Interview: Vicki Courtney - Bringing Teenage Girls Closer to Christ
Vicki Courtney recently took home an Evangelical Christian Publishers Association (ECPA) Award for her dynamic “maga-book” Teen Virtue. The glossy, magazine-style book addresses common issues such as boy problems, break-ups, girl politics and purity, and relates them with faith.
Vicki Courtney recently took home an Evangelical Christian Publishers Association (ECPA) Award for her dynamic “maga-book” Teen Virtue. The glossy, magazine-style book addresses common issues such as boy problems, break-ups, girl politics and purity, and relates them with faith.
With a passion to bring young teenagers closer to Christ, Courtney’s personal experiences as a broken teenager - who has made countless mistakes in her walk of life - and the lessons she has learned since coming to Christ at the age of 21, are reflected in the book.
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In this interview with a Christian Post correspondent, Courtney shares her personal testimony on how she is growing in Christ as a mother, speaker, and a counselor. In addition, she reveals her devotion towards ministering to girls of all ages as she sets to launch Between, her new book for girls aged 8-12.
Where was Teen Virtue mainly derived from?
I have an organization called Virtuous Reality. It started in 1998 and today we do events across [America] primarily for girls. We have one event, actually, that reaches girls as young as 8-12 years old and their mothers, and we have another event that’s for middle school and high school girls – right around 7th grade to 12th grade, before you head out to go to college.
Through our events and our website - we have an online magazine for girls called VirtuousReality.com - we reach over 150,000 girls over the year. Through that, I was kind of thrown into the trenches of issues facing our teen girls. Teen Virtue was a compilation of those issues that they are facing, which was put down onto paper so that they could hold it in their hands and look at it.
What I love about it is it tackles ‘top 40 issues teen girls face,’ as it says on the front cover. I didn’t make those up. I basically was looking to the girls who come to our website to let me know over the course of 3-4 years.
For example, our website has an advice column called ‘Just Ask,’ which has actually been active since the year 2000. Girls will log in and submit many stories anonymously. Also at our events, girls will often feel like they can share with me or my staff what’s really going on in their lives. These sources offered me a glimpse of what an average teenage girl, or even a pre-teen girl, is going through. So Teen Virtue takes those issues and puts it into a contemporary format – a magazine-style book.
What tends to be the greatest challenge teen girls face?
I am finding that there is a tremendous pressure that the culture puts onto girls to grow up way too fast. It cultivates their sensuality to attract guys - whether it’s through the things they wear, or through their behavior. The outfits they wear just scream for attention....
You can look at the teen fashion magazines that are coming out in the U.S., such as Seventeen or CosmoGirl, and even the grown-up counterpart that adult women are reading, and the subtitles alone really sum it all up. For example: ‘Swimsuit tops will tease and please.’ It’s implying the girls to please the guys. Another example is: ‘How to be a Guy-Magnet.’ I think I counted about three magazines within a two month period that had ‘How to be a Guy-Magnet.’
So it plants these seeds in their mind that ‘this is why you’re really here’. Here we claim in the U.S. that we host the ‘women’s movement’ of the 1960s and 70s, and that we’ve made all this progress. Yet, I don’t consider that as progress at all. Our young women are treated like they’re objects.
You’ve obviously interacted with a lot of teenage girls who are facing a number of problems. In addition to their experiences, were any of your own personal experiences contributed to Teen Virtue?
Absolutely. I was no doubt the teenage girl who got into every one of the culture's lies. For example, putting an extreme amount of importance on my appearance…. I had an eating disorder in my early college years, had sex outside of marriage, I’ve had one unplanned pregnancy, and ended up opting for abortion at the age of 17….
So definitely, I have made a lot of mistakes. But I became a Christian at the age of 21 - and really it was a life-changing experience.
So things started to change when you became a Christian?
Absolutely. I was agnostic, and I already told people that throughout my high school and college years. My conversion came as sort of a shock to some of my family members and friends – that I will do this ‘Jesus thing.’ My parents said it was a stage and thought I would come out of it eventually. But 21 years later, I’m still going on with this wonderful stage of life. I plan to never leave it behind.
How did the conversion come about?
I was invited in my college years to attend a Christian event sponsored by a church. I went in with a friend kicking and screaming, not wanting to hear a lot about God. Seriously, I just wanted meet some cute guys. But in the course of this event, through hearing the worship and the speakers talking about many of the mistakes they’ve made in their past, and how coming to know Christ had offered them the forgiveness that their hearts have longed for, I began to see that I really had been my own God for 21 years – not to mention that I was empty at that point.
