Pastor, It’s Time to Talk About Sports

“When was the last time your pastor preached a message about sports?” 

It’s 9pm and I (Brian) am sitting in my office on Zoom with a handful of sports ministry leaders pursuing our MA in Theology and Sports Studies (Yes, that’s a real degree offered through Truett Seminary at Baylor University). The professor opened the class discussion with that question and waited for a response. 

I can’t remember ever listening to a sermon where the primary intention was to offer a theology about sports. 

I’m 43 years old and have attended church habitually my entire life, and I wasn’t alone in my answer. None of us in the class had attended a church where a pastor dedicated time in a sermon to teach about the beauty and brokenness of sport. Ever. 

To be clear, all of us have heard sport illustrations, metaphors, and stories. But all those served to support another point of the sermon. 

I don’t think we’re outliers. Over the last six months, when appropriate in conversation, I’ve asked a similar question to people I am connected with in the sports ministry world, including the co-author of this piece (Ed). Their answers reflect my experience as well.

We’ve never heard a pastor preach a sermon on a theology of sports or a theology of play.

We realize our experience and direct relationships do not necessarily reflect the entire evangelical church. We know that. We know there are pastors out there who have written and preached about a theology of sport and play. But our hunch (and extremely unofficial poll of people we know) is that most church leaders have not offered their people a robust—or even minimal—understanding of how to think Christianly about sports. 

Given the place of sports in our current cultural moment, this is a problem. 

Pastor, sport is a formation machine, and it’s often malforming us in ways that push us further away from Jesus and gospel-kingdom values. 

One of the gospel-driven goals of the local church involves presenting counter-cultural ways to live in the midst of godless society. Today, sports sit at or near the top of any Top-10 list of consequential cultural topics demanding our theological and pastoral attention.

We get it. Sports are probably on our radar as pastors and ministry leaders, but some of us just feel ill equipped to talk about it because we haven’t educated ourselves to think well about it. 

Some of us don’t talk about sports because we don’t believe they are a good gift from God that can be redeemed. Many of us have only experienced the idolatrous side of sport and its tendency to pull people from attending our services. 

Some of us have never played sports and “don’t really get it.” 

Maybe we don’t like sports—or maybe we like them too much? 

There’s plenty of legitimate explanations for not preaching a good theology of sport and play, but it’s time we not only leaned into the conversation but also gave Christian people a vision of God-glorifying play. Pastor, if Paul instructs us in Romans 12 to not be conformed to the pattern of this world, then we are in desperate need of God-fearing, Bible-teaching people who can help us think rightly about the role of sports in our culture—and in our own lives.

Why should we teach a theology of sports?

The majority of people are directly impacted by sports

It’s not that sport is just a relevant topic to talk about. It’s an overwhelming life reality for most of your congregations. 70% of Americans are sports fans. 65% of adults grew up playing sports. In 2023, an estimated 27.3 million youth (that’s 55.4% of kids) ages 6-17 “participated on a sports team” or “took sports lessons after school or on weekends.” The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recently set a long-term objective of 63.3% of students playing by 2030—meaning they will align resources and strategy to get more kids involved. 

Sports eat into our time, our wallets, our relationships, our scrolling habits, and our head space. Even if you don’t participate in or consume sports as part of your weekly schedule, the pervasive, ever-present nature of modern American sports culture impacts all of us. 

Sports act as a vehicle of identity and values formation

Sports are not formation neutral. Quite the opposite. We don’t need research to prove this. Just show up at a soccer field anywhere in the country on a Saturday morning—it doesn’t matter if it’s 14-year-olds or 4-year-olds. Show up and listen to the words adults use as they “cheer” their kids on. Listen to what coaches are yelling, how they correct, what they value. Pay attention to the tone and the intensity. It will take less than 10 minutes to see that sports are a formation machine. 

It’s almost naive to expect that sports clubs will intentionally provide adults who can competently steward character formation with our kids. That doesn’t mean our kids aren’t developing their inner life within youth sports culture at all. They are. 

But probably not in the way you want. 

“Youth sports culture” is not trying to help your children follow Jesus or live out Christian values or priorities. But the youth sport industrial complex does have its own worldview, its own values, and its own character expectations. It doesn’t come to us or our kids value-neutral. It’s shaping them—and us. 

