The Great Sex Rescue: The Lies You’ve Been Taught and How to Recover What God Intended by Sheila Wray Gregoire, Rebecca Gregoire Lindenbach, and Joanna Sawatsky

Sheila Wray Gregoire has been speaking and writing about sex and relationships for a long time. During that time, she’s had hundreds of online and in-person conversations, with many women but also some men. She began to see common themes coming out—Christian women are really struggling with sex. There are lots of Christian books about sex and marriage out there, but most are written by men and are most concerned with men’s needs. So she and her team decided to survey 20,000 women about their marriages, sex lives, and the beliefs they had grown up with or learned along the way. 

Along with the survey, they also studied the bestselling Christian books on sex and marriage. The titles of these books will be familiar to many Banner readers, yet some of the passages quoted from them are downright horrifying. 

In The Great Sex Rescue, the research team presents their findings. And it isn’t pretty.

Christian women have absorbed the message that men really, really need sex, that the role of the wife is to fulfill that need, and that the wife’s experience doesn’t really matter that much. This hasn’t done much to cultivate intimate, mutually satisfying sexual relationships in Christian marriages. Instead, it has done untold damage.

This enlightening, potentially life-changing book is also an interesting and accessible read. While the topics are weighty, the authors’ approach is positive and sometimes even funny. It’s also part sex manual—there is plenty of frank conversation about how to improve emotional and physical relationships in marriage. It is all based on a Christian perspective of marriage that takes Scripture seriously, centered on sex as a gift from God that is meant to be a lifegiving expression of love and intimacy for both partners.

Women who grew up in the church—and whose lives have been influenced by popular evangelical books on sex and marriage—will find themselves nodding knowingly. Men will have their eyes opened to how women have experienced these things. And pastors, church leaders, youth leaders, and counselors will find invaluable new insight into the realities of sex and marriage. (BakerBooks)