For us, especially in the U.S., we like to think that we are independent. It’s hard for people to come to the end of themselves. But I thought, ‘Maybe it’s not that great to be your own God.’ I knew God was speaking to my heart. At that point, I offered a silent prayer and surrendered my life to Him and said, ‘Surely You can do a better job than I’ve done with my life. So take it and do what you will do with it.’
Of course everything didn’t change overnight, but I got involved in a church and joined the Bible study…. Little by little, I just dove into God’s Word and couldn’t get enough of reading the Bible, which I’d never read before. I would wake up at four in the morning just hungry to read it. I couldn’t believe the stuff it had to say, just about life and practical living.
Within that year, I remember getting on my knees and asking God if I could ever serve Him in any way to help others avoid some of the mistakes that I’ve made - of course with the solution being sharing the good news of Jesus Christ with them.
It seems like God has answered your prayers.
He did. And it wasn’t really until much later. I was married probably a year later…. I started a family very early. Those earlier years in my 20s and early 30s, while nurturing my family, God answered that call. And it’s kind of ironic, because now my kids are teenagers, I have two sons and a daughter - my daughter is 16. And it’s so rewarding to help her and other girls her age, and be able to go back to those years through her and her friends and others who are coming to our conferences or reading Teen Virtue. God answered that prayer. Of course I am not qualified to write a single word, unless I look towards [God] and allow Him to direct what I write.
When you first became a Christian at the age of 21, what particular verses from the Bible really hit you?
I would say the verse that people quote when they first become a Christian, John 3:16 – ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life’ (NIV). Also 2 Corinthians 5:17 – ‘Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!’ (NIV).
That was really powerful to me because I wanted to start over. I realized that I had, like most girls by the time they’re 21, many regrets in my life. Only through the blood of Christ was I able to be forgiven.
How are you leading a Christ-like family with your own children at home?
It’s not easy - but I am very blessed because we have wonderful communication in our home. My husband and I have worked very hard on that. We spend a lot of time with our kids, we try to sit around the table and eat dinner together as much as possible, we go on family vacations, we attend almost all of the activities they are involved in….
So as we spend time with them, we point out things without trying to sound too preachy – whether it’s a commercial that comes on TV, or a TV show that is not appropriate, or the lyrics to a song on the pop radio station. We can point things out and ask, ‘Is that something that brings honor to God?’
Again, we are not banning our children from everything out there. We don’t believe in raising our kids in a bubble because it doesn’t do them any good when they leave our home. They don’t know how to live in the world then.
We kind of have an open-door policy at our home. We have a ‘game room,’ with a ping-pong table, a big-screen TV, and we added this room to our house to reach out to our children’s friends. We tell them, ‘You could have anybody over here. In fact, we would rather have you guys hang out here than be out on the streets somewhere we don’t know where you are anyway.’
Our kids really love that, and we have great relationships with their friends. They feel very comfortable coming here. They come all the time and we look at it as an outreach for them to get a glimpse of a loving Christian family. Many of these kids are coming from some pretty hard backgrounds and family lives. So they need to see the love of Christ – although we never claim to be perfect.
In a recent interview with Josh McDowell, he noted that the core solution for parents to lead a Christ-like family with their teenagers is a good relationship. I know “relationships” is the main theme of Teen Virtue 2. What is the main lesson regarding relationships that our teenagers can learn from the new book?
In Teen Virtue 2, I cover four aspects of relationships. I talk about a girl’s relationship with her friends, family, guys, and God. What I would tell girls is: ‘When you build a relationship with Jesus Christ, your other relationships will all fall into place. If you’re looking to Him daily and diving into Gods word each day…
God meant for us to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. And when you are building on that personal relationship with Jesus Christ, it’s going to trickle down and affect your relationship with your family, your friends, and with guys.
It’s rumored that you’ll also be launching a Teen Virtue for pre-teens?
Yes. The title of it is actually called Between. It has that double meaning. It says so much! It’s saying ‘Be Tween.’ ‘Don’t be ashamed.’ ‘Don’t want to grow up too fast.’ What we’re finding with these eight-year-old girls is that they are growing up way too fast. It was just a joy to write that… and writing on a level that they could understand, yet when they hold it in their hands, they feel like they are reading this contemporary, grown-up magazine that looks like something their older sister would read.
Everything in it is encouraging them to be a ‘tween,’ and to focus again, and kind of get a glass on how much God loves them and how He sees them, because they are just at that age starting to form their identity. They’re beginning to look into their friends. They are starting to notice guys around them. So I’m super excited about Between. I really feel like if we can plant those seeds at that age, it might help in their teen years. It can cut back on promiscuity, eating disorders, and a lot of the things that are harming our girls in their teen years.
Editor's note: Between releases October 1, 2006.
