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Fixed It for You: Volume 1: Rescuing and Reframing Common Evangelical Teachings about Sex and Marriage
Get ready to Fix It–and find Jesus again!
Has the advice you’ve heard in church circles about marriage, sex and gender roles made you feel small? Attacked? Unloved? Does it make you feel like God must be angry at you? That He doesn’t want the best for you? That He thinks you’re less than other people?
Or maybe you’re going through a faith shift and you don’t know how to talk about it with those around you. How can you make them see what you’ve starting to see?
Fixed It for Yous are a simple tool that can jumpstart engaging and fruitful conversations about who God really is and what he thinks about women, about sex, about marriage.
This workbook of 30 Fixed it For Yous contains 30 problematic quotes from evangelical leaders, all "fixed" for you, along with 180 questions to use as journalling prompts, as conversation starters with your spouse or friends, or even as a small group discussion!
We take thirty terrible things that have been said by different Christian leaders, and “fix” them to look more like Jesus. And then we give you tools to see what’s off, and journaling questions to level up your discernment!
The book includes 30 Fixed It for Yous, including some of the favourites from Sheila Gregoire's social media, and 10 never-before-seen ones! covering Masculinity, Femininity, Marriage, Sex, Boundaries, and Responsibility for Sin.
You’ll find Fixed It for Yous
John PiperJohn MacArthurGary ThomasEmerson EggerichsShaunti FeldhahnSteve ArterburnDesiring GodThe Gospel CoalitionAnd even me! (That’s right! I even fixed myself!)And each Fixed it For You includes the context of the quote; 6 questions to help you discern what’s healthy and what’s not that you can use with others, or that you can journal yourself; and a red flag section to help you recognize when something is off.
Our surveys of over 32,500 people for our books The Great Sex Rescue, She Deserves Better, and The Good Guy’s Guide to Great Sex have found that a lot of teaching in the evangelical church actually makes marriage and sex worse. It lowers self-esteem. It increases fear.
That’s not of Jesus.
As a child, you likely sang, “Jesus loves me, this I know…”
But as you got older, you may have heard terrible things about this Jesus who is supposed to love you. You’ve heard that He’d rather you suffer and be abused than get to safety. You’ve heard that you have to measure up to specific roles or else you’re a failure. If you’re a woman, you’ve heard that He loves other people more than He loves you.
Isn’t it time that we find that Jesus who loves you again?
Isn’t it time that we stop letting toxic teachings that have run rampant in church steal God from us and make us feel alone, dirty, or ashamed?
Let these 30 Fixed It For Yous take you on a journey rediscovering God, and validating what you have always known to be true.
And let them give you an easy way to start these conversations with your spouse, as you’re snuggling in bed; with your friends as you sip coffee in the local Starbucks; even with your small group as you try to cut through the weeds of the toxic theology you grew up with.
Save it on your phone so it’s always available when you’re with friends.
Has the advice you’ve heard in church circles about marriage, sex and gender roles made you feel small? Attacked? Unloved? Does it make you feel like God must be angry at you? That He doesn’t want the best for you? That He thinks you’re less than other people?
Or maybe you’re going through a faith shift and you don’t know how to talk about it with those around you. How can you make them see what you’ve starting to see?
Fixed It for Yous are a simple tool that can jumpstart engaging and fruitful conversations about who God really is and what he thinks about women, about sex, about marriage.
This workbook of 30 Fixed it For Yous contains 30 problematic quotes from evangelical leaders, all "fixed" for you, along with 180 questions to use as journalling prompts, as conversation starters with your spouse or friends, or even as a small group discussion!
We take thirty terrible things that have been said by different Christian leaders, and “fix” them to look more like Jesus. And then we give you tools to see what’s off, and journaling questions to level up your discernment!
The book includes 30 Fixed It for Yous, including some of the favourites from Sheila Gregoire's social media, and 10 never-before-seen ones! covering Masculinity, Femininity, Marriage, Sex, Boundaries, and Responsibility for Sin.
You’ll find Fixed It for Yous
John PiperJohn MacArthurGary ThomasEmerson EggerichsShaunti FeldhahnSteve ArterburnDesiring GodThe Gospel CoalitionAnd even me! (That’s right! I even fixed myself!)And each Fixed it For You includes the context of the quote; 6 questions to help you discern what’s healthy and what’s not that you can use with others, or that you can journal yourself; and a red flag section to help you recognize when something is off.
