What The Beautiful Game Can Teach The Church
Updated: Aug 21
You might wonder why I talk about football so much in combination with Christianity. Here’s why…
I am certain that if you walked into almost any church up and down the UK on any given Sunday morning and talked to a random selection of ten of the blokes there about football and about Jesus, you’d get on average a more emotionally excited response about the beautiful game than about Jesus.
(I’m just using men in the example here, simply because historically I’ve tended to have had more chats about football with my male friends in church than my female friends – a balance I’m conscious I need to look at redressing).
Windbags
My friends in church will all say, if you ask them, that Jesus is the most important thing in their life – and correctly so.
Why then don’t we share greater excitement about coming to worship him on Sunday than talking about the previous day’s matches?
Suffice to say Jesus isn’t boring; it’s churches that have made the most exciting, tough, courageous, rebellious, society-changing convicted-criminal ever to walk the earth sound a bit dull to many.
I could suggest a number of reasons focussed around the structure, style, traditions and presentation of church services, but I won’t expand on that here.
I think it is very interesting to focus on why people like me find it so exciting to watch a bag full of pressurised air being kicked about a rectangular piece of grass…
It’s not about the game
The reason isn’t about the kicking of a ball, it’s about the emotional attachments we have to the community the team doing the kicking represent.
To give you an example, if I watch or listen to Aston Villa playing, my heart beats fast, I get sweaty palms, I shout at an inanimate object (the TV) and I feel overjoyed if we win, a bit flat if we lose and sometimes angry if we’re on the wrong end of some form of unsportsmanlike play.
In short, I’m heavily emotionally invested in the Villa, and have been for the past 35 years. It runs deep, Villa fans are my family and the B6 area of Birmingham is an area I care about – notwithstanding the fact I don’t know more than perhaps a hundred Villa fans personally and live 44 miles from Villa Park.
I can watch any other team play with complete serenity and emotional detachment. I can enjoy the fantastic play of a Liverpool v Manchester City match and remain totally deadpan about the result, unless it happens to affect the fortunes of Villa.
This all sounds a bit bizarre when you say it like this, but it does neatly illustrate an important point…
Emotional Investment
Who are you most emotionally invested in, in the whole world? I could give you my answer immediately without any hesitation at all – I’m sure most people could do likewise.
When you’re emotionally-invested in people, when you care deeply about them, it has a similar effect on you as watching ‘your’ football team – heart racing, palm-sweating, joy or anger-inducing passion.
Similarly if you’re not emotionally invested in someone, it’s far easier to remain calm, objective and dispassionate. This is why when a person engages in therapy (which I’m a huge fan of anyone doing), they do so with a person who they aren’t personally mutually emotionally-invested in.
It’s all about people
I get so excited about football because it’s actually all about people. It’s about community, togetherness, cohesion, society. It’s a phenomenon as old as human history itself – just outworked via the vehicle of soccer in the last 150 or so years.
Football is in-and-of-itself a neutral, but extremely powerful, vehicle. This power can be channelled for tremendous good or horrific evil.
I love to watch the BBC Match of the Day re-run on a Sunday morning, as they have a section additional to the Saturday night programme that focuses on what a Premier League club is doing in its local community to help bring about positive societal change.
This amazing work can be contrasted to the horrific scenes of hooliganism or racism we still sadly witness linked to football.
God is love
When a group of two or more people are gathered together in positive, affirming relationship, the invisible two-way mutual connection between them is love.
God is love.
That’s why the bible says “where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I”. God is saying that when people are gathered together – even just two of them – in love, then He’s there too in the form of the invisible bond joining them.
What an incredible thought.
“For where two or three gather in my name, there I am with them”
Matthew 18:20 (NIV)
I have love for more people than I can count, or even know. However the intensity of love I feel varies massively across this group. The more emotionally invested I am in someone, the greater the intensity of love for them I feel.
That’s why I say it’s when I’m with those I feel the most intense love for that I feel the strongest experience of God, because God IS love.
So what about church?
A church is not a building, it’s a community of people.
I long for people to be as emotionally invested in their local church as they are in their football team. This would make going to church as exciting as watching your soccer team play.
It would also be hugely powerful, because churches are communities whose main reason for existing is for the benefit of people who are non-members.
Churches are there to serve and support the wider communities in which they are based – that’s their main reason for being.
Imagine the amazingly positive societal impact it would have if people were as emotionally invested in their church as they were their football team… it wouldn’t just be Match of the Day where we hear about such uplifting stories each Sunday morning!
Doing church differently
The possibilities are limitless as to how we ‘do’ church. After all, all a church is a community that meets regularly to love, serve and worship Jesus together.
Anything else is only limited to our imaginations of how we choose to do this.
Perhaps it would be worth church-members watching a bit more football and working out exactly what the things are that cause people to be so emotionally invested in a community via the vehicle of kicking a bag of pressurised wind around? I personally find it helpful to think of my church as a team of people on the side of good competing against the evil present in our world…
Church-members – let’s not be limited in using our imaginations as to how we do church. Let’s think outside the box and not be afraid to push the boundaries to explore ways of doing church that will bring about the greatest positive change in society.
Pep talk
Let’s be game-changers! Let’s be visionaries! Let’s change the way we do church so people become even more invested in their church than their football team!
Let’s be Pep Guardiolas of church!
If we all do that, we might just change the world!
Go well, with love!
David
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