Youth and Sports: A Balanced Discussion

Ed Uszynski, Brian Smith: Away Game: A Christian Parents’ Guide to Navigating Youth Sports

Darrell Bock 

Welcome to The Table Podcast, where we discuss issues of God and culture to show the relevance of theology to everyday life. You know, when I say that little intro, I'm always thinking, we discuss issues with God and culture; that means we discuss anything and everything, and today is an anything topic, because our topic today is sports, sports and youth, and the challenges of the schedule of being a parent, usually, who has one or maybe more kids involved in sports activities and walking alongside them in their pursuit of the faith, and so I have two special guests, who have been doing this for a long time. And I am going to go in reverse order of expiration; So Brian Smith, who has been with Athletes in Action for eighteen years, is with us from the apparently pretty cold state of Michigan, I am looking at your screen in the background, and it is looking like, yup, it is pretty white, and then Ed Uszynski, who was, and had been with, Athletes in Action for 34 years, okay, that is a pretty long time, and although Ed has a background that obscures where he is in Ohio, where it is also quite white in the background, and then there is me, he in nice warm Texas, here we are able to play outdoor sports this time of year, besides ice hockey, and so thank you guys for being a part of our podcast today.

Ed Uszynski

It's good to be here.

Brian Smith

Yep. Thanks for having us

Darrell Bock

So let's talk about first, let's talk a little bit about Athletes in Action, so that people have the context of what your ministry experience has been, and Ed since you did this for such a long time, tell us about athletes in action and what it's what its goals are, and how sports and faith got integrated into that program.

Ed Uszynski

Yeah, it's a great question. It started back in 1966. Again, guy named Dave Hannah, who wanted to equip athletes to use their very effective platform to minister to people, to share the gospel, to help people in the church grow in their faith. And since that time, it's grown to be an international ministry that ministers primarily to college and professional athletes. And really the goal is that there'd be, there'd be a Christian on every team and every sport in every country, like everywhere you go in the world, that there'd be a Christian found on it who can multiply his or her life and really become a movement starter. You know, a person that what we want to see in the church, that we see people that are multiplying their lives, and in this case, it's just contextualized to the to the world of sports.

Darrell Bock

And Brian, so tell us what that has involved. Because I actually had a friend who was with Athletes in Action for, I think, a summer, maybe even two, back when he after he came out of college and played college basketball. What is athletes in action? What are they? What do they do?

Brian Smith

Yeah, we have a lot of different offerings in and through the ministry. And so one of the things that Ed didn't mention, which is probably relevant, is, we're actually part of a broader organization called, it's now called CRU. Used to be called Campus Crusade for Christ. And the way CRU operates is we have many different contextualized ministries, and so we are the athletic arm of CRU, and some of our offerings are we do a lot at the campus level. So, the collegiate level we're on, I think, close to 200 college campuses right now where we have staff members that sit with another team of people, and they disciple athletes, encourage them to share their faith to lead Bible studies. We have a headquarters in Ohio, which just built a massive sports complex. And so, I think, projected, around 250,000 people come in through that sports complex this year, which the hope would be, you know, they come on campus and they're introduced to our principles that we teach. We teach five different principles at the intersection of faith and sport, and we're globally. We're in last I checked, about 85 different countries where we have a ministry leader assigned to that specific country, and they're doing very similar things that our campus staff do at the collegiate level, winning, building, and sending Christ-centered laborers all over the world.

Darrell Bock

Well, I've been to that center several years ago. I came in for a few days before a group, a baseball team, was sent out into the Caribbean, and did some devotionals and some teaching for them before they went out and ministered for the summer. So, do you still have teams that you send out periodically to various parts of the world?

Ed Uszynski

I was going to say that's probably the other piece that's still missing, now, from what we've said, there used to be much more of a focus on putting collegiate teams together, and especially in the summertime, sending them to different parts of the world to do the same thing, just to compete, but also to use that platform to minister as an insider to other athletes all over the world. So you got to do that with baseball. There's volleyball teams, there's basketball teams. That's actually how I came into the ministry back in the early 1990s, they had a full-time basketball team. They used to play exhibition games against 40 division teams.

Darrell Bock

Yeah, that's what my friend did for a year and a half.