Our surveys of over 32,500 people for our books The Great Sex Rescue, She Deserves Better, and The Good Guy’s Guide to Great Sex have found that a lot of teaching in the evangelical church actually makes marriage and sex worse. It lowers self-esteem. It increases fear.
That’s not of Jesus.
As a child, you likely sang, “Jesus loves me, this I know…”
But as you got older, you may have heard terrible things about this Jesus who is supposed to love you. You’ve heard that He’d rather you suffer and be abused than get to safety. You’ve heard that you have to measure up to specific roles or else you’re a failure. If you’re a woman, you’ve heard that He loves other people more than He loves you.
Isn’t it time that we find that Jesus who loves you again?
Isn’t it time that we stop letting toxic teachings that have run rampant in church steal God from us and make us feel alone, dirty, or ashamed?
Let these 30 Fixed It For Yous take you on a journey rediscovering God, and validating what you have always known to be true.
And let them give you an easy way to start these conversations with your spouse, as you’re snuggling in bed; with your friends as you sip coffee in the local Starbucks; even with your small group as you try to cut through the weeds of the toxic theology you grew up with.
Save it on your phone so it’s always available when you’re with friends.
126 pages, Kindle Edition
Published February 6, 2023
37 people are currently reading
92 people want to read
About the author
Sheila Wray Gregoire
26 books736 followersSheila Wray Gregoire is an award-winning author of 9 books, including the ground-breaking Great Sex Rescue, and founder of BareMarriage.com. She's passionate about changing the evangelical conversation about sex to something that is mutual, initimate, and pleasurable for both. She heads up a team of researchers who want to bring evidence-based, healthy advice to evangelicalism when it comes to relationships. Sheila lives in Belleville, Ontario, with her husband Keith. They are the parents of two adult daughters.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
February 20, 2023
Quick read. If you grew up in conservative fundamentalism it will probably make you uncomfortable. Sit with that and figure out why. Because the quotes the author “fixes” are serious and damaging and give a very bad name to Christianity, and yet they are very much the normal and accepted way to view women/sex/marriage/partnership. Some of the quotes she pulls are from leading marriage books (some of which I’ve read), and they literally defend abuse, and women staying with her abuser no matter what. As I’m walking my own “disentangling” journey I’m realizing how pervasive this is, whether blatant or underlying. It’s terrifying. I don’t agree with everything the author says in every “fix”, but I really recommend the book overall.
February 16, 2023
This book will make you uncomfortable! It was a harsh reminder that we need to change the narrative in our churches and fix mindsets. I'm glad to have read it and been made aware of the ways sex and marriage are viewed in many evangelical circles. I appreciated the talking points and questions to ask so I don't simply stare slack-jawed if someone tries to throw one of these truly unchristlike viewpoints my way. Thankful for what Sheila and the rest of the team at Bare-Marriage are doing to help Christians treat their spouses and others in a way that really is biblical.
March 11, 2023
Fixed It for You is a compilation of quotes highlighting popular Christian teachings regarding marriage and sex. The book is divided into six sections including 1) Masculinity, 2) Femininity, 3) Marriage, 4) Sex, 5) Responsibility for Sin, and 6) Boundaries. Quotes are taken from a variety of sources including books, social media posts, and sermons. The original quote appears in bolded letters with the edited or "fixed" portion written over in red. While most of these edited quotes have been published on Sheila's social media pages, this short book comes with the additional content of the original quote's context, discussion questions to use with groups, and finally, an application section that teaches readers how to further discern between helpful vs. unhelpful/harmful teaching (1. Test the Fruit, 2. Bring it Home, 3. Recognize Red flags).
Not to be dismissive of the truly bad teachings out there that have circulated and affected real people's lives, but I found this book to be genuinely laugh out loud funny. The "fixed it" portions strike the perfect balance where the corrections are respectful enough so as not to be rude yet just spicy enough to highlight the utter ridiculousness of some of the original quotes/teachings. The discussion questions encourage the healthy practice of reading with others as opposed to simply acquiring information in isolation without a way to test the material or be sharpened by others' ideas. I appreciate also how she includes a resource guide at the end of the book directing readers to better sources that are more relationally informed and/or have a more Christ-centered worldview.
Not to be dismissive of the truly bad teachings out there that have circulated and affected real people's lives, but I found this book to be genuinely laugh out loud funny. The "fixed it" portions strike the perfect balance where the corrections are respectful enough so as not to be rude yet just spicy enough to highlight the utter ridiculousness of some of the original quotes/teachings. The discussion questions encourage the healthy practice of reading with others as opposed to simply acquiring information in isolation without a way to test the material or be sharpened by others' ideas. I appreciate also how she includes a resource guide at the end of the book directing readers to better sources that are more relationally informed and/or have a more Christ-centered worldview.
