Forty-five students from Lakeside Baptist Church, Hoover, sampled life at the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) annual meeting while attending a True Love Waits rally in Orlando, June 13.
During that rally 12-year-old Brit Brown, a member of Lakeside, made a commitment to family, God and himself by pledging for the first time to abstain from sex until the day he gets married.
“I’ve always been thinking about it since I was young,” Brown said. “It’s something I want to accomplish in my life.”
Brown joined 200 other young people at the rally to make the pledge for sexual purity.
Teenagers met at the Orange County Convention Center to sign and stake 500 commitment cards on the front lawn of the center as a visible sign of their pledges.
Sixteen-year-old Brandon Ison from Orlando, said, “This is to show there’s a difference between Christians and non-Christians. There is a difference in the way we live.”
Ison is not alone in pledging sexual abstinence until marriage.
In 1994, Southern Baptist teenagers from across the nation displayed 211,000 commitment cards on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
In 1996, nearly 350,000 cards stretched to the top of the Georgia Dome in Atlanta. The effort was repeated in 1999, when volunteers marched an additional 100,000 cards across the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.
For Valentine’s Day 2001, True Love Waits is moving to the Internet.
Teenagers will find commitment cards available online for them to sign and send electronically to a national collection site.
Richard Ross, youth ministry consultant for the SBC’s LifeWay Christian Resources, said he anticipates several hundred thousand commitment cards to be submitted Feb. 14, 2001.
“Teens are so thankful they don’t have to feel alone in the commitment they’ve made while everyone else was talking about sleeping around,” Ross said.
“They now have a movement to latch on to,” Ross added.
And the True Love Waits movement seems to be making an impact on society.
Since True Love Waits began in 1993, the numbers of sexually active teenagers has decreased.
This downturn came after a 20-year increase of sexual activity prior to True Love Waits.
Sixteen-year-old Mary Margaret Collingsworth from Orlando, said, “True Love Waits helps me because I made a commitment to God and to myself. I know where I stand before I get in a compromising situation.”
Seventeen-year-old Brittney Marks also from Orlando, said the commitment is not as far-fetched as skeptics say.
“It’s not unrealistic because God wouldn’t set goals that were unrealistic,” she said. “He sets goals we can achieve. We are the ones that have to choose right over wrong.” (News Network)
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