Ed Uszynski

Okay, yeah, so you know that that was, that's what I knew of athletes in action back then, and that was, you know, hugely influential. It's kind of crazy that we even got to do it. We'd stand at halftime of the games. There'd be a full house, 20,000 people would be in the stands, and we'd get three minutes to share the gospel. We get to explain how we were different from other exhibition teams, what the place of Jesus in our lives, and we get to meet with the other team before the game, maybe sometimes after the game, we do ministry in the city, and then we'd pack it up and go somewhere the next night and do the same thing. Play ACC schools, big 10 schools, big 12, back when that existed. So it was amazing

Darrell Bock

Yeah, and, of course, that raises the question, so how did you make adjustments for how to play the game at halftime, if you're giving testimonies at halftime,

Ed Uszynski

That's a great question. That used to be a point of contention.

Darrell Bock

Should we press or not?

Ed Uszynski

I mean, you know, the ministry versus the competition, and how do you balance those when you're on that stage, you know, is it okay to lose and sort of lose respect and share the Gospel, or do you have to win? Like, what does winning mean? So that's a whole nother podcast, but we spent a lot of time having those conversations behind closed doors.

Darrell Bock

I can imagine. So, so, I mean, obviously, I mean one of the reasons I'm so interested in this topic, and have been is because I would regard sports as one of the most formative things I did as a young person. Played basketball in junior high and high school, and the teamwork that it developed, what it required to you as a person, working with others, that kind of thing. I had coaches who were–who didn't just care about how I developed as a sport, in a sport, but how I developed as a person, things like that. It really is a major formative element, both inside the church and outside the church. And so, as such, as a very important element of the equation. Brian, you said there are certain principles that athletes in action brings to the table when they talk about sports that probably that's a good way in why don't we talk about some of the principles that you all are trying to connect To sport, to make the experience a deep one.

Brian Smith

Yeah, there's five specific ones, and so each one is connected to a question. So the first one is audience of one, who or what do I worship? And so we're trying to help athletes and coaches and sports people realize that left unchecked or without an intervention, that we just we drift towards idolatry with sport, but we can actually use it as a vehicle to worship God if we think rightly about it. The second one is called inside game. It's who or what motivates me so, kind of getting at the that the heart side of what's actually motivating our behavior as athletes, that God really does care about the help the heart motivation, maybe even more so than what we produce on the field. Three is holy sweat, this idea that we can actually grow by doing spiritual discipline. So it's nothing overly profound, but the question we're asking is, how do I how do I grow? How do I move closer to Jesus? So we're introducing athletes and coaches to just the basic spiritual disciplines, specifically, read your Bible, surrender to the Holy Spirit three or four, we changed the name. It is now called Better over bitter. And it's answering the question, how do I deal with pain and suffering, not just in sports, but in life? And so trying to give athletes almost a front end theology of suffering before it actually happens in sport, it's much better to understand how God works in and through suffering before you get benched report, before you tear your ACL,

Darrell Bock

Okay, so that's losing, that's losing, getting hurt, and being on a team where someone's better than you, All those kinds of things.

Brian Smith

Yeah, there are a lot of losing experiences in sports. And then the last one is victory beyond competition. How do I live and play for God's Kingdom instead of my own kingdom? And so we're just helping athletes and coaches give a get a broader perspective on what God's doing in and through the world and the role they have, of being transformative agents in the midst

Ed Uszynski

Great summary, Brian.

Darrell Bock

Yeah, that's great. And, and, you know, I find one of the things that's interesting is the idea of competition and, you know, the other team kind of being the enemy, if I can characterize it some way, I have a story to tell that that fits into this space that kind of shows the irony of God's sense of humor. This very person who I was talking about, who used to work with athletes in action. We played high school basketball together. We were in a league. In my senior year, we beat the team that normally wins the league in I think it was a double overtime game, if I'm not mistaken, it's more than 50 years ago. So anyway, but the Center for that team was the player who, who my friend, who was also a center, because he was six, seven, played off against, well, when I got to seminary, the father of the Center on that team, the rival actually worked at the Seminary where I was attending, and eventually where I came to teach. And, and I'll say my friend and the center on the other team didn't get along very well, because they were rivals, all right. And, and yet, here's God 15, 20 years later, because he came to this friend, came to seminary as well, hits the campus, and he's having this conversation with this man who's whose last name was Rutenbar. And he looks at him, and he says, "Are you the father of and then names the center on the other team?" and "guy goes, yeah, that's my son." And my friend said, is, and I won't use the name of this guy, "is he such a jerk as he was when he was in high school?" And kicks off this relationship of this former rival, etc.? And what it raises, of course, is in the midst of competition, you get to know people you're competing against, if you're in the same league, etc., and you meet them year after year after year after year, and the opportunity to develop relationships across rivalries is an interesting part of character development that sport can nurture.

