Page 2277 – Christianity Today (2024)

Are sports the problem? Mark Householder, president of Athletes in Action, Benjamin J. Chase, a former lacrosse player at Wheaton College, and Ted Kluck, author The Reason for Sports: A Christian Fanifesto, respond to CT’s cover story on “Sports Fanatics.”

Can sports pose problems for Christians? Absolutely. But abolishing certain sports would probably reflect a Gnostic view of the human body. I fully agree that Christians should do some soul-searching in how we approach sports. I also suspect that God’s design is for us to conduct our analysis in the very throes of competition.

Obviously, there is a danger for Christians in sports. We may fail against athletic standards or to be Christ-honoring. But such risks are no different from those faced in business, media, or any other career. I doubt that we can learn how to do sports rightly without struggle in that world.

We need Christians participating at all levels of sports, from youth leagues to the pros. Even at the collegiate level, there are many tiers of athletics, ranging from Division I to Division III, from intramurals to pickup games. In general, the lower you get, the less money is involved, which allows more people to play for pleasure and to enjoy a sense of community.

I played club lacrosse at Wheaton College, and we paid to play, raising an annual budget smaller than the ticket revenues many Division I lacrosse teams make in a single game. As a club team, we relied on community and creativity to meet our budget. We sold merchandise at games, did work projects, and often slept in churches on the road. We didn’t have trainers, shuttles, or chartered flights. But we bonded more in petty adversities than we ever would have in luxuries. (Last year, we missed going to nationals by one game—a one-point loss to Division I Missouri State.)

College lacrosse forced us to wrestle with issues of faith and athletics in the midst of competition. Were we above reproach in everything? No, but we loved each other, prayed and talked together, often apologized to and prayed for other teams, and told many players about Jesus Christ. Other teams never saw perfection when they looked at us, but I do believe they saw Christians: people who are highly complex, just like them, yet moving toward redemption. I believe they saw people who can be honest and humble about their failures, since the grace of God fills these gaps too. I don’t know what else Christians anywhere—on the field or off—can do or be.

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Related Elsewhere:

Benjamin J. Chase recently graduated from Wheaton College. Mark Householder and Ted Kluck also responded to CT’s cover story on “Sports Fanatics.”

CT also published a cover story on “Why We Love Football” in 2007.

Are sports the problem? Mark Householder, president of Athletes in Action, Benjamin J. Chase, a former lacrosse player at Wheaton College, and Ted Kluck, author The Reason for Sports: A Christian Fanifesto, respond to CT’s cover story on “Sports Fanatics.”

I found myself saying “amen” more than once to Shirl James Hoffman’s well-written appeal. It’s both a worthy challenge and a chance to envision a new role for sports.

Still, at times I felt lumped in with evangelicals who are being swept up in the tide of materialism, excess, and moral freefall. When Hoffman says that evangelicals “have been quick to harness sports to personal and institutional agendas,” I call a foul. He overlooks the thousands of professional and college athletes every year who give of their time to volunteer in the U.S. and abroad for transcendent causes. They are doing it because they believe there is a victory beyond competition.

It is important to distinguish between individuals in sports and the system of sports. Both are broken due to the Fall; both are in need of the redemption found at the Cross. Over the past 50 years or so, sports have been considered a viable ministry field, and the majority of sports ministries have focused on the individual and his or her platform to influence others.

Effective ministry strategies have been employed that bring the gospel to and through the world of sports. The growth has been staggering—some form of sports ministry exists in over 200 countries around the world. But more work can be done. It is one thing to see athletes and coaches profess Christ, and quite another to see them engage in the discipleship process that yields Christlike character.

By trying to influence individuals “one life at a time,” we have often overlooked the system of sports. Hoffman is on the mark when it comes to the systemic issues and realities. Here is the reality: Having a few athletes and coaches committed to following Christ doesn’t necessarily change sports culture. That culture is broken. Here’s where we need new ways of thinking, spiritual breakthroughs, and pioneers to lead an effort to redeem the culture of sports.

Nelson Mandela once said, “Sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire in a way that little else does. It speaks to youth in a language they understand. Sport can create hope where once there was despair. It is more powerful than governments in breaking down barriers. It laughs in the face of discrimination.” Let’s move forward and capture a much higher view of sports.

