Beyond Awkward Side Hugs: Living as Christian Brothers and Sisters in a Sex-Crazed World

It Doesn’t Have to Be This Weird

When it comes to relationships between men and women, we have more questions than answers:

• How do we keep relationships with the opposite sex healthy—and still hug each other after small group?
• Is it possible for married men and women to be friends with people of the opposite sex?
• What does it mean to be a woman if you’re not a wife, or a man if you’re not a husband?

Jesus’ pattern for church living was one of family—of brothers and sisters living in intimate, life-giving community with each other. With story, sensitivity, and hope, Beyond Awkward Side Hugs invites us to leave behind eroticized, fear-based patterns and move toward gendered, generous relationships between men and women of character as we love one another as Jesus did.

“Beyond Awkward Side Hugs is a deep well of biblical wisdom, and Lea has written with nuance and clarity, humor and grace.”

—Jen Pollock Michel, author of Surprised by Paradox and Keeping Place

“The church desperately needs a bigger vision for how men and women can flourish together in ministry and friendship, and Bronwyn Lea paints a vivid picture for how we’ll get there.”

—Steve Wiens, author of Shining Like the Sun, Beginnings, and Whole 

Bronwyn Lea has been active for twenty years in vocational ministry to serve, encourage, teach, and mobilize Christians of all ages. A graduate of law school and seminary, she ministers in her local church and also heads up Propel Sophia, the Christian living wisdom resource for Propel Women. Bronwyn is mom to three school-aged kids, who keep her somewhere between hilarious laughter and desperate prayer on any given day. She and her fellow South African husband live in Northern California, where they count the men and women in their church as both friends and family.