TLW Plans to 'Take the Town' in Nationwide Abstinence Emphasis
by Allie Martin
March 15, 2005
(AgapePress) - A Christian abstinence program has launched an initiative designed to help communities find strategies for reclaiming and proclaiming the value of sexual purity among young people.True Love Waits (TLW) is a youth-based international campaign that uses positive peer pressure to encourage teenagers to commit to remain sexually pure until marriage. And now, through its new "Takes the Town" initiative, TLW is encouraging cities around the United States to engage in a unified, community-wide approach to promoting abstinence.
Jimmy Hester, a co-founder of TLW, says the new initiative will encourage more of America's communities to embrace abstinence education in a comprehensive way. "And when I say community," he explains, "I'm talking about the different parts of the community, such as businesses, health organizations, education organizations or schools; also media, and maybe even so local government."
In this all-encompassing effort, Hester says, the various human elements and corporate entities that make up a city or town ideally "would come together along with churches and the religious community and give a concerted effort to put this message out to the community to challenge teenagers to remain sexually abstinent until marriage."
TLW hopes to involve 50 communities during the first year of its "Takes the Town" initiative. The movement's co-founder says the abstinence education initiative will not only challenge those cities and towns, but will also encourage those students who have actively participated in True Love Waits programs and emphases in recent years.
"We hear all the time about students in schools who are very bold about sharing this message and challenging their peers," Hester says. "This is going to give them encouragement and support to do that in even greater ways."
True Love Waits was created more than a decade ago by LifeWay Christian Resources of the Southern Baptist Convention. Since 1993, an estimated 2.5 to 3 million youth have signed pledge cards, promising to remain sexually abstinent until marriage.
Allie Martin, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
