Sports God part 1: Thinking Biblically as fans, players, coaches and parents.

It's the Fall here in the USA, which means the kick off of a new academic year,  Friday Night Lights football and British Premiere League soccer. As a pastor, parent and fan, these are a few of my favorite things!

 I love the renewed sense of focus and vision in the church as people return from summer vacation, but I also feel the tension of people's jam-packed lives as they launch into new academic rhythms and a myriad of extra-curricular activities. None more so than sport.

This week I've had 5 separate conversations with parents who are overwhelmed with the allure and demand of club, school and professional sports. One parent laments that they never eat together as a family anymore. Another is wrestling with the fact that their club schedule takes them away from church. One man has decided not to play fantasy football because he realizes it means he's glued to his TV, laptop and phone from Thursday through to Monday. Another man berates me because I'm willing to miss a quarter of my son's football game due to a pre-scheduled meeting.  How do I respond to these conversations as a pastor, parent and sports fan, myself?

Before you write me off as a sporting kill-joy, I'm blogging in between my third and fourth soccer game. My daughter plays club and my son plays signature which makes for a busy weekend, but I'm a proud and passionate supporter. So passionate, in fact,  that I was once red carded by a ref and forced to do the walk of shame to the car park for protesting a bad refereeing call in my daughter's league final! (It was an awful call, believe me) Beyond soccer, my oldest son plays Varsity football and as I've mentioned,  Friday Night Lights is one of my favorite American past times. Besides being a passionate sports parent, I played sports at a fairly high level myself, and I'm a serious sports fan. (For Soccer it's Galaxy and Arsenal, Rugby the Springboks, Cricket the Proteas and Football it's USC)  My favorite Saturday morning past time is to get up early and watch soccer and rugby games that were recorded during the night. My boys and I have been known to play  FIFA15 marathons on our PS3. My favorite thing is to surf the almost perfect long board swell on my SUP at Doheny's. Whether it's sport for exercise, competition or pleasure, I think you get the picture. I'm not anti-sports. Far from it. I have an almost insatiable appetite for it.

Which hopefully gives me some credibility when I ask whether we have ever considered what God's opinion of sport might be?  Have we ever allowed the Scriptures to probe our sport-crazed culture? This is what I intend to do this week, in three brief blogs. I want to look at sport as a gift, sport as a gamble and sport as a god. 

Firstly, let's look at sport as a gift.

It's significant that while certain forms of sport were used to persecute Christians in the 1st century, the New Testament is full of sporting imagery.  The Roman Emperor Nero entertained thousands of citizens with his Gladiator competitions in the Colosseum in Rome around AD 60.  The highlight of the program was pitting Christians against lions as sport. If ever there were reason to denounce sport as anti-Christian, it was surely in the early church. And yet the writer to the Hebrews uses a sporting metaphor to describe the endurance needed in the Christian life, likening it to a marathon  runner. (Heb 12:1)  Paul too, uses a marathon metaphor to describe the focused endurance needed to follow Christ; "Run in such a way as to win a crown," as well as boxing metaphor to describe the discipline needed in a preacher; "I beat my body and make it my slave," (1 Cor 16)  His Olympic imagery not only redeems sport,  but points it out as a way of understanding the Christian life.

Besides the sheer enjoyment of sport, which is no small thing, my wife and I have often talked about the valuable life lessons that we and our kids have learned from being physically trained by sports coaches in a team environment. It's taught us discipline, how to work as a team, play hard but fair,  receive criticism,  persevere through pain and defeat, and win graciously. Although sports teams are not the only environment in which to learn these lessons,  I've found that people who never played sport often lack these qualities, and tend to be undisciplined, unable to work in team or unable to persevere through hardship. These qualities last long after fitness has been lost, or win-loss records have been forgotten. Sport is a common grace.

