LUBBOCK, Texas — As autumn approaches, aspiring missionaries in their late teens and early 20s arrive at Sunset International Bible Institute’s West Texas campus.

The 45 students — 27 women and 18 men — from 19 U.S. states and Mexico will train for eight months before scattering to mission points around the world.

As the two-year Adventures in Missions program — known as AIM — begins, participants get instruction on stewardship, security procedures, personal hygiene and respectful treatment of the Sunset Church of Christ members who house them.

For nearly a decade, another topic — one often avoided by Christians — has gained prominent attention at AIM’s annual orientation: Sexual trauma.

“They’re going to be real,” Pat Sheaffer, AIM’s advancement coordinator, tells students as he introduces the guest speakers, Steve and Holly Holladay. “They’re not going to put on any masks.”

The Holladays, founders of a ministry called Ultimate Escape, recount their own journey — Steve’s escape from sexual addiction, Holly’s healing from teenage sexual assault — before delving into healthy relationships, sexual identity and how God wired the brain for marital sex and bonding.

“Our students really come to trust and believe Steve and Holly … because they share their personal back stories,” said Sheaffer, who first came to AIM as a student in 1988 and then served three years in Lisbon, Portugal. “Just this element of vulnerability really lays the groundwork for wanting to trust and learn from them.

“It’s just a blessing,” the AIM leader told The Christian Chronicle. “Their vulnerability allows other people to learn of God’s healing, of God’s grace and also of God’s intention for their lives.”

Steve and Holly met and fell in love at Freed-Hardeman University in Henderson, Tenn., in 1990 and later worked in youth ministry.

The couple started Ultimate Escape 20 years ago with a focus on helping adolescents address addictive sexual behaviors. The ministry’s launch coincided with the rise of easily accessible pornography — via the internet and later smartphones.

Steve speaks from experience. He first endured sexual abuse as a preschooler. He faced it again at age 16 — with a youth minister as the perpetrator. As an adult, he developed a pornography addiction. He credits God and a faith-based treatment program with helping him overcome it.

He later earned a master’s degree in counseling and completed additional clinical training in sex therapy. Sadly, many of the clients he sees cite abuse by ministers and other church leaders.

Holly speaks from experience, too. In her high school years, she survived a three-year sexually abusive relationship with an older boyfriend. For a long time, she blamed herself — not understanding the trauma she braved.

A registered nurse, she is studying to become a nurse practitioner.

The Holladays attend the Harpeth Hills Church of Christ in Brentwood, Tenn.

In recent years, Ultimate Escape’s emphasis has expanded to serve Christians of all ages.

“We want to equip people to address sexuality in a healthy way. That’s our main mission right there,” Steve said in an interview at the couple’s Dickson, Tenn., home.

“But at this point in our culture,” he added, “I don’t know how in the world to do that without addressing sexual trauma, because so many people have experienced the hurtful side of sexuality and need the healing to be in a good spot.”

Secret trauma

Illustrating the point, Steve wrote in his ministry’s newsletter about the couple’s interactions at last year’s AIM training:

“During a break, one guy approaches me and describes what a friend did to him at age eight. He says he never told anyone about it. I congratulate him on his courage to give his secret a voice.

“A girl tells Holly about an experience; the girl had been forced into a sexual encounter by a guy. He threatened her by saying, ‘If you don’t, I know where you live and I know you have a (preschool age) sister.’ The girl wonders if the encounter was her fault because she did not say ‘no’ after she was threatened. It breaks my heart to hear that a young girl feels like that situation was her fault. But this weekend she discovers it was not her fault. I believe others experience similar realizations about their own experiences.”

About 1 in every 6 American women has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape in her lifetime, according to RAINN, the nation’s largest anti-sexual violence organization.

The same is true for about 1 in every 33 men.

But RAINN — which stands for “Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network” — notes that sexual violence “is notoriously difficult to measure, and there is no single source of data that provides a complete picture of the crime.”

Stats from RAINN, the nation’s largest anti-sexual violence organization, provide an overview of the problem.

In an age of porn, exposure to sexually explicit images and content — purposely or not — is widespread, often at an early age.

As Steve and Holly explain to the AIM students, sexual trauma can result from nonconsensual sexual contact, forced exposure to sexual content and unwelcome sexual comments or gestures.

“It’s certainly not anything new. I think it’s something we’re more aware of,” Steve told the Chronicle. “Internet porn, social media, sexting, phone cameras — all of that has just ramped up the electronic side of sexual trauma.”

A proactive approach

Since its 1973 founding, AIM has enrolled more than 2,300 students and sent helpers to more than 200 mission points in the U.S. and around the world.

The program’s short-term missionaries have served in 31 states and 49 countries.

Truitt Adair, Sunset’s chancellor and former longtime president, first introduced Ultimate Escape to AIM.

At the time, AIM leaders noticed that a rising number of students had experienced some form of sexual trauma, said Cory Burns, the program’s director.

“AIMers would come to us and build a rapport. They’d build trust,” Burns said. “And then we’re months into their time with AIM, and they’re like, ‘Hey, I just wanted to talk to you about something that happened to me when I was 15 years old.’”

Often, AIM leaders would need to ask the student — deep into their missionary training — to take a break and focus on their long-term health.

Nine years ago, Sunset decided to take a more proactive approach and address the issue directly.

“We intentionally bring Steve and Holly within the first two weeks of AIM starting so that students can hear the material but also get resources that are available,” said Burns, who first came to Sunset as an AIM student in 1996 and served in Moscow, Russia, before a decade as a missionary in Guadalajara, Mexico.

Those resources include a counselor in Lubbock.