February 14, 2023
This was a very quick read for me.
The book is designed so that it can be used as a group Bible study or discussion group for 6 weeks, with 5 Fixed It For You memes centered around a theme each week. The themes for the 6 weeks are Masculinity, Femininity, Marriage, Sex, Responsibility for Sin, and Boundaries. Each meme is correlated in the book to at least 1 Bible verse or passage, but she encourages you to think of other Bible verses and passages, particularly in the Gospels, that correlate to each.
For every single problematic quote, she encourages you to look at what fruits are created by a particular belief. As Matthew 7:15-20 says, good theology will lead to good results in people's lives. If you interpret the Bible in a bad manner, you will see terrible fruits as a result. Sheila and her team have done scientific research with over 32,000 study participants to show that believing certain things lead to a high probability that a person will end up divorced or with a really bad sex life.
I think that this method would be extremely helpful for gauging how good other theological concepts are. Correlating soteriological, eschatological, ecclesiological, christological, pneumatological, and other theological beliefs with good or bad outcomes in the real world would be *quite* interesting. The difficulty is that many people say with their mouths that they believe X, Y, and Z, but their actions betray the fact that they don't actually believe what they say that they believe. Their applied theology doesn't follow the logic of what they claim as their theological beliefs. If you say that you believe in using the plain meaning of scripture as your interpretation, but you deny that Matthew 5:29-30 should ever be acted upon in a literal manner, you don't really believe in using the plain meaning of Scripture; you are just picking and choosing on the basis of personal comfort. If a particular theological belief is highly correlated with changed lives (such as being able to quit a drug addiction with no relapse for decades), then it is most likely a godly theological belief.
I'm not certain what percentage of the Fixed It For You memes are new to this book, if any. The greatest benefit of this book is lots and lots of discussion questions and personal application questions, which aren't available anywhere else. The Bible passages that are correlated with each one might only be available deep in the comments section of Facebook, Instagram, or the blog.
The exact source for each bad-theology quotation is given so that if you really need to see for yourself that this theologian or that theologian really said that and what the greater context is, you can do it. Sheila summarizes the greater context of each quote as well, and many of them are horrifying. The footnotes are quite solid.
If your small group/discipleship group/Bible study/fellowship group/whatever you want to call it is looking for something to study for the next 6 weeks or you want to study this on your own, I highly recommend this! If you like this book, you will also probably like Rebecca Davis's Untwisting Scriptures book series (not designed for study groups), and those also get 2 thumbs up and my highest recommendation.
The book is designed so that it can be used as a group Bible study or discussion group for 6 weeks, with 5 Fixed It For You memes centered around a theme each week. The themes for the 6 weeks are Masculinity, Femininity, Marriage, Sex, Responsibility for Sin, and Boundaries. Each meme is correlated in the book to at least 1 Bible verse or passage, but she encourages you to think of other Bible verses and passages, particularly in the Gospels, that correlate to each.
For every single problematic quote, she encourages you to look at what fruits are created by a particular belief. As Matthew 7:15-20 says, good theology will lead to good results in people's lives. If you interpret the Bible in a bad manner, you will see terrible fruits as a result. Sheila and her team have done scientific research with over 32,000 study participants to show that believing certain things lead to a high probability that a person will end up divorced or with a really bad sex life.
I think that this method would be extremely helpful for gauging how good other theological concepts are. Correlating soteriological, eschatological, ecclesiological, christological, pneumatological, and other theological beliefs with good or bad outcomes in the real world would be *quite* interesting. The difficulty is that many people say with their mouths that they believe X, Y, and Z, but their actions betray the fact that they don't actually believe what they say that they believe. Their applied theology doesn't follow the logic of what they claim as their theological beliefs. If you say that you believe in using the plain meaning of scripture as your interpretation, but you deny that Matthew 5:29-30 should ever be acted upon in a literal manner, you don't really believe in using the plain meaning of Scripture; you are just picking and choosing on the basis of personal comfort. If a particular theological belief is highly correlated with changed lives (such as being able to quit a drug addiction with no relapse for decades), then it is most likely a godly theological belief.
I'm not certain what percentage of the Fixed It For You memes are new to this book, if any. The greatest benefit of this book is lots and lots of discussion questions and personal application questions, which aren't available anywhere else. The Bible passages that are correlated with each one might only be available deep in the comments section of Facebook, Instagram, or the blog.