Paul also encouraged physical exercise in his first letter to Timothy. "Physical training is of some value but godliness is of value in all things, both in this life and the life to come."(1 Tim. 4:8) He was debunking a gnostic view of life here, which viewed the spirit world as good and the material world as evil. He affirmed the gift and stewardship of the human body as valuable, even if it was of temporary value.  He may have been talking more of health than competitive sport, but in Paul's day, exercise was generally communal and therefore had a degree of competition, not unlike the boxing gyms or cross fit boxes of today.

 Beyond the clear Biblical references, sport is a gift because it's a great uniting force for people of diverse backgrounds. We witnessed the uniting power of sport first-hand in 1995 when South Africa, a country previously torn apart by racism, was united as it hosted and won the Rugby World Cup. Nelson Mandela, the president of the nation at that time, intentionally used the South African team as a metaphor for unity, calling the fractured nation to rally around their team on the day of the final. When we won, the nation was transformed. It was such a catalytic moment that Clint Eastwood made the movie Invictus to herald the uniting power of sport. We see this uniting force both in sports teams and among fans, who are able to set aside racial, economic, language and political differences for the common cause of winning.

Sport is a gift indeed.

Trump and our Evangelical strangeness: an opinion piece.

A recent poll in Reuters  showed that Evangelicals who go to church don't like Trump. This statement seems strange to me for two reasons.  It seems strange that any Evangelicals support the billionaire turned presidential candidate hopeful, although it's somewhat of a relief that Evangelicals who actually go to church do not generally like him. While his conviction and clarity may seem Messianic, his power-hungry, playground-bully tactics and blustering ego are more more akin to Herod than Jesus. As Christians, we cannot look to any political leader as our Messiah, but if we are going to vote for someone, surely they should possess something of the essence of our Messiah?

Anyway, what's even more strange to me than Evangelicals supporting Trump is that Reuters actually have a category for Evangelicals who go to church. 

As if there were any other category of Evangelical?

But of course, we know there must be another category and it would be  made up of those who identify as Evangelicals who do not go to church. This is indeed strange, but we know it to be true.
We know that there are many Evangelicals who do not go to church. I'm not talking about nominal or sporadic church going. I'm not even talking about less formal expressions of church.  I'm talking about a convicted refusal to gather with the people of God to worship Jesus, hear the preaching of the Scriptures, pray and celebrate the sacraments in any organized way, shape or form. Being Evangelical and refusing to go to church is more strange to me than being Evangelical and liking Trump.

An Evangelical, at its most basic, is a Christian who views the Bible as God's final of authority for all life and doctrine. Just flip through the pages of the New Testament and you will see that a Christ follower who doesn't go to church is simply not a thing. To deny the authority of the Bible on the subject of the Church generally, one must cut out half of the New Testament which was written to and about the church. Perhaps at this stage, with bible-snipping scissors in hand, one should also snip off one's Evangelical label?

I grew up in a moralistic Christian culture. People thought that if they did the right things like going to church then they were Christians. They would check the boxes. "Helped a poor person. check. Read my bible. check. Said my prayers. check.  Went to church. check.  I'm a Christian." To counter this moralism we would say, "Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than living in a garage makes you a car." We were trying to help people see that we are saved by God's  grace not by our religious activity. Today we no longer live in a moralistic Christian culture. It's individualistic. The car/garage  metaphor has been turned on its head. It's like people are saying, "Just because I'm a car doesn't mean I have to park it in a garage." Evangelicals  may view going to church today as optional, but not vital. It's no longer simply what we are designed to do. It's now a matter of preference.  To continue the car/garage metaphor I'd respond, "Of course you could be a car and not park in a garage. But then don't be surprised if you find your car getting dirty, faded or even stolen."

Don't be surprised if you find yourself voting for Herod instead of Jesus.

One of the arguments against going to church is, "We don't go to church. We are the Church."
This is quite true. Since the day that we were adopted as sons and daughters into God's worldwide family,  we were made members of that family and remain members every moment of our days.
 But if I was a member of a family who refused to gather regularly with that family you would say that I was a very unhealthy family member. Of course, there is plenty of dysfunction in God's family. It's far from perfect. But it's the Father's profound gift to us as His children and as we engage with a healthy church family we discover new depths of the Father's love that were simply unfathomable when we lived in splendid isolation.

