Faith, Hope, Chastity : Thousands of teen-agers are embracing a new Christian abstinence program. Why? Many long for moral certainties. Also, “Sex is now a matter of life and death.”

On a recent Sunday, 39 teen-agers promised to remain virgins.

Relatives with video cameras edged in for close-ups of the girls in white dresses and boys in shirts and ties as they recited their vows. Younger brothers and sisters balanced on tiptoes to get a better view. And after the ceremony, the whole congregation of St. Stephen’s Baptist Church in La Puente gave a blast of applause.

In the name of their Christian faith, a small but growing number of teen-agers are pledging to save sex for their spouses.

The vow seals their membership in True Love Waits, an abstinence program introduced last year by Baptist minister Richard Ross of Nashville, Tenn. His is not the first campaign of its kind, but it certainly is the most visible. With rallies, ceremonies, T-shirts and wallet-size pledge cards, True Love Waits has ignited the zeal of teen-agers across the country.

“I heard about it in Sunday school and I thought it was a cool idea,” said Jennifer Sutherland, 14, who was among 31 young people to recently take the vow at El Toro Baptist Church in Orange County.

Word of the program has spread quickly. Along with his duties as youth pastor of Tulip Grove Baptist Church, Ross serves as consultant to the national Baptist Sunday School Board. From that launch pad, he promoted the program, and the response was swift. Within two weeks, True Love Waits went interdenominational. About a dozen conservative Christian communities, including the Pentecostal and the Assemblies of God churches, have endorsed it. The Roman Catholic Church also signed on. Next, Baptist missionaries will take it to South America, Africa and Europe.

Most teen-agers learn about the campaign at Christian youth conferences that attract thousands--from Anaheim to Orlando, Fla., from Falls Creek, Okla., to Spokane, Wash. Not everyone at a mega-meeting takes a vow. Still, half a million youths 12 to 19 are expected to sign pledge cards by summer’s end. At a Youth for Christ rally scheduled for July in Washington, D.C., the cards will be driven into the National Mall like so many stakes in a garden.

The seeds being planted are already blossoming in unexpected ways. Some single parents, even those raised in the free-love ‘60s, have promised to give up their liberal dating habits in support of their children’s pledge.

“I do think our values are changing,” said Jim Christensen, 14, during Sunday school class in El Toro. “This isn’t a fad. People are starting to wise up.”

Classmate Joe Howard, 17, seemed less certain. “In the crevices of their mind, I think teen-agers know abstinence is the solution,” he said, counting unwanted pregnancy and AIDS first among the dangers of an active sex life. Still, he concluded, “it’s not the popular position.”

Twenty years ago, such discussions were unheard of in most Sunday schools.

“In my church, there wasn’t even a thought of talking about issues of sex,” said E. Wilbert McCall, pastor at St. Stephen’s. “Churches have changed. You have to talk about these things. Back then, we didn’t have to worry about the problems kids have today. Sex is now a matter of life and death.”

Ross said the timing for True Love Waits is right for two reasons: “Our concern about the consequences of teen-age sexual activity is overwhelming. And what we’ve done about it so far is not working.”

The most recent government statistics show that 54% of high school students have had sexual intercourse. One in 10 girls ages 15 to 19 becomes pregnant each year. And 86% of all sexually transmitted diseases are contracted by 15- to 29-year-olds.

At the same time, young people are putting off marriage; the average age is 24 for women and 26 for men. So a 14-year-old who vows to be chaste may have a long time to test the strength of that commitment. For this and other reasons, educators from both the religious and public sectors question the practicality of Ross’ program.

“Along with abstinence, we need to supply kids with information about sexually transmitted disease and contraception,” said Amy Hasselton, a director of education for Planned Parenthood. “Vows of chastity break more often than condoms.”

Others worry that teen-agers won’t be able to keep their promises.

“If youths don’t have the skills to say no, a vow’s not going to help them a whole lot,” said Gilbert Rodriguez, youth director for St. Peter’s Catholic Church in Fallbrook.

