LAS VEGAS — Amid the strippers slipping out of their shirts and the sex-toy makers hawking the latest products at the AVN adult trade show, two youth ministers from Southern California stand in front of their own show booth, preaching to the crowd.
For Mike Foster and Craig Gross, who recently launched a Web site devoted to getting people out of the porn industry and stopping Internet porn addiction, the mission is clear. They have ventured into Sin City, diving deep into a conference that revels in explicit sexuality, to convince a multibillion-dollar industry that Jesus is far more compelling than the miles of glistening bare skin inside the Sands Convention Center.
"If Jesus were walking the Earth today, we think that he'd be here too," says Gross, 26, who lives in Mission Viejo. "After all, [he] hung out with prostitutes and stuff."
Talk about a challenge. The two say they routinely work at various ministries to try to help young people addicted to alcohol and drugs. They came up with the idea for the site, XXXChurch.com, after talking to parishioners and friends and those they minister to about where they surf the Net.
Over time, stories of people looking for triple-X films and photographs online began to surface, says Foster, 30, of Corona, who is on staff at Crossroads Christian Church there.
The XXXChurch site, launched last week, includes a virtual "prayer wall," which invites people to "pray for your own integrity and safety on the Internet"; a section on suggestions for meeting others who also want to avoid watching erotica; an area proposing alternatives to the adult-film world; and a software program that tracks Internet users and what Web sites they visit.
"We're not here to judge anyone or to picket the show. What good would that do?" Gross says. "We decided the best thing to do was to actually be in the show and try to talk to the people in the industry in a professional and respectful manner and not be confrontational. The congregation [at Crossroads] told us they'd be praying for us."
The youth ministers--Foster says he was ordained at Summit Church in Fontana, Gross at East Side Christian Church in Fullerton--are among several thousand men crammed into the nation's largest annual triple-X trade show, a four-day run that wrapped up over the weekend.
It's a guy's-guy week, when the city teems with businessmen attending another major convention in town--the Consumer Electronics Show. For many, the AVN show is a quick, and traditional, side trip.
