The headline at the ABC News Web site wasn't the sort of thing you normally see there: "Does 'Jesus Loves Porn Stars' Bible Go Too Far?" It was certainly an attention-getter: You know you're going to read on after that.

The story zeroed in on Pastor Craig Gross, who heads a ministry to what some people might call "adult-entertainment professionals." Among his controversial tactics, he goes to porn conventions handing out copies of the biblical paraphrase The Message with covers proclaiming "Jesus Loves Porn Stars."

Gross says his approach is necessary: "We're trying to reach a new audience and we can't do things like our parents did, like the generation before us did." Critics like prominent Southern Baptist theologian Albert Mohler argue that the ministry has "crossed a line" that shouldn't be crossed. "I just have to wonder what people think when they see that cover," Mohler says. "In other words, are they expecting the Bible or are they expecting something else?"

All Christians should be able to agree on some things here. We should agree that Jesus loves everyone, "porn stars" included; that ministry to the lost is important; and that Gross's desire to reach to a particularly unappealing group is commendable. We might even agree that some things in such a ministry call for radically different approaches, at least in some respects: Just getting to be known and heard by the people you're trying to reach has to be a special challenge.

Still, I've got to count myself among those with concerns. Like Mohler, I wonder what message people are really hearing — regardless of the intent of the sender. And I wonder that not just about Gross's target audience but also about the larger culture.

We are, after all, living in an age when porn increasingly is being mainstreamed — ubiquitous on the Internet, portrayed as the norm (especially the male norm) on sitcoms at least since Friends came along. No one's supposed to be ashamed about it any more, and lots of people are downright brazen. (Maybe you've seen the "Porn Star" T-shirts in the mall.)

We're also living in an age where being "judgmental" is considered perhaps the worst offense. And the spirit behind today's definition of "judgmental" is worlds apart from the one held by Jesus, who unfailingly insisted on a standard of righteousness that applied to everyone across the board. Where He denounced those who were soft on their own sins by focusing on the sins of others, today's spirit simply despises the notion of sin, period — at least sin among "consenting adults."

We have to be aware that lots of folk have cherry-picked an image of a Jesus whose words ("Judge not lest ye be judged," etc.) reflect their own morally lax approach. They've had considerable success in popularizing the idea that sterner moral standards were corruptions of Christianity introduced by later parties, like Paul. The fact that it's biblically and historically false to the actual Jesus doesn't matter to people who are being told what they want to hear, and who don't study the Bible or history in any case.

In an age like this, you have to expect many if not most people to hear a phrase like "Jesus Loves Porn Stars" along these lines:

Jesus is a live-and-let-live kind of guy Who wants you to be able to do whatever you want (at least if you're a "consenting adult"). He wants everyone to be nice to each other and He can't stand the sort of people who condemn other people's "lifestyle choices."

Pastor Gross doesn't want to say that, of course: He has other goals in mind. "Whether it's a joke, whether it sits on the table and they make fun of the thing, I think if someone cracks this thing open, that's our prayer, that's our hope, then their lives will be changed," he says.

It's an understandable hope: Get people's attention and at least a few of them will delve deeper into Scripture. But in the process, most of the audience (especially the porn pros) will simply use this opportunity to picture a warm, fuzzy deity far different from the real, righteous Lord Who confronts us with our sin and calls us to repentance. Far from delving deeper, they'll settle for the divine hug conferred by the phrase "Jesus Loves Porn Stars" — and keep doing what they're doing. If it makes any impact on them, it may be to confer a sense of divine validation.

I don't mean to suggest that Gross himself never confronts the people to whom he's ministering with their sin. For that matter, I'm not attempting to evaluate his total body of work: I'm just focusing on the wisdom of some of his tactics. And the trouble with those attention-getting tactics remains this: Some words just unavoidably tend to overwhelm the rest of the message.

And that's something all Christians should bear in mind when witnessing to people. Most of us want to lead by talking about God's love, not God's Law. The trouble is that we can't really understand God's love without first understanding something about God's Law — including how thoroughly we've broken it.

Consider Acts 2, where Peter and the apostles address a crowd with God's Word by convicting them of their sin, culminating in the execution of Jesus. The result among their listeners comes in verse 37: "They were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, 'Brothers, what shall we do?'" Then and only then does the Gospel response come: "Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins."

This isn't a template for every evangelism scenario. Many people, confronted with their sins, react with denial and anger, as Scripture warned they would. (That's part of the meaning of "God's Word will not return void.") And we don't always need to do the confronting ourselves. Some people already are convicted by the guilt of their own hearts by the time they encounter Christians, and those are people ready for the Gospel. The last thing they need is to be further crushed under the burden of the Law. They need to hear "your sins are forgiven."

However, no one was ever won to the faith without being "cut to the heart." C.S. Lewis, describing the process, noted: "The Christian religion is, in the long run, a thing of unspeakable comfort. But it does not begin in comfort. It begins in the dismay I have been describing, and it is no use at all trying to go on to that comfort without first going through that dismay."

That's not something we can put on the back burner till we've shown people a nice, affectionate Jesus. And however good our intentions, it does a disservice to Jesus to try. For it's in seeing the magnitude of our sin that we see the magnitude of God's love — the love of Him "Who did not spare His own Son, but gave Him up for us all" (Romans 8:32).