Tebowing, John 3:16 and Evangelism

Sports and faith often intersect as well as boy and girl at a middle school dance: awkwardly and embarrassingly. There's a lot of faith and courage, but the result is usually more notorious than it is memorable. 

Take the John 3:16 guy often seen at sporting events. 

I am in no way doubting his faith, nor the courage (or complete lack of shame) it takes to pull this off. But where he and poster-holders intersect with sports ends up being a dance with two-left-feet, and not because of the sports side of the tango. 

When we are told in Ephesians to "make the most of every opportunity" (Ephesians 5:16) I just can't shake the feeling that these sort of displays are NOT what the Apostle Paul meant. Typically the "John 3:16 Guys" are making the most of the spotlight, not the opportunity. The difference is this: 

*the spotlight is that fading moment, everyone has it at least once, some longer than others

*the opportunity is typically a person or a small group of people whom we actually interact with

A glaring celebrity instance of all of this is Tim Tebow and "Tebowing."

"Tebowing" was an incredible cultural (mostly internet, but also in the office) phenomenon that became a focus of Tebow's Christianity. His one-knee-kneeling posture with fist on forehead became such a hit that even a pretzel can do it.

Even tebowing.com is a real thing lending photographs of people Tebowing at weddings, at the Antarctic circle and even at Machu Pichu. 

If that was all there was to Tim Tebow's faith, i would place him in the realm of the John 3:16 guys, an awkward Christian participant in sports culture, where we are not sure to commend him for his time in the spotlight or shake our heads at the fact that our faith was reduced to assumptions about him praying for his team to win over the other team. 

But Tim Tebow, fortunately, is a man who makes the most of every opportunity. While shrugging off the fame he got for Tebowing, he quietly always hosted a family to every game he played, home or away. Often times there was a child with some sort of disability in the family. He would host them for the weekend, paying their way, giving them tours, taking them out to dinners. Then, win or lose, whether he played or was benched, he then would take the family out for dinner after the games as well, placing a cherry on top to their already once-in-a-lifetime experience.

So what's the point? 

The point is that Tebowing has barely made an impact on my faith and life (except for those times I have Tebowed before a crucial point in a game of ping-pong or Foosball... and then won). But it really impacted me to see and read of him doing something so sincere with his time and wealth. I'll tell you who his faith really impacted though…

Those families who were in need of a pick-me-up. 

In the posts to come i will take a look at three different circumstances this plays out in:

*as a fan

*as a participant

*and i'll take a stab at "a letter to a Christian professional athlete"

and try to explain how we often lose our greatest evangelistic platform in sports when we consider them only worthy of an evangelistic opportunity.

That platform: loving sports in its right way.

More to come. Stay tuned. 

Babe Ruth is not a girl. or How your life is affected by sports, even if unknowingly.

In the movie “The Sandlot,” Scotty Smalls sneaks a Babe Ruth autographed baseball out of his house so that he and his friends can play some back yard ball. When they lose the ball, Smalls informs his friends that it was autographed by some Babe Ruth person, even asking, “Who is she?”

Well, if you know the clip, you know his buddies respond that he is:
“The Sultan of Swat”

“The King of Crash”

“The Colossus of Clout”

“The Colossus of Clout”

“THE GREAT BAMBINO!”

Now, maybe you aren’t as clueless as Smalls and you know who Babe Ruth is. But the humor here plays off the fact that everyone knows who Babe Ruth is.

I’d like to claim that sports and sports figures play a similar, yet even larger role in our current culture. In the same way that you can’t enter a shopping goods store without there being a holiday you just need to buy something for (I’m looking at you Wal-Mart and yourChristmas supplies that came out with Halloween decorations), we also can’t go a week now without a major sporting event or sports newsmaker impacting us in some way or another. A few examples from recent sports culture:

Tiger Woods: famous for golf, infamous for adultery.

Lance Armstrong: famous for being cycling’s Babe Ruth and being the backbone to Livestrong, infamous for cheating, lying, and bullying.

And now Ryan Braun, a young perennial MVP candidate who beat the system... once. But now is suspended for the remainder of this season for using performance enhancing drugs and lying about it.

So what? A bunch of millionaires are getting themselves in trouble? How does that affect me?

-

When I was finishing 11th grade I was fortunate enough to play on a State Championship baseball team. I didn’t start, but I stole a ton of bases and scored a bunch of runs. Either way, I received the same gold medal that our soon-to-be-minor-league-shortstop had hung around his neck that day. We got paraded around the town on top of a fire truck. Seven year olds and seventy year olds not only knew my name, they knew my stats as I autographed their t-shirts and hats. It’s hands down one of the highlights of my entire life. We put tiny Palmyra, Pennsylvania on the map. And apparently gained Coca Cola’s attention.

When we got back to school that fall, we now had Coca Cola vending machines, a Coca Cola sponsored banner congratulating us hanging in our cafeteria, and congruent advertisements around the school and the ball fields.

And money.

Suddenly our sports fields became nicer. We had a new paint job on our school walls. Our sporting events became more attended.

And as I look back over the years, the whole of our school systems are now more than ever sports-and-money-oriented.

Even though there are studies out there proving that elementary aged kids are better suited for school times of 8 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., and secondary school aged youth being better learners with a 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. timeslot, those time assignments are swapped. Why? So we can use buses for both primary and secondary schools without having to purchase more of them. But more so that sports teams can play their games in the sunlight, so they have time to travel, and because school’s make money off of sporting events. Plain and simple.

Now, I’m not complaining about this. But at the same time, when it is a known fact that teenagers don’t fare as well academically in the morning compared to kids (trust me, I work with college students) we blatantly sacrifice academic success for sports.

Do you see now how this all relates? As sports stars make millions, as scholarships are doled out to the athletic bourgeoisie, and schools profit off of touchdowns, everyone from individual students to parents to entire school systems (see Penn St. and the whole Jerry Sandusky ordeal) are being whirled around the gravitational pull of sports.

In the posts to come I hope to help you both navigate and weigh carefully the role that sports play in our lives, our faith, our neighborhoods and our future.

Even if you think Babe Ruth is a girl, I’m here to help you make sense of the influence that sports has in your life.