March 4, 2002

High teen pregnancy rates spark
interest in True Love Waits events
___By George Henson
___Staff Writer
___LUBBOCK--Lubbock County's pregnancy rate for 13- to 17-year-olds has exceeded the state average every year since 1994.
___The county's rates for chlamydia and gonorrhea were 817 and 448 per 100,000, respectively, in 2000. That's more than triple the national average of 258 and 132 for the same year.
___Therein lies the problem.
___The answer, according to youth and adult leadership at First Baptist Church of Lubbock, is encouraging teenagers to commit to save sexual relations for marriage.
___The West Texas church has been involved in the True Love Waits campaign for years. But last year, Minister to Youth Jimmy Storrie decided it was time to make a bigger emphasis.
___Plans were finalized in November for a six-week emphasis with special Sunday School lessons, parent meetings, a commitment service and participation in a nationwide televised event from Wedgwood Baptist Church in Fort Worth.
___Then the first week in December, the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal unveiled the statistics related to teen sexuality in the city, and overnight it was the talk of the town.
___The convergence of those statistics with the already-planned emphasis on abstinence threw First Baptist Church in the local media spotlight. Television and newspaper coverage alerted more people in Lubbock than ever before to the True Love Waits message.
___"It was very timely the way all this worked out for us to minister to our community," Storrie said. "The people in our community now know, if they didn't before, that we're trying to meet the needs of teenagers and their families."
___The teenagers responded. Before the emphasis about 190 teenagers attended Sunday School at First Baptist. During the True Love Waits emphasis, that number jumped to 225.
___"We were open and honest in our approach to things, and they were open to that," Storrie said.
___During the last session, youth were polled about what kind of difference the study had made in their lives, and most indicated a change in either attitude or behavior. Others said that while they already had made a commitment to sexual purity before marriage, the emphasis reinforced that commitment.
___Parents also were highly supportive of the emphasis, Storrie said.
___"Our parents were thrilled beyond measure," he explained. "At every event where parents were invited, we filled the room. And a lot of them were honest and said they were uncomfortable about talking about these things at home. Well, the way we worked this was to show a film or to throw out a subject and then encourage them to go home and discuss these things. We heard from dozens of parents and teenagers that they had conversations they felt they should have had long ago."
___More than 100 teenagers made commitments to sexual purity during a special Sunday night service. "It was great," Storrie said. "With their parents with them, we had more than 300 people at the front of the sanctuary."
___Storrie feels certain other youth made similar commitments but were not comfortable with that type of public service. Some, he said, do not have parents who would participate with them, so they opted out.
___Evidence already is coming in that the church's emphasis is paying real dividends.
___"I've had a lot of Sunday School teachers come to me and say that a student had called them on the phone to say they had been on a date and could have gone a lot farther sexually, but they thought about what we had been talking about and didn't," Storrie said. "We feel like our teenagers will continue to make those kinds of decisions."

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