“We just saw instantly a positive change of what we were facing with our students,” Burns said of Ultimate Escape’s role. “I just love that the students have a safe environment to talk … (and) be preventative in some areas where Satan tries to get a foothold in people’s lives.”

Like Sunset, Great Cities Missions — a Texas-based church-planting organization active in Latin America — has developed a long-term partnership with Ultimate Escape.

“Though often overlooked, missionaries struggle with the exact same issues and temptations as any other Christians do,” said Scott Reynolds, Great Cities’ associate director and a former missionary to Brazil.

“At the same time, they are amongst those who have the least resources for support, counsel and help,” Reynolds added. “Tragically, over the years, many have fallen prey to Satan’s traps in the area of sexuality and intimacy.”

Steve leads regular group sessions and offers one-on-one counseling at Connections, Great Cities’ renewal retreat in São Paulo. The men’s event, conducted every other year, draws missionaries from throughout Central and South America.

Reynolds praises Ultimate Escape’s focus on healthy sexuality.

“Not just internationally but in our own context in the U.S., I would say this is a subject we don’t address enough or with honesty or with the type of attention that it needs,” said Reynolds, who serves as an elder of the Shawnee Trail Church of Christ in Frisco, north of Dallas.

Hope and healing

Ultimate Escape changed Tara Wallace’s life.

Married for 26 years, Wallace is a nurse, a mother of four and a faithful Christian.

But she couldn’t pinpoint the reason for her depression until she heard Steve and Holly speak several years ago at the White’s Ferry Road Church of Christ in West Monroe, La.

“I was in my late 30s at that point, and I just didn’t understand it — what was going on with my marriage and in my mind and in my heart,” said Wallace, now 45. “I knew I loved Jesus, and he was everything to me, but something was still not quite right. And when I heard Steve and Holly’s story that night, I just kind of broke down.”

Wallace said she was molested as a child. She carried the burden of that trauma throughout her adult life, even if she did not realize it. Through counseling sessions with Steve, she found healing.

“He helped me work through my trauma and my pain that I honestly didn’t know was still there,” she said. “I’m forever thankful for Ultimate Escape and everything that Steve and Holly were able to do for me.”

‘It needs to be talked about’

Back at Sunset, AIM students Nathan Odle, Daniel Roland and Adria Estabrook gathered in Sheaffer’s office to reflect on the Holladays’ two-day presentation.

All three emphasized the relevance of the subject matter to their age group and Christians in general.

“I think it is one of the most swept-under-the-rug topics in our society and culture today, so I think it needs to be talked about more than it is,” said Odle, 18. “So I really, really appreciate what they’re doing.”

He came to Sunset from Idaho, where he attended the Idaho Falls Church of Christ.

His parents, Jonathan and Jaime, met in the AIM program. His brother, Caleb, 20, is an AIM graduate now studying preaching at Sunset.

“I know people that have been sexually abused,” Odle said, “and I know people that have gone on from that, not gotten the help they needed, and have gone on to either commit suicide or to live horrible lives away from Christ. So for me, this is something that’s so important, and we don’t talk about it.”

Roland, 18, echoed Odle.

Roland said he grew up thinking sex was bad because all the talk he heard about it was negative.

He welcomed the Holladays’ clear teaching on God’s vision for sexuality.

“It’s like, it is a good thing, especially when it’s within the boundaries,” said Roland, who was born in Lubbock and adopted at age 3. “But when Satan gets a foothold, like how it is today, it gets corrupted.”

As a child, Roland moved to Midland, Texas, where he attended the One Hope Church of Christ. His parents, Jeff and Karen, serve as missionaries in Ghana.

Given the prevalence of sexual trauma, AIM participants need to know how to confront it and show love and support to victims, Roland said.

Estabrook, 17, said she appreciated the juxtaposition of the world’s view of sex as “the nasty” with God’s vision of sex as an intimate relationship between a man and a woman, mirroring Christ’s sacred bond with the church.

Estabrook grew up in the Sacramento, Calif., area, where she attended the Lincoln Church of Christ. Her parents, Josh and Victoria, met at a Wendy’s restaurant in Lubbock during her mother’s time as an AIM student.

“I cried at least six times hearing the stories,” Estabrook said of the Holladays’ real-life anecdotes.

“It’s so frequent in our society,” she said of exposure to sexually explicit material. “There’s no little child who, by the age of 13, won’t have at least seen something sexual at least once or twice, right? Like, it is so prevalent in everything, especially in today’s world.”

What God intended for sex

A passion to educate fellow Christians about sex drives the Holladays, who have seen Ultimate Escape morph and mature over the past two decades.

“As I have gotten older and moved from being the parent of young children to a grandparent, I think that allows me to speak to things from a different vantage point,” Steve said. “Also, the more I got the chance to speak at churches and get feedback and hear story after story, the more I realized that there is a huge need.”

That need has as much to do with a healthy understanding of sexuality, he stressed, as it does dealing with problematic sexual behavior.

Like Steve, Holly grew up in a Christian family.

“We were always at church. We were committed believers,” she said. “But the only thing I ever heard was that sex outside marriage was wrong: ‘Don’t ever do it.’ That was it.”

Christians must be much more open about the subject, the Holladays believe.

That’s why Ultimate Escape exists.

Over 20 years, the ministry has connected with believers in 26 states and nine countries.

“It’s about an overall understanding,” Steve said, “of what God intended when he created sex.”

This piece is republished from The Christian Chronicle.

Bobby Ross Jr. writes the Weekend Plug-in column for ReligionUnplugged.com and serves as editor-in-chief of The Christian Chronicle. A former religion writer for The Associated Press and The Oklahoman, Ross has reported from all 50 states and 18 nations. He has covered religion since 1999.