No doubt, we don't just go to church. We are the Church. 
But if we are the Church, we also go to church. 

The Numbers Conundrum

God is in the details.
My first boss would drum this saying into me regularly. I was the kind of salesman who would spend days landing a big deal and then fill out the wrong product code. I would tend to be about the big picture and forget to do my due diligence in the little things much to his frustration.

God is in the details.
I'm so grateful for a leadership team that has a culture of thinking big but acting faithfully in the details.  We've recently been looking at the details of our church's attendance, income, members, life groups, baptisms and leadership development track. This has been with our eye on the big picture of sending out a fresh crop of members and leaders to our next community in Whittier. We're also scouting out Myanmar and Thailand for a church plant in the near future.

While it may be simplistic to say that a church is only heathy if the numbers are growing, they're helpful indicators of the vital signs of health and its ability to reproduce itself. Almost all of our vital signs are growing which is encouraging. Some are growing more like a glacier than an avalanche, while others are growing more rapidly.  But still, being able to track these things is helpful and illuminating.

The Bible is a book full of numbers. There’s even a book in the Bible called Numbers!
 I'm intrigued at how much Jesus spoke about numbers in his parables. In his ‘Lost' series of parables, the good shepherd counted his 100 sheep and found 99, and so went looking after the 1. The woman counted and realized there was a lost coin so she cleaned out the whole house searching for it. In the parable of the talents, the good master counted to see how much return his servants had given him on what he had invested in them. In his feeding of the 5000, (they must have counted to know it was  5000, and they counted the 5 loaves and 2 fish) Jesus divided the people in to groups of 50 and 100 in order to feed them. These examples show us that counting is good leadership practice for keeping track of people, of progress, and keeping track of appropriate administration.
God is in the details. 

The early church was aware of numbers too. 3000 people were saved and added in one day after Pentecost, and the church followed Jesus model by meeting together in the temple courts, but then breaking up into smaller groups house to house for food and fellowship. A few chapters later, Peter confronts Ananias and Sapphira because they had given less than they said they’d sold their house for. The result was death. God is in the details.

Numbering is necessary for good stewardship. It's just honest. Counting values people more than undervalues them, because it assumes that we will give an account to God for them.  It tracks fruitfulness and informs our multiplication. It also shows us areas of stagnation that need fresh focus.

But numbers can be dangerous. Details can be deadly of they puff us up when they're up or beat us down when they're down.

I recently stumbled over the passage in 1 Chronicles 21 where Satan incites David to take a census of his army, and Joab, his commander in chief,  is loathe to take it. He resists David's idea, replying, "May the Lord add to his people a hundred times many as they are. Are they not all servants of my lord, the king? Why then should my lord require it?" Nevertheless, the kings command prevails. He counts a million and a half soldiers and it is a grievious sin to God. God kills 70 000 people because of it!

What is going on here? What is the difference between good and bad numbering?

I think the message here is that God had given David against all odds victories by faith  in the past and now David was starting to put confidence in his human and natural resources instead of his heavenly resources. God was greatly displeased by this.The difference between numbering as stewardship and numbering as sin is in what, or in Whom  we place our confidence.

I suppose if we are going to number, we should keep Abraham and Sarah in mind. There were just two of them and a barren womb and God says, ‘Look at the stars in the sky and the sand in the sea shore – this is how numerous I will make your descendants. ' We need to look up at the heavens and out at the ocean in their vastness. This means that if we are lacking in numbers, we can still think big. God is an against-all-odds God! Ultimately, if we are counting we're counting on  the God of heaven, with His inexhaustible  resources. We are counting on the God who makes barren wombs fruitful, and fells mighty giants like great redwoods with one smooth stone.

Let's be in the details, by all means. But if we're counting, let's be counting on the Lord.