I don’t think I’ve ever heard from a Catholic priest a sermon on how to have better sex. But the idea is apparently gaining popularity in Protestant denominations. Writer David Van Biema highlights a few church movements in a Time magazine article, which was timely for me, having just seen the movie “Sex and the City” with a few girlfriends.

Sex talk seems to be one strategy of getting the attention of young adults and Gen Xers in the pew. This is because superior sex is something almost all young and middle-aged couples want but are slow to bring up with each other and especially with a pastor or priest.

When New Direction Christian Church in Memphis, Tenn., launched its “40 Nights of Great Sex” program, Rev. Stacy Spencer and his wife distributed daily planners. For example, it would stipulate that on Monday the husband would give his wife a full body massage, and on Thursday the couple would read 1 Corinthians 7 and ask each other how they could please each other more.

And Paul Wirth, pastor of the Relevant Church in Tampa, Fla., delivered “The 30-Day Sex Challenge,” a program featuring a Bible verse a day as well as some form of sexual engagement. Scheduling sex, according to Wirth, is a way of making couples keep that very important piece of their marriage alive and burning.

“My own marriage was in trouble 10 years ago,” Wirth explained to Van Biema for the Time article. So the pastor consulted the book “His Needs, Her Needs” by clinical psychologist Willard Harley and decided to design a church program based on the book.

Both New Direction and Relevant Church orient their programs toward Gen Xers because young adults comprise the majority of their congregations. So, while the church programs emphasize the spiritual and emotional aspects of a working marriage, they also include practical aspects of how to have better sex more often, like “nag less, and compliment more.”

I applaud the pastors for creating these church programs that offer their congregants some guidance on how to keep the sex good in a marriage. And I think Catholics should copy their successful agendas. Maybe we might even get some participants to react in the way one congregant did to the New Direction program, saying, “After more than 20 years of marriage, this has been ‘a shot in the arm.’”

Or maybe fewer of us would rush off to see “Sex and the City” to hear a foursome of fictional characters talking about real stuff.