The exact source for each bad-theology quotation is given so that if you really need to see for yourself that this theologian or that theologian really said that and what the greater context is, you can do it. Sheila summarizes the greater context of each quote as well, and many of them are horrifying. The footnotes are quite solid.
If your small group/discipleship group/Bible study/fellowship group/whatever you want to call it is looking for something to study for the next 6 weeks or you want to study this on your own, I highly recommend this! If you like this book, you will also probably like Rebecca Davis's Untwisting Scriptures book series (not designed for study groups), and those also get 2 thumbs up and my highest recommendation.
May 1, 2023
I have enjoyed reading and following Sheila as she unpacks a lot of held beliefs about marriage, women, and the church. I don’t know if I agree with her on everything, but I do know these conversations are healthy and important for us to have. I have seen a lot of harm over the years come from some of these books she calls out.
What I appreciate the most in this publication is her humility to publicly fix her own writings when she gets it wrong.
Worth your time!
What I appreciate the most in this publication is her humility to publicly fix her own writings when she gets it wrong.
Worth your time!
March 11, 2023
A must read on deconstructing toxic church teachings about marriage and sex
I found great comfort in this book! It's long past time that the church get rid of those toxic teachings found in these "Christian" books. So many people, mainly women, have been harmed by these teachings which are not Christ like. Let's put Jesus back in teachings which are to encourage and heal because that is His character.
I found great comfort in this book! It's long past time that the church get rid of those toxic teachings found in these "Christian" books. So many people, mainly women, have been harmed by these teachings which are not Christ like. Let's put Jesus back in teachings which are to encourage and heal because that is His character.
February 26, 2023
Sobering but necessary
Sheila shines a stark light on sinful corners of evangelical teaching that harms marriage and women, then reveals how the gentle love of Jesus can redeem it. Recommended.
Sheila shines a stark light on sinful corners of evangelical teaching that harms marriage and women, then reveals how the gentle love of Jesus can redeem it. Recommended.
April 26, 2023
I didn’t have a small group to discuss this with, so I read it on my own. Each section includes a graphic where Shelia fixes a problematic quote (crosses out the icky parts and writes better teaching over top of it), including one from of her own books, on topics like masculinity, marriage, responsibility, and sex. This definitely would be a great discussion book, because she includes a LOT of questions to help you work through the issues with each quote as well as where you’ve seen bad fruit from these teachings. If someone just wants to read straight through a book to learn more depth about some of the things she discusses here, though, I would definitely recommend a book like The Great Sex Rescue (by the same author) or Non-Toxic Masculinity (by another author). Some people may not find the depth here quite enough to convince them, but I hope the questions would help them start to see problems with these types of teachings that at one point may have felt normal.
May 15, 2023
I have greatly enjoyed Gregoire's Instagram Fixed It For Yous since she started posting them. (For the uninitiated, a Fixed It For You consists of a quote by a mainstream evangelical voice that highlights problematic beliefs and teachings in the church. Gregoire "fixes" each quote with a red pen to bring it back in line with biblical teaching on the given topic.) They always prompt great discussions between my husband and I about what we see as some of the biggest issues surfacing in the evangelical church. So I was very excited when I heard that I book was being printed, not only with never-before-seen corrections, but with discussion prompts to go with them! I bought it immediately, and it has been my husband's and my "car book" for the past couple of months. Whenever we were on a long drive, I would read the quotes and their corrections and we would work through the discussion questions together. It prompted some great discussions, and I think it would be fun to do this book in a small group setting, too.
From a parent-of-small-children perspective, this book is great because it can be read in super short snippets (as in maybe 3-5 minutes), put down and returned to completely at random, and nothing will be lost from the experience. You might even benefit from having more time to ponder in between quotes. If you, like me, would love to read a longer nonfiction book on the topic but lack the consistent free time to commit to it right now, this might just scratch your itch.
From a parent-of-small-children perspective, this book is great because it can be read in super short snippets (as in maybe 3-5 minutes), put down and returned to completely at random, and nothing will be lost from the experience. You might even benefit from having more time to ponder in between quotes. If you, like me, would love to read a longer nonfiction book on the topic but lack the consistent free time to commit to it right now, this might just scratch your itch.
February 16, 2023
Extremely enlightening! Highly recommend.
April 8, 2023
Sheila and team are, quite literally, doing God’s work. A much-needed expose of the evil that has flown under the radar and gone unchallenged too long.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews