A Christian View of Sports – Classic

And our guest today is Ed Uszynski – I don't know if that's Uszynski or Uszynski. How do you say your last name?

And I joined the ministry through their basketball team. Used to have a traveling basketball team that a lot of people know about and have had different roles throughout the years, but most recently I've helped give leadership to the start of a brand new website. You can check out athletesinaction.org, we've basically launched an entirely different kind of ministry online for us.

So, maybe we can talk more about that as we get into it. But that's what I've been giving attention to for the last year.

And in fact, our headquarters is at a – really a national landmark. It's an old sailors and soldiers home that Abraham Lincoln had commissioned before he was assassinated, that there would be different spots throughout the Union where orphans would be able to find safe haven after the war. And this property that we're on was actually one of 'em. So, the very building that we're in was an orphanage up until about 20 years ago.

And we're in the process of building a huge indoor arena that, hopefully, is gonna host over 300,000 people, throughout the year, that'll come in and be able to compete in sports. But more importantly, they'll be trained in ministry; they'll be taught how the Gospel intersects their whole athletic life, which is really what we're about doing.

So, we've already got baseball fields out there, like you mentioned, and softball fields, a football field, two big soccer fields, and they're just – they're constantly full when the weather's nice. So, that's the problem with being here in Central Ohio, you only get about six-seven months where you can be outside easy. So, this will allow us to be a year-round facility.

So, we – you know, stand there in front of 20,000 people for 7 minutes, getting to share the Gospel at public institutions – I can't even believe that we used to do it, given the current climate. But sometimes it would be after the game. I can still remember standing at half court at Rupp Arena and Rick Pitino keeping his team out on the court to listen, and all the people would stay in the stands, and we'd tell 'em about Jesus.

So, anyways, it was a great opportunity. And like you said, it was always on the road. So, we'd play sometimes five games in seven nights and just travel to all the different schools, and half the time we wouldn't even know where we were at.

So, that's the other way that people know about Athletes in Action is we have these summer opportunities where currently- competing college athletes will take a one- or two-week tour to go somewhere around the world and be trained in ministry, while at the same time having an opportunity to minister to the people on the ground wherever they go.

So, not only are they getting to play high-level baseball throughout the summer, but they're being discipled and poured into in their spiritual life. So, it's a perfect combination of things for a kid who wants to grow and who also wants to become better at his sport or her sport.

And the staff does a terrific job of helping them bond at the start and get rolling. So, it's – like I say, it's a terrifically fascinating ministry, and I know it's had an impact as people have moved around the country. The fellow who I mentioned, who played for you all, originally was impacted by another athlete who had done a Athletes in Action, played on his basketball team, and really helped or was responsible for helping lead him to the Lord in the context of his team's normal season.

You know, when you wind up with a group of guys or gals that – like you say, you don't know, but you're gonna go on a journey together – you find yourself being very vulnerable and talking about things that maybe you have thought about but just haven't shared with anybody, especially when it comes to your spiritual life or emotional life or areas that you need to grow in.

And you start to realize that other people have the same struggles, other people have the same questions. And when those things start to come out on the table, and you start to get a response from Jesus on how to deal with 'em, it's a real bonding affect. And it ends up being, I think, some people's greatest experiences in their whole life.

I don't think that's an overstatement to go on a tour like this. They look back on it and say their life was literally changed because of the relationships they made and because of the way they grew.

I didn't play college basketball in a U.S. college, but when I went overseas to Scotland – this is kind of a fun thing to say – when I went overseas to Scotland, graduate students could play sports. And so, I was doing my doctorate and played on the Scottish basketball team. What was really exciting about that is I'm all of 5'10", but people in Scotland were so short, I could play forward. And so, we literally traveled all over the U.K.: England, Wales, Scotland. Didn't go to Northern Ireland.

But we were in the car a lot of the time, and you're just talking and hanging out, and there's just a lot of – it's really not downtime, but there's a lot of time together, in travel and context, where you're talking about all kinds of things in life.

You know, you talk about sports teams being a family, there's a sense in which that is actually very, very true. And so, a lot of stuff happens outside game time.

So, athletes have that advantage. And in fact, one of the things that's missed the most, after you graduate or don't compete anymore, is that lack of community.

And, of course, there's a difference between individual sports and team sports. And we're talking here primarily team sports. But there is a character development aspect to your involvement in sports and working with a team, working with people who have different gifts, different strengths and weaknesses, in some cases, where you're having to respond to someone's failure to do something as well as their success in doing something that really is character forming in many ways.

And I think – you know, my conclusion is that it does in the same way that any other little sub-cultural setting does. That where you become part of a group of people who are given a task to do, and that task has a bunch of hurdles that are in the way with – that are keeping you from being able to accomplish it, you have an opportunity to find out things about yourself. You have an opportunity to push yourself beyond what your normal limits are.

And those kinds of things are character forming. I think it sort of rises and falls, these days, with who the coach is, though. That's part of what the problem is.

