Craig Gross - Eyes of Integrity: The Porn Pandemic and How it Affects You

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EYES OF
INTEGRITY

THE PORN PANDEMIC
AND HOW IT AFFECTS YOU

CRAIG GROSS
WITH JASON HARPER

2010 by Craig Gross

Published by Baker Books
a division of Baker Publishing Group
P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.bakerbooks.com

E-book edition created 2010

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means for example, electronic, photocopy, recording without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

ISBN ***_*_*****_***_*

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture is taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION. NIV. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

Scripture marked NASB is taken from the New American Standard Bible, Copyright 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

Craig Gross is represented by Wheelhouse Literary Group, 1007 Loxley Drive, Nashville, TN 37211.

To protect the privacy of those whose stories are shared by the authors, some names and details have been changed.

This book is dedicated to my friend Steve Glisan. Thank you for your passion, love, and care for the people you served in this ministry. I miss you and wish I could have let you know I was here for you.

Steve, you were a great man of God! You are greatly missed.

Contents

It was the mid-nineties. I was a youth pastor in Southern California and was sitting in my office hearing about one of my students well call him Tommy and a recent blowout hed had with lust.

It had to do with this new thing, this invention called the internet. More and more of my students were coming to me with stories about satisfying their lust through this latest source. In years past if someone wanted porn, they had to work for it, trekking, under cloak of night, to a seedy neighborhood. I imagine a man sneaking into the local quick stop to buy a Hustler, wearing a trench coat and fedora pulled down to his eyebrows.

But with the launch of the internet in the early nineties, porn was on a new kind of page. Instead of buying a magazine with a limited number of pictures, the internet offered an endless supply, accessible to everyone with a computer and an internet connection. With a few clicks and some refined searching, a young user like the student in my office could find just about any type of porn he wanted and then some.

Though I had been dreading this meeting with Tommy and his mother, Sherry, I knew we needed to talk. I could tell when he called me a few days ago, adamant about seeing me as soon as possible, something was wrong.

So on the day of our appointment, Tommy stumbled into my office with a dazed look on his face and an angry mom in his wake.

Tears running down her cheeks, Sherry went from angry to sad to hopeless as she told me, her voice barely above a whisper, about walking into her home office. She found Tommy glued to the computer screen, so entranced by the porn site in front of him that he was oblivious to her being there.

Now in my office Tommy felt ashamed and awkward as his mother and I quizzed him on his activity. Our thirty-minute appointment turned into a two-hour session as the three of us tried to uncover the strong seduction of internet porn in Tommys life.

When our meeting was over and Tommy and Sherry had left, I was the one in a helpless daze. I hardly knew what the internet was, much less the ways it was destroying this young man. I didnt know what to say to this kid or to any of the other kids who were now suddenly struggling with this new phenomenon. I was at a loss.

Days passed and I still hadnt given Tommy a practical plan or any helpful advice. I just didnt know where to start. I probably told him to read his Bible more, pray consistently, and come to the next midweek service all the standard answers when you dont know what to say. Hardly the complete answer I would give him if he came to my office today.

I tell this story for a reason. That encounter with Tommy and his mother was the first time I realized how destructive porn is the way it consumes and corrupts the hearts and minds of good people whom we think should know better.

Over the next couple years, more and more of my students became entangled in the web of pornography, and I kept searching for a way to help them. I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of lives that porn left broken. It was taking people farther than they ever thought they would go and influencing them to do things they never thought they would do.

Porn had become a pandemic.

A pandemic is an epidemic of an infectious disease that spreads through populations across a large region. Often polls produce inflated numbers and statistics can embellish a problem, but with porn, I think reality is much worse than the numbers indicate. I mean, who wants to admit in a survey to having a problem with porn?

But help is available.

No addict ever started off saying, I hope I become an addict someday. Addiction comes after a lot of bad choices and continues as long as the bad choices are made. If we could somehow help prevent the bad choices, we could then help overcome the addiction.

After talking with a computer programming friend of mine, we came up with the concept of an accountability software program. In its earliest version the idea was simple. Load the software onto the computer and then go about your online business. The program would instruct users to enlist a friend as an accountability partner. Then every two or four weeks (depending on the frequency you chose), a list of any questionable websites you visited would be sent to your accountability partner. Now you had someone looking over your shoulder as you surfed the web; hopefully that knowledge would keep you from getting sucked into the vortex of porn. We named it X3watch and gave it away to anyone who wanted it.

And that was the beginning of what I do today. My friend and I strategized and decided to roll out a website to help people who needed it the most: the Las Vegas Adult Video Convention. Dreaming outside the box, we purchased a booth at the Adult Video Trade Show and branded ourselves XXX-church: The #1 Christian Porn Site.

You may wonder where that name originated. We mixed the seedy (XXX) with the sacred (church) to make this statement: the church can have an impact on the lives of those who are being destroyed by pornography addiction.

We had a unique approach to ministry, so we generated quite a few critics but even more converts. We pressed forward, offering spiritual solutions to porn addiction on our website and appearing every January in Vegas with a vision not only to give software away to porn addicts but also to help those in the adult industry escape if they wanted to.

That was eight years ago at the time of this writing, and during those eight years weve heard so many stories of hope and struggle. Nearly a million people have downloaded the free X3watch software (available at XXXchurch.com), while our website continues to have more than a million hits per month. Weve relocated our ministry from Southern California to Las Vegas and do outreach on the notorious Vegas Strip, offering the many adult industry workers in the city a place to escape.