Our kids—and we—are being shaped and formed into the image of the modern day, youth sports industrial complex, complete with its own value system, and we need gospel-saturated voices to counter that formation. 

Sport can be a vehicle for worship or a path to idolatry

Satan knows how to distort and corrupt every good gift from God. He’s mastered the art of getting humans to turn gifts into idols, empowering them to take the place of God in our lives. 

For example, consider “money” or what the Bible calls “mammon.”  

Culture forms and shapes our view of money and wealth and encourages us not only to be consumed by it, but to actually turn it into an idol. So we teach about money in the church. Among other things, we teach that it’s the love of money that leads to evil and idolatry. But money is not bad on its own. In fact, when understood rightly and stewarded properly, money is a gift capable of being leveraged for God glorifying initiatives.

Culture forms and shapes our view of the human body and sex. So we teach about sex. It’s not that sex is bad. Quite the opposite. It’s a beautiful gift given to us by a God who loves us—but it’s a gift meant to be experienced within the boundaries that God has clearly laid out for us in the Bible. 

Why can’t we teach a similar theology about sports? What if we reminded people of what sport  looks like in its purest form, as an embodied experience of play that may even show up again on the New Earth? We could warn them not only of the ways sport culture seeks to conform us to “the pattern of this world,” but also offer practical ways they can redeem sports in their own life—from youth sports participation to professional fandom? 

One of the ways we do this is by teaching people to be like Jesus as they journey through different aspects of sport culture: to ask really good questions, to speak with grace and truth, and to be just as concerned (maybe more?)  with those that typically go overlooked alongside those who are making headlines. 

Paul’s letters addressed the significant issues going on in each city

Maybe you’re thinking, “We are teaching about money and sex, not because our culture promotes a perversion of each, but because the Bible clearly teaches us how to think rightly about them. The Bible drives our teaching, not culture.” 

And you're right. 

Paul wrote his letters to specific groups of people, in specific locations, with contextualized messages based on the prevalent issues of their day. But when Paul was addressing his church plants, none of them competed against a 40 billion dollar industry like our current youth sports industrial complex. That’s more than the entire video game market. Paul’s pastoral letters addressed real life issues that his people were facing. 

He wrote about appropriate sexual behavior with the church at Corinth because they had persistent problems with sexual immorality. 

He wrote about false teachers with the church at Galatia because the church was infiltrated by people teaching a gospel that requires circumcision. 

He wrote about the second coming of Jesus to the church at Thessalonica because the church most likely needed reassurance about their own destiny and those around them who had died.

Paul wasn’t predicting or guessing. He wrote contextualized letters to churches facing contextualized issues. 

If he was writing a letter to your church today, what would he address? For most of our contexts, I would guess that sports (at the very least, youth sports) would make his initial draft, especially given its identity-shaping implications. 

It’s an opportunity to equip our people as “ministers of reconciliation” 

What other spaces exist in our world today where Christians and non Christians gather habitually—and physcially—in the same location, week after week, year after year, largely with familiar faces? 

Yes, sports pull people away from church. But they are also a place where the church is standing and sitting side by side with the rest of culture in a “mostly” civilized space. 

Pastor, sports are a ministry opportunity. It’s one of the few universal languages of our time. When Athletes in Action or Fellowship of Christian Athletes travels overseas to share the gospel, they don’t lead with Bibles. They lead with soccer balls. Why? Because most people speak the language of sport. Starting with common ground paves the road for spiritual conversation and often opens doors for gospel engagement.

But many Christians don’t know what it looks like or sounds like to show up on a Saturday morning and “put on Christ” in front of the other parents in the bleachers. They’ve often given themselves permission to leave their faith witness in the parking lot or just never considered what it means to operate like a Christian in sport spaces. They just follow along with what everyone else is doing.

So we have to teach them. 

Let’s teach our people to follow in the footsteps of Daniel and his friends. They lived in a Babylonian culture opposed to Yahweh, and they resisted both becoming isolated from it and getting swept up in it. They learned to be faithfully involved in it. 

Let’s be a church that disciples people to do the same.

ps. If you are a pastor reading this and wanting to take a next step, we’d be happy to introduce you to more resources to help you build a theology of sport—and play.