Each October, the Fellowship of Christian Athletes promotes Fields of Faith. FOF is a movement of FCA groups hosting a night on the football field when students lead the challenge for others to live for Christ. It’s an unbelievable opportunity for ministry…if your school has an FCA. Our’s didn’t. Of the four North Texas towns that our small rural, church ministered to, none had an active FCA chapter.
So, two other youth pastors and I began planning to host a Fields of Faith to reach some new kids. We gathered coaches’ permission, student athletes in our youth ministries, very limited financial resources, and called in a few favors to be able to host a FOF on one of the district’s fields. We saw almost twice as many youth come to that event on a Wednesday night than normally would have attended our three churches combined. It was humbling to watch God’s Spirit move through the teenagers, band and speaker to reach a group of youth who otherwise would spend Wednesday night elsewhere. And it all happened because of a little thing called sports.
When it comes to ministry in schools, open doors are increasingly scarce. Gone are the days when school zones were wide open to youth pastors and religion. Today, we have to live
• Go Deep. Sports involve different students from all grade levels. Most schools begin athletics in seventh grade, and there will be a lot more seventh graders in athletics than there will be seniors of the same class. Start early to reach more kids. The smaller your school is, the larger the percentage of students who will be involved in some sport, which means even larger impact potential.
• Go Wide. Sports pull in students from all social, racial, cultural and economic backgrounds, giving you an opportunity to touch kids your church might not normally be able to attract. Sometimes due to demographics and location, a church simply struggles to reach a certain group of people. Sports are amazing equalizers and bring in all types of people. Use that to your advantage and begin transforming your ministry from the outside in.
• Go Forward. While not all the athletes in school sports are leaders, many are. They’re the team captains and encouragers who command respect from their peers and who have influence over others–on and off the field. Reach them, and you have a better chance of reaching the rest. Some of them probably are sitting in the chairs on Wednesday nights listening to you talk. Enlist them to be your “ministry captains,” and make them a part of your plan to reach their classmates through sports.
• Go Far. When you work through sports you have a wide-open door of opportunity to minister up the ladder of authority by impacting coaches, teachers, administrators and parents. When a dad sees some guy he doesn’t know walking around talking to players on the side lines, he’ll eventually ask his athlete or another parent who that guy is. When he discovers it’s a youth pastor who supports and encourages the athletes, it will make a lasting impression not only about that youth pastor, but about the church he represents.
• Go Near. When kids see you taking a consistent interest in what matters to them, they’ll begin taking an interest in what matters to you. The old cliché, “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care,” is 100 percent true. When you spend time serving these kids on their territory, you’ll soon begin seeing them trickle through your youth-room door. Once they come through that door, onto your turf, there is nothing limiting you in sharing your faith with them.
Sports is the ticket for school ministry with an impact, and it can be done in innumerable ways. All it takes is a prayerful attitude, a servant’s heart and a keen eye for opportunities. My fellow youth guys and I have tried lots of different ways to use sports to get into the schools. We go to their games. We’ve supported them by providing refreshments after practices. We’ve attended and participated in FCA activities. We’ve helped in practices. We’ve served as team chaplains, and have even ridden to events on the bus with the athletes. We’ve provided meals for teams before their sporting events. The list could continue, but I think you get the idea. There is an unlimited amount of ideas you could try, but the right one is the one that works for you. Here are a few places to start as you get to work with the sports teams in your school.
• See. GO TO GAMES! How can you possibly expect to work with coaches, athletes and teams effectively if you have no clue how they’re doing and haven’t been keeping track of their season. Follow the teams and know what’s going on. This is the first step to establishing credibility with those involved.
• Serve. Go to the coaches and ask how you can help them. Don’t ask for anything in return; just offer to help with anything they need. When you offer to help with anything, be willing to do just that. When the time is right for you to ask for permission for a project, you will have made significant progress in getting the coach’s ear.
• Start. When looking for an area to get into, start with a sport in which you have experience. That gives you an inroad to coaches and students because you speak the same “language.” The things that you do and say will have more credibility because of your experience. Plus, it’ll be more fun!
Above all, be creative. Think outside the box and see what opportunities you can see or create, and then work toward them. I have a vision for a sports picture ministry. Let’s face it, teenagers love themselves; and they love good pictures of themselves. I would love to be able to take baseball-card quality pictures of athletes in action and make them available to the students free of charge! All they would have to do is come to the church on Wednesday night to pick them up. All I need now is a good camera and lens!
Whatever your goal for ministry in your local schools, sports offer open doors of opportunity for ministry. You never know what will happen, but it will almost always be positive! Our Fields of Faith goal wasn’t to ignite a revival, although that would have been great! We wanted to give students an opportunity to proclaim their faith and to foster relationships between youth pastors and new coaches–goals which were absolutely fulfilled. Most importantly, our efforts allowed God to show Himself in an area where the world has tried to shut Him out, all because some kids love to burn energy in a little thing called sports.