Copyright © 2010 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Related Elsewhere:

Mark Householder played football at the University of Cincinnati and is president of Athletes in Action, a sports ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ. Benjamin J. Chase and Ted Kluck also responded to CT’s cover story on “Sports Fanatics.”

CT also published a cover story on “Why We Love Football” in 2007.

I left my first pastorate because I felt too constrained by the congregation’s traditional mindset. They simply were not interesting in asking deep questions and finding new ways to engage the culture. The church was in rural Arkansas and was attended mainly by welders, electricians, and log truck drivers. We used the Heavenly Highways hymnal, had fifth-Sunday sings, and read from the King James Version. After a couple of years, I went looking for something more (whatever that means).

I ended up at an emerging church, although I didn’t know to call it that. We met in a coffee shop filled with candles, played moody rock worship music, and talked a lot about authenticity. It felt more like a family than a church. And that’s just what I was looking for. Unfortunately after a few years, I became disenchanted with that church, too. I felt like our values kept us from effectively carrying the gospel to our neighbors. The trouble was I didn’t know where to go. Neither the traditional nor emerging churches seemed to have the answers I was looking for.

In the mid 1990s, Jim Belcher was on a similar journey. He and his wife began hosting a few friends who were hungry for intimate Christian fellowship. They felt limited by their traditional church context and wanted to wrestle with difficult issues and be rigorously honest about their struggles. They became the church they all were looking for. “Over the next year,” Belcher writes, “hope … began to return. People were being set free …. Lives were changed forever.”

Belcher’s experience brought him into conversation with young ministers all over the country who were experiencing the same sense of discontent with the traditional church and were asking probing questions about the future of ministry. These conversations would eventually become known as the “emerging church.” By then, however, Belcher had begun to have what he calls “Calvinist misgivings” about the movement’s core and direction. Like me, he found himself in a no-man’s land between movements.

Fortunately for us, his struggle with the issue resulted in his new book, Deep Church: A Third Way Beyond Emerging and Traditional (IVP, 2009). It is a pastor’s effort to make sense of the ideological differences that divide traditional and emerging Christians and to synthesize the best instincts of both into what he calls “deep church.” That’s no small task.

The book is divided into two parts. In the first, Belcher tells his story and introduces the reader to the emerging church, which he identifies as a protest movement. Then he identifies what emerging Christians are protesting—things like “captivity to Enlightenment rationalism,” “a narrow view of salvation,” and “weak ecclesiology” among others. Belcher is careful to clarify that the emerging movement is not a monolithic organism, but is made up of at least three major branches (which he describes). Belcher concludes the section by casting his vision for “deep church.”

In the second section, Belcher addresses seven issues that divide traditional and emerging Christians. He identifies the strengths and weaknesses of each perspective and argues for a more productive middle way.

In his chapter on preaching, for example, Belcher suggests that traditional preaching can be “deductive, legalistic, imperative-driven” and “appeals to bounded-set evangelicalism,” while preaching among emergents is often “inductive, open-ended, experiential” and appeals to the relationally oriented. Neither of these is satisfactory for Belcher. He argues instead for a “centered-set” homiletic that delivers “the life-giving power of living water via the redemptive drama that runs from Genesis to Revelation.”

Belcher tackles the big questions head on. But what makes the book powerful is that he writes as a pastor who never loses sight of what’s at stake in these conversations. His accounts are full of stories—his own and those of his parishioners—that keep the theories grounded.

What may be more helpful, though, is that Belcher avoids stereotypes and straw men. Neither traditionalism nor emerging Christianity comes out unscathed. But his analysis is fair and even. I hope all our future conversations about what divides us is done in the spirit of this book, which reminds us at every turn what unites us: the gospel of Jesus Christ.

—Brandon O’Brien is associate editor of Leadership and a doctoral student at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

Copyright © 2010 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

With Christians losing credibility in society, these pastors say morality is the wrong place to start in pursuit of healing. Instead we must show that we care about people, and not simply how they behave. That requires befriending the “immoral” outside the church, and being committed to radical discipleship inside the church.

