We’ve all been there…

You meticulously plan an event around the various school sports schedules only to have an unforeseen tournament pop up that knocks out a third of your students.

You have 50 students on roll, but you struggle to get 20 to attend on Wednesday nights because of one practice or another.

You have conversation after conversation with parents: “My daughter won’t be able to make the retreat because she’s traveling for a meet.” “My son will miss Bible study because of pitching practice.”

You push, pull and prod students to grow in their spiritual habits, but they struggle. Practice before school, school, practice after school, homework…They’re legitimately worn out.

There may not be a single conversation that’s being had more often in youth ministry culture than the conversation surrounding the impact that sports have on teenagers and youth ministries. Our teenagers’ participation in athletics impacts large churches and small, rural and urban. Based on our culture’s obsession with sports, it’s not a conversation that’s going away anytime soon.

I need to offer a caveat: I love sports. I played football, baseball and basketball in high school. I played intramural sports in college. A lot of my family time is sports-centric. We’re season ticket holders for Auburn University Football. Our family loves spending fall Saturdays tailgating with friends and watching the game. My oldest daughter plays softball. My middle and youngest daughters are involved in gymnastics. As a family, we’re very aware of the positives and negatives of playing and watching sports. I say all this so you know I’m not someone who is anti-athletics. On the contrary, it’s always been a pretty important part of my life.

Attendance = Spirituality?

A while ago, a youth worker dropped by the youthministry360 office. He’s a competent, passionate youth worker, the kind of guy you’d love to have on your team. As he talked about his current struggle, I heard frustration in his voice. He’s having a really hard time competing with sports for his teenagers’ time. He has close to 50 kids on roll in his youth ministry. He’s struggling to get 20 to show up on Wednesday nights, and the main culprit is practice—all sorts of practice—football, basketball, cheerleading, you name it. Furthermore, it’s not just Wednesdays. Sunday numbers are down, too. AAU basketball, cheerleading, baseball and softball take up a lot of his students’ weekends.

I can relate. My church’s summer camp numbers were impacted by the high schools in our community and its football practice. Additionally, I know several students who won’t attend our winter retreat because of athletic commitments. While our numbers are healthy overall, it’s quite common for students to miss youth group functions because of sports commitments.

It’s pretty easy to point out that youth group attendance doesn’t define our students’ spiritual identity. While this is essentially true, I think there is something we should consider: The Bible is clear that God designed spiritual growth to happen within community. In the New Testament, Jesus called a distinct people to Himself. We see ample evidence of this with the emergence of the New Testament church. For many of our students, youth group is the only source of a true community in which their faith can grow. They simply don’t have another option.

When a significant number of teenagers consistently miss youth group because of sports, not only does it present logistical problems for you, but it deprives your other students of vital members of their faith community. I wish our students and their parents were in a place where church participation was seen as valuable as sports participation, but it seems that in most cases it’s not. I don’t think that will change.

Moving Away from Program-centric Ministry
So the question is: What are we to do? I think we have two choices. We can stay married to the program-centric models that are challenged to meet the needs of students who spend most evenings at practice; or we can adapt certain aspects of our ministry model to meet students where they are.

Adaptation is the way to go, but how does that look?

If you have a large number of athletes who can’t make it to your Wednesday night service, consider creating new opportunities for them to plug into your ministry. The guys in my small group can’t often come to Wednesday nights, but Sunday nights are open. We meet for an hour to an hour and a half on Sunday nights, and we get full participation most of the time. Remember, your programs aren’t sacred. You don’t serve them. They serve you. You may need to embrace a less formal, more relational model.

If your numbers are dwindling because your athletes can’t come to you, figure out how to go to them. Meet in small groups before school. Show up with dinner after practice. If you do this, you may find you reach a group of students who previously weren’t reached.

Remember, their absence isn’t personal. While it can feel personal at times, teenagers aren’t choosing sports over you personally. For some of our students, being at the ball field every night of the week isn’t their choice. We should feel empathy for these students, whose parents who push their kids to over-attend sports activities. It’s a recipe for burnout, and it does more harm to their family relationships than edifies.

Sports vs. Spirituality?
For many of our students, a team provides a rich environment for sharing the gospel. Sports teach discipline, teamwork and respect for authority among other things. These are attributes that can serve to enhance faith with lessons learned on the field or the court bleeding into their spiritual lives. We need to keep in mind that for many youth workers, sports are the backbone of their communities. In many cases, the support system that sport provides is the only one a student might have. Furthermore, it provides youth workers with a built-in environment in which to engage teenagers and their families.

It’s such a fine line to walk. I have led a small group of guys who are now 11th graders. I have discipled them since they were in seventh grade. All but one is an athlete, and I would say their families have a pretty healthy view of sports. Yet it’s still a huge challenge. We’ve talked before about the biggest obstacle to their faith. As a group, they said that having no time in their schedules was the biggest challenge. They are so maxed out.

Six a.m. lifting and cardio starts for football runs from January through May, with two weeks of afternoon practice in the spring. They’ll get a few weeks off and resume morning practice all summer. Then school starts in the fall when they will do football-related activities six days a week from August until November. Three of them play other sports that overlap with their morning football workouts. They’re all good students and take their grades seriously. They have two or three hours of homework most nights, not to mention increased loads around test times and special projects.

As are most athletes, they are tapped out. They all say their prayer lives are in good places, but their time to devote to meeting God in His Word (when they are focused and not exhausted) is slim. It’s hard to believe sports participation isn’t affecting their spiritual lives.

For many of our students and their families, their involvement with sports is unhealthy. Family life centers around the next game, the next tournament, the next practice, the next private coaching session. On a list of priorities, sports come first; everything else, second. For these families, athletics dominate their cultural landscape. Their collective identity revolves around the ballpark or arena. They have a problem with what they have chosen to attach value.

It occurs to me the unhealthy pursuit of sport is, at its core, a discipleship issue. Recall in Matthew 19 where Jesus has the exchange with the rich young man. Jesus told him that in order to follow God he must give away all his possessions. We know Jesus isn’t categorically opposed to wealth. However, Jesus knew that for this young man, his wealth was the thing keeping him from following Him. Jesus told the man to prune away the most inhibiting obstacle in his life, and it caused the man great consternation. I wonder if we were to substitute sports for riches, what would some families’ reactions be if Jesus were to ask them to walk away from the ball field?

So our verdict must be that sports can impact many youth ministries negatively—but only if we fail to adapt. Trying to fight sports culture probably is wasted effort. The challenge for us as youth workers is to look for how we can change our methodology to reach a culture that more often than not puts the fields and courts before the pews (or bean bags).

Andy Blanks has been teaching the Bible and discipling teenagers weekly for the past 14 years. Andy lives in Birmingham with his awesome wife and their four children. He is an avid runner and loves being outdoors. Follow him on Twitter.