Brian Smith

Yeah, I was going to say even as you say that, it reminds me of they, they're not sure if they would attribute this quote to Plato or somebody else, but the heart behind it is you can learn more about somebody in one hour of play than in one year of conversation. Yeah. And we found that to be so true in sports is, yeah, you get to connect and build relationships, but almost at a level, a deeper level than, you know, work relationships, our neighbors, just by throwing a ball on a court and competing, you learn about somebody real quick. Yeah, obviously you're talking about this goodness that's, half a century later. You remember, double overtime.

Darrell Bock

Exactly right, exactly right. Yeah, no, those games make a deep impression, because, like, I say, they're formative. I mean, those things that would it take to work together to get there, the challenge of being there, everything about there are a lot of disciplines that sports requires that are really our character building, and you and you see it in the pressure of having to solve problems and that kind of thing, important part of sports. So, so let me ask you this question. I'm assuming that you're both, either are or have been parents, and I'm not quite sure how to how to word this question at the start. And how have you as a parent approach the issue of sport and your child?

Ed Uszynski

It’s a great question. Well, let's start at the beginning. So I am married to Amy, and we have four children, three who are in college and one who's in ninth grade. There's a 10 year gap between the oldest and the youngest. One has played college basketball. All have been involved in sports, and so sports has been a huge part of our family dynamic. Brian, maybe give your setting real quick your context.

Brian Smith

Yep, you already mentioned. I live in Grand Rapids, Michigan, married to my high school sweetheart, Lindsay for 20 years. We have three kids, a high schooler, middle schooler and elementary school kid, and all three play sports right now. My freshman is in the middle of his wrestling season, so we're wrestling two times a week, watching wrestling two times a week.

Darrell Bock

I've got two grandsons who wrestle, and they're both wrestling at Wheaton right now. So I know, I know that experience, yeah, I think the biggest prayer is they all stay in one piece. But anyway, yeah, exactly.

Ed Uszynski

Well, Brian and I, obviously, we're doing ministry with college athletes, but we were working together a little over a decade ago, and we were also coaching youth sports. And both of us looked up and just realized that all of a sudden we were a part of this, this youth sports culture that was. Very different than what we had grown up with. And again, even just putting some facts on the table, that it's actually, literally grown to be a $40 billion industry Wow out of nowhere, which wouldn't have been possible 40 or 50 years ago. There's a whole bunch of cultural realities that have kind of intersected at this moment in time that have made it even possible, which is really pretty fascinating. We talk about in the book a little bit. Book a little bit, but it's become something really different in the last 20 years, and we call it the youth sport industrial complex. I mean, it really is a machine that's got its own values and has its own goals, whether they're spoken overtly or they're happening behind the scenes. We our kids and us are being formed by this machine. And we both looked up and to answer your question, we didn't like what we were doing in the way we were interacting with our kids. We felt like we'd gotten on this super fast train that everybody else was getting on as well. It felt very different from what we had grown up with, like you said, and started to look around saying, Well, what would it mean to be a Christian on this train? Shouldn't this be different somehow than what everybody else is doing? And that's what got us to start talking about it, researching it, listening to other people, and I'll pass the baton to Brian to go where he wants to go with this. But it's really been for the last decade that we've been digging down into the youth sport world, mostly for ourselves, or at least primarily, first for ourselves, but then obviously, just realizing that every Christian parent that's involved in youth sports is asking very similar questions, what do I do with this? Where's the boundaries? How can I be different? And we wanted to start answering that.

Brian Smith

Yeah, we talked, even at the beginning of this conversation, just the beautiful, formative opportunities that sports provides. And Ed, you just said it, we almost feel like today's sport culture is malforming us in the other direction. And Ed, you talked about kids. You also mentioned, I feel more with me than maybe my kids, I just as I'm as I'm looking in the mirror and trying to assess what's going on in my own heart. I just feel pulled and really worldly directions when it comes to what I'm expecting sport to produce with my kid and what my what I'm hoping my kids get out of sport. And there's some ugliness in there that I think needs exploring, and so like, I really do want sports to be formative for my kids, but for that to happen, I need to own the process of what is sport doing to me, in and through my heart, and then shift my expectation of man I am. I'm not just a fan. I'm actually I'm actually called to be my kid's primary discipler, and sports gives amazing opportunities, but for me to do that, I need to change what I'm expecting it to bring to us and our family.