This video clip is from our friends at Catalyst. You can view all their videos at the Catalyst Vimeo Channel

In this video from the Drive Conference, Andy Stanley shares five principles about leadership, listening, and decision making. He warns about dangers on both ends of the spectrum – including so many voices that decisions never get made, and listening to no one and making decisions alone.

This video clip is from our friends at Catalyst. You can view all their videos at the Catalyst Vimeo Channel

Luis Palau is an evangelist who has preached the gospel to millions of people around the globe. So why did it take him so long to discover the link between evangelism and loving one’s neighbor? Palau shares his experience of opening doors to the gospel in the city of Portland, Oregon, through serving others.

This video clip is from our friends at Catalyst. You can view all their videos at the Catalyst Vimeo Channel

Chris Seay, author of The Gospel According to Lost, is vlogging for CT while in Hawaii for the big premiere event. Here’s his latest:

Michael Catt, Senior Pastor of Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Georgia, and executive producer of Fireproof and Facing the Giants, explains why the church’s next film, Courageous, will focus on fatherhood.

“There’s a difference between a good idea and a God idea,” says Catt. “It is our sense that God has given us a God idea to address fathers in this country.”

See Catt’s comments on this 79-second video:

Susan Wise Bauer is writing the history of the world. Not the history of salt, or the history of the year 1492, or the history of the color blue. No, the whole shebang.

Editor’s note:

Rich Stearns, president and CEO of World Vision, US, recently returned from a trip to Haiti and provided this eyewitness account and spiritual reflection to Christianity Today.

Rich Stearns

Last week, I stood in the streets of Port au Prince Haiti weeping at the scope and scale of human suffering. Tens of thousands died—men, women, children, mothers, fathers, pastors, priests—no one was exempt.

Hundreds of thousands wandered stunned, hungry and homeless in the streets. While they survived the quake, the many aftershocks, and the lack of medical care, food, water and housing, still they had so much of their lives stripped away from them due to the destruction.

Who of us in these past days has not asked the question, “Where was God?” or “Why God?”

The sudden deaths of so many innocent people and the staggering human suffering that persists seem to mock the very notion of a loving God. There was another time that God was mocked in the face of suffering and evil. It happened on Calvary as our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, God’s own son, was spat upon, beaten, and hanged on a cross. And people asked: Where was God?

If he was God, why didn’t he save himself—why not prevent this suffering from happening—why not save the Jewish people from their bondage to Rome—why not face this evil and turn it back?

But God had another way. On that cross we are told that Jesus faced all the evil that ever was or ever would be. He took upon himself the sins of mankind, the evils of injustice, the pain of suffering and loss, the brokenness of the world. He felt every pain and took every punishment for every person who would ever live.

Christ is not distant from us in our times of suffering. He is not indifferent or detached. He does not look upon us from far away. He lies crushed under the weight of concrete walls. He lies wounded in the street with his legs broken. He walks homeless through the camps hungry. He weeps uncontrollably over the child who he has lost.

But where is hope? Where is justice for the dead, broken, and grieving of Haiti?

We need to see something not easily seen from human perspective. We, not God, are trapped in time. We, not God, see only in part and cannot yet see the whole. We, not God, must wait for that day when he will wipe every tear from their eyes.

We live in the “not yet.” But God sees the “already.”

How then should we think?

We see today and yesterday, not tomorrow. God sees all three at once. In him, those crushed in Haiti are alive already. In him, those orphaned in Haiti are reunited with family already. In him, those broken in Haiti are healed already. In him, those grieving in Haiti rejoice already. He is no distant God who turns his back on us. He is no callous God who sheds no tears. He is God, who shed his own blood for us.

Until that moment when the “not yet” and the “already” are brought together in God’s time, we are commanded to “love our neighbors as ourselves.” Until then, we are to shelter the homeless, clothe the naked, and grieve with the grieving.

We are to let our light so shine before others, that they might see our good deeds and give glory to our Father in heaven. As the apostle Paul wrote, “We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors …as though God were making His appeal through us.”

Until then, we must show forth God’s deep love for Haiti.