Doug Howe, a minister at the interdenominational Emmanuel Church in Burbank and a local director of the Christian club Young Life, is considering the True Love Waits program for his group.

“To have a rally and get kids charged up isn’t a bad thing,” he said. “My guess is it works best for kids who’ve been trained in these values for a long time.” Many of the kids in his group have not.

“The question is,” he continued, “do you want to do something that looks really great but doesn’t reach the kids on a personal level? We want them to adopt the values, first.”

Young Life members discussed chastity vows at their recent weekly get-together. Several girls said they had made a private promise to God, as a gesture of self-respect. But they also agreed with 16-year-old Rebecca Nassaney’s conclusion: “Other kids would probably say it’s nice for somebody else, but it’s not for me.”

Mario Gordillo, 16, doubted that he would take a vow. “It’s unrealistic, in the society we live in,” he said. “A person would have to be really strong in their convictions.”

St. Stephen’s Sunday school teacher Alice Wallace has a quick response to such objections: “Take it off your shoulders. Tell your date, ‘I would love to spend the night with you, but the God I serve is holy. And for God’s sake I don’t do this.’ ”

If that doesn’t work? “We talk about what happens if someone breaks the vow,” Wallace said. “I teach them about forgiveness and encourage them to pray for each other.”

The girls who attend El Toro Baptist Church said they feel pressured to become sexually active. “Pressured, from guys, from television,” said Chantal Armstrong, 14. “The input is sex, sex, sex.” Boys feel it too. “It’s not studly to be a virgin,” she said.

Comments such as these encouraged Ross to launch his program.

“The message teen-agers are receiving from parents, educators and policy-makers is ‘we expect you to be sexually active.’ Not that adults intend that. It’s the way teens are reading it. The inference in the media, in movies, is that teen-agers are sexually active. They feel almost obliged to fulfill adults’ expectations.”

The truth is, sex frightens most teen-agers, said Los Angeles psychiatrist Mark Goulston. “It’s too close, too scary. But if you’re going to be the only virgin in your high school, you might have sex because of the peer pressure.”

He believes that chastity vows offer a solution: “They give kids permission to be innocent.”

True Love Waits organizers have filled 63,000 requests from pastors and youth directors for the curriculum. It outlines classes for parents and teen-agers to take together, as well as some for teen-agers to take alone. Each relies on Scripture readings that support sexual purity, lasting commitments and family values. The program ends with the church ceremony where the young people, more than half of them girls, make this pledge:

Believing that true love waits, I make a commitment to God, myself, my family, those I date, my future mate and my future children to be sexually pure until the day I enter a covenant marriage relationship.

Although True Love Waits is attracting the most attention, similar abstinence programs exist. One of the oldest is Campus Crusade, a Christian organization founded in 1951. Among the newest is the non-religious Athletes for Abstinence, founded by basketball player A.C. Green. In addition, California law holds that abstinence must be emphasized in the public schools’ sex education programs.

Karyn Johnson of Downey promotes abstinence on a smaller scale through her Garden Enclosed purity seminars. Johnson, who serves as director of an adoption service outreach program for Calvary Chapel, views chastity as a new form of sexual liberation.

“This is almost like the early days of feminism. I talk to groups of girls who say, ‘I want control. I can say no.’ ”

But even some conservatives say vows are not the answer.

“It’s chaos out there, young people are rootless,” said Lisa Sowle Cahill, professor of theology at Boston College and author of “Sex, Gender and Christian Ethics.” She blames America’s lust for personal freedom, which keeps us from exploring shared common values. Protecting free choice even affects family life, she said: “We find it difficult to talk positive sexual ethics to our kids.”

As a result, “there is a vacuum in the culture,” Cahill said. “Kids are caught between the Hollywood myth that everybody’s doing it and the very vocal, conservative religious groups that give them messages they can’t relate to. Chastity becomes something to glom onto.”

Ross struggles with no such dilemmas. He simply proclaims a moral revolution in progress.

“True Love Waits has given teen-agers a way to communicate their values to society at large,” he said. “These are virgins with an attitude.”