'True Love Waits' Plans Olympian Effort to Change Culture
by Allie Martin and Jenni Parker
August 19, 2004
(AgapePress) - True Love Waits will take a global stand for purity this weekend at the Olympics in Athens, Greece."An Evening With the Olympians: True Love Waits" will be held Sunday night at the Dora Stratou Theatre, located at the base of the Acropolis. The event will feature several athletes, including 1988 gold medallist Joe DeLoach and "Olympic Athlete of the Century" and 10-time medallist (nine gold and one silver) Carl Lewis.
True Love Waits (TLW), a LifeWay Christian Resources ministry, is partnering with Lay Witnesses for Christ International to host the special program, during which athletes will be encouraging young people to make a commitment to sexual purity by choosing to abstain from sex until marriage.
Jimmy Hester, co-founder of True Love Waits, says the Olympic event is a golden opportunity to communicate God's design for human sexuality. The event will be a "global celebration" of young people making commitments to abstinence throughout the ten-year history of TLW, he says, and "what this commitment really does mean -- how it's changed cultures and changed the way people have approached their sexual activity prior to marriage."
Hester says the message of abstinence transcends all cultural barriers, and the TLW movement, which began in the U.S., has caught on in several places around the globe. "We know of activity in about 85-86 countries around the world," he notes, so the "Evening With the Olympians" has "given an opportunity for those countries to come together."
He adds, "We don't typically get to be able to do that, but they'll be able to come together in this one display." The TLW spokesman says event organizers in Athens have already received abstinence commitment cards of young people from every inhabited continent in the world.
The "Evening With the Olympians" event is scheduled to begin on August 22 at 5 p.m. and will be taped and available that evening for viewing through the Internet. The download is available at www.truelovewaits.com; and at www.lifeway.com/news.
