Regardless of where it came from, or how it happened, harmful teachings about our body negatively impact how we view and treat ourselves, which in turn negatively impacts all of our relationships. To heal from harmful teachings about the body, we need to learn how to build a healthy relationship with our body again, or for the first time…

There are three teachings of purity culture that have had the most detrimental impact on women. These messages may or may not have been what the authors, preachers or youth leaders wanted to come across, but these are the messages that have stayed with Evangelical women into adulthood…

In Leviticus, we see that it was the finite bodies of humankind that made them impure, different from God, and unable to approach God’s temple without rituals and cleansing. Jesus removed the need for rituals by existing as the infinite presence of God in the finite body of a human, as, “…in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily” (Colossians 2:9). After not being allowed to enter God's presence during their monthly cycles for so long, a woman's body was the chosen vessel for Immanuel to come into the world and for salvation to come to us all. Immanuel, God with us, was birthed as an unclean human into an unclean environment, and from the moment he was born, he began making the unclean holy…

To understand the goal of purity in the Old Testament, we must begin with the first garden. A garden was the specific location and environment that God created to commune with Adam and Eve (Genesis 2:8). We see in the Garden of Eden the first introduction of the concept of the temple, a place where humankind could meet with and spend time with God. Before sin entered the world, there was no need to separate the purity of God from his creation. After God created Adam, he created the Garden of Eden and placed Adam there (Genesis 2:8)…

The young females who came of age under the teachings of the Evangelical Purity Movement (Purity Culture) are now in their thirties to forties. Some are now wives and mothers, having achieved all the goals set out for them by purity culture, yet the messages they received as teenagers can still be found in their struggling mental health, almost non-existent sex drives and the inability to stay present in their own bodies. Others made it to their wedding day but discovered that purity culture could not hold true to its promises as their marriages fell apart or their bodies would not allow them to be a mother. And still, others have waited and waited for a promise of marriage that has never arrived. This series is an invitation to join on a journey; visiting the places in Scripture that speak of purity and God’s presence, discovering the messages of purity culture and how that has impacted the church, and finally arriving at what call to action this information means for the Church.