Levi the Poet, who has done some stuff for us in the past, we’ll have some more stuff going on with him as well as continued improvement on the software side. We’re working on versions for the Android and Blackberry for “X3Watch.” New stuff is around the corner.
(7 votes, average: 4.86 out of 5)
great interview! cool to see this being talked about!
Wow, what a cool organization!