I think when there's a coach who actually has development in mind and points out and is very aware of character-forming opportunities, I think you get a lot more done versus a coach who really is just about trying to figure out how to win games and misses a lot of the opportunities to talk about things. Especially with youth; I guess I'm thinking more with youth.

You know, those have sort of become the priorities. And really, I think what we should pay more attention to is who is it that he's going to be influenced by? Who is this person that I'm giving my child over to, not to become an all-star player, but to become an all-star person? That's really ultimately what we want, but we don't think of sports that way anymore.

I think it used to be more part of the framework of sports; the expectation of sports is that whole character development side. But now it's all about trying to climb up the ladder. And it's really an illusion; it just is. If you look at what the numbers are, they haven't changed. I mean it's such a miniscule number of kids that actually wind up playing –

You know, I go through – I'm just thinking in the back of my head the list of coaches that I had, which were several in several different sports, 'cause I not only played basketball, but I ran cross country.

But I have one coach who stands among all of them because he cared about me and my development as a person as opposed to my development as a basketball player. And what's interesting is I was not a Christian in high school. I just was playing sports to play sports.

And what I found out, after I graduated and went to seminary and came back to the school was, is that this coach was actually quite a committed Christian. And when he found out I had come to the Lord, and we chatted after reconnecting – this is after almost a decade of having been in high school – there was a whole different level to our interaction than had existed before. But I understood better how and why he had coached me the way he had coached me.

So, we really should expect to find Christian people who are thinking that way more than they're worried about winning. Again, unfortunately, we often wind up being just as culturally corrupted as the non-Christians do in terms of only being worried about our own identity and trying to get wins and losses in ten-year-old environments.

But for people who have perspective, you can really get a lot done. You really can no matter what age, whether it's with the college athletes like you talked about, or it's with ten-year-olds or eight-year-olds or six-year-olds, if you love 'em and you see beyond what they are right now, and beyond what they are right now and beyond the sport that they're playing and think of them as young men and young women who are going to go out into the world and hopefully make an impact. You can be a huge influence in a short period of time.

I'm – in case you can't tell, I'm a pretty deep believer in the value of sports, when it's applied properly, because I do think it's one of the few community operations where you learn team in a very real kind of way, and I think it prepares people wonderfully for life.

But it was my responsibility to make sure the team was set in the right way and that we were approaching the play from the right angle, those kinds of things. And so, I learned a ton, all of which I have ended up applying in my lifetime and in my ministry as a result in terms of working with people.

I was at a soccer game the other day with my 12-year-old daughter, and the refs were struggling, and the parents were just going berserk and calling him an idiot, and they were yelling back and forth at each other on the sideline. And the girls on our team ended up losing the game. And as they ran over to us at the end to slap hands, they all had smiles on their faces. And I heard a couple of the parents comment, "Oh, they don't seem like they're bothered at all."

And I thought, "That's because they're just playing a game. And again, what we're doing over here, battling with each other and screaming at the refs and getting all worked up because they're losing four to one completely misses the opportunity that we have to teach them to overcome bad calls, to teach them how to help one another up when they're getting knocked down.

There were so many things that happened where we as parents and adults could have actually gotten something positive out of it, but it was just too easy to get sucked into the, "We're losing, and we're being mistreated, and the refs are terrible." And I gotta grow up as a parent. We gotta grow up in those environments if we want to get something out of 'em.

So, I am – I'm constantly asking for help. I'm constantly reading. I'm talking to my friends who are further down the road. I'm talking to other athletes to hear what they wish they their parents would have done differently.

And, you know, some of the best advice that I've heard is it really has to do with how to help process things with our kids. So, you know, to ask 'em after a practice or after a game did they have fun? And I ask my kids that all the time, "Did you have fun today?" And let's just talk about fun and why it was or wasn’t fun, as radical of an idea as that is now that a game and a sport would actually be fun anymore.

"Did you learn? What did you learn? What did you learn today? What did you learn about yourself? What did you learn about competing? What did you learn about the sport?" That always ends up producing interesting conversation.

What was going on – a third question that I like to ask a lot is, "What was going on with you and your teammates? Were you a good teammate today?"

"Well, what do you mean by that, Dad?"

"Well, did you encourage anybody? Did anybody encourage you? Was there any conflict behind the scenes that maybe nobody saw?"

And it's interesting how often they'll say, "Actually, yes."

"So, let's talk about it. What happened?"

And so, we wind up talking more about what's going on around the game than just performance aspects of their own improvement in the batter's box or kicking the ball or dribbling the ball or whatever.

And I'm not saying that there's not still a place, obviously, to talk about those things, but when we focus more on the soft stuff that's around it, the relational stuff, the development stuff, it's amazing that our kids, they actually really do want to talk about those things.

And, you know, the other thing is, so, sometimes the answer is nothing. There's nothing to talk about. Okay, then the next day I need to come back and ask the same questions and not get dissuade from that because my surly teenager doesn't want to talk today. You know?

So, it's a discipline. I know I need other guys around me that are thinking the same way, too. It's really hard. Again, just any aspect of discipleship I think is difficult to try to do on your own. It's good to have a community of people that are saying, "Let's try to do this differently. Let's try to create a different experience for our kids." And they're out there; they really are.

And some of those will be actual game performance, but hopefully there's a much longer list of how you carry yourself, how you approach the game. How you approach and handle your teammates and whether or not you're a good teammate, whether you're respectful to coaches and to umpires and to referees. It almost – it sounds – it sounds almost too simple, but it really is lost today that we would focus on those things and pay attention to 'em and capitalize on the opportunities we have.

We just don't see very many people doing it, because their list – the longer list for them is, "Are you on the most elite team? Are you getting enough playing time? Are you getting treated properly by the coach, which means that you never sit down; it means that you –" You know?

So, why don't you share a little bit about that journey that you've been on with them in your more than two decades with the ministry and kinda where things are headed and how you've worked hard to kind of broaden the palette that Athletes in Action is painting on?

And we started in '66. And what the emphasis was back in 1966, and has been up till now, is that we would like to see athletes come to Christ, and we'd like to see those athletes who come to Christ grow in their relationship with God and then turn around and use the platform that they have as athletes to reach other people.

It's a multiplication model. It's the Great Commission. It's Jesus stuff that's built into that model; that's not something that Bill Bright came up with or anybody in Athletes in Action; it's a discipleship model.

And I love that; I really do, but what I've become more and more aware of, and many of my colleagues have, is just the overwhelming status, the idolatrous status that sports has in our culture makes it such that sports is being talked about constantly and continually.

And so many of the issues that are being talked about in sports are moral issues; they're philosophical issues; they're social issues. And frankly, an ESPN commentator doesn't usually have the freedom and maybe doesn't even have access to the right vocabulary to be able to talk about those issues –

And so, for years now, we've talked about the need to ask, "How does the Gospel intersect these questions? How does the Gospel intersect these issues? And maybe more importantly, where would somebody go – where would somebody who identifies as both a Christ follower and a sport lover, where would they go to get Gospel answers to the different issues that are being talked about every day in sports?"

And frankly, there really aren't many places to go. And so, one of the redirects that we've tried to make here in Athletes in Action is to start to ask, "How can we produce content and make it available for people who actually want to be trained to think theologically about sports?"

And that's partially what the website exists to do now. Like I said, athletesinaction.org, you might want to check it out, and you'll see that we're just in the beginning stages of this, but we want to write and post content that will help you think Christianly about sports.

So, how do you – how do you interpret the things that are going on? How do you interpret or view somebody like a Kobe Bryant who's been in the news, or any other Kobe Bryant whose narrative has been both very dark and ugly over the course of his career –

So, how do you think about that? How do we think about homosexuals in the locker room? What is a Christian response to somebody who comes out as gay? You know, every week there's a new list or current list –

So, how do you strip – how do you strip away your idolatrous leanings? How do you cleanse yourself of thinking about sport I the wrong way and replace it, then, with a kingdom-centered view of sport? Is that even possible to do? Some would say that it's not, that sport is inherently evil because it's part of this system that is inherently evil.

And I don't believe that. I just – I believe that every aspect of life is redeemable as do many, many other people. And so, what does that look like?

And I think it's because – you know, I think it's power to become an idol is directly related, if I can say it this way, to the potential that it has and what it demonstrates about life that draws you in. It's part of the drama of the ups and downs of life, in many ways, and the ups and downs of proper kinds of cooperation versus, you know, destructive kinds of cooperation, that kind of – all that's in play.

You've got the – you've got the full drama of life being played out for you in a way, again, with a scoreboard sitting o the side, you know, telling you sort of where you stand, at least in one – from one angle.

And so, sport has become a huge place to derive identity –

When an entire city surrounds – you know, I'm from Cleveland, originally, and it's old new now, but when LeBron James left Cleveland, and there was such an uproar, and people were, in a sense, mocking the reaction –

It happens right on the field of play, that this actually becomes an act of worship back to God rather than a way to separate yourself further from God, which is how most people do sports. It's an idol that separates you from God. Well, what would it look like if you could flip that around and use sports to worship God?

And sports is another dimension of that. The amount of investment that comes, the way in which weekend time and entertainment, what we call leisure time, is actually spent is actually life investment time in many ways.

There's sort of these one-off existences for us. And I mean we need people that are gonna say, "No, that's actually part of God's kingdom; it's part of God's creation. And so, what does redemption for that look like?"

And we do this with college athletes at our camps in the summer. And we have these ultimate training camps that are going on in five or six places around the country now. And it's a four- or five-day camp where we basically are taking athletes and trying to deconstruct their thinking.

And so, what does that look like? It's a different mindset where it's not about me all the time. It's really not. It's not about trying to position myself above or beyond everybody else, which is typically how people think about it. It's to give the best that I have every day, but to turn my eyes out to other and start to look for ways to minister to other people.

And it's amazing how that – when you take on that perspective, honestly I really feel you end up performing better.

How do I play my role without comparing myself to everyone else? And if I really want to take a leadership step, not only do I need to ask how to play my role to its fullest, but how do I also help other people to play their roles to the fullest?

And we thank you for joining us on The Table, and we look forward to having you back again with us soon.