Darrell Bock

Okay, so tell us about the book. The title?

Brian Smith

yeah, the book is called Away Game: A Christian Parents’ Guide to Navigating Youth Sports and the titles that play on words a little bit, I'll give the athletic side, and you can talk about our biblical character, who we're modeling it after. Most people involved in sports are familiar with what an away game experience is like. You go on somebody else's turf, the locker rooms are nasty, you don't know where the bathrooms are, if you're at a youth football game or high school football game, the visitor stands as always has, the sun shining in the eyes, you can't expect good calls from the refs, you just know it's going to be an environment where it feels like you don't have any semblance of control. And so, on one end, we're saying youth, youth sports parents, especially Christian parents, need to see the youth sport experience as an away game. We need to understand that we're not fully in control, that there's going to be things that come at us that we can prepare for, we can prepare our best for, but it's oftentimes not going to meet our expectations.

Ed Uszynski

Yeah, well, and it's happened. It's just another aspect of a secular culture that we're being asked to live in as Christians and to be in that world and not be of it. So, Brian mentioned the biblical character just from the very beginning. We said, we want to walk in the footsteps of Daniel when it comes to this." What did Daniel do? He was functioning in a Babylonian culture that was completely anti God. Was an industry, an anti-God industry, and he locked arms with a handful of other friends, and they didn't isolate themselves from it. They could have just created a little holy huddle over on the side and stayed away from it. I mean, that is a strategy, but that's not what they did. They also they didn't get assimilated into it. They didn't just say, well, God's not showing up the way we thought that he would, and everybody else is doing it. Let's just get on the train and ride it the way everybody else rides. But they took this position in the middle where they said, Let's be obediently involved. What is it going to look like to actually walk with God in the midst of being right here in the middle of this godless social structure, if I can use language like that. What would it look like for us every day to step into this and be different? And they gave thought to it. They had strategy for it. And so when we wrote this book, that's really what the book is. It's putting a bunch of his a little bit of history, on the table. How do we get here? What is it? But the majority of the book is really about if you want to see these virtues developed in your child. Here's the opportunity sport provides, here's the kind of questions and metrics and things to be asking them and to be pushing into with them, along the lines of seven different virtues. We could name them if you want us to, but it's just like a guidebook for how to do that, or at least to introduce some language for how to do that. And again, people are going to come up, maybe with some different ways on their own, but at least gets the conversation going in a direction that will be helpful.

Darrell Bock

So let me give you another metaphor that's come to my mind while I'm listening to this. It's not the most pleasant metaphor. It's the metaphor of a toilet. And you know, when you flush the toilet, it spins around and spins around. You get caught in. A lot of people go into sports, and they find themselves in a world in which they're spinning around and spinning around. They're not sure where they're going, where they're headed, and there's a lot of stuff controlling them as they walk into that space. And you're trying to help people make sense out of the out of the swirl that they find themselves in, which leads to this question, and that is, you've already talked about this a little bit, that the sport experience today is different than when he said we were growing up. So we, I, you know my youth sports days were in the 60s and 70s and certainly were far removed from that time when sport was really, in many ways, recreation. And, you know, you didn't have leagues and that kind of thing, AAU was probably just still developing that kind of thing. So talk about what's what makes the modern sport scene different?

Ed Uszynski

Yeah, good. I've got a good list that I'll put out here for us, and then and Brian can add some thoughts to it. I mean, it went from being primarily about play. People probably can't even believe that, but it really did used to be about just kids playing games, to now it's really about performance and winning at all costs. Winning has become a primary goal, even down at the, you know, 4, 5, 6, year old level. It used to be really kid centered, and now it's very adult and coach and parent centered. It used to be affordable, where everybody had access to it in the community, at all socio economic levels, and now it's really become so expensive that it's a bit of a luxury. So not everybody's able to play. In fact, there was just a House subcommittee in Washington that was created to analyze and kind of poke at this idea that kids can't play sports anymore because they become too expensive. And what are we going to do about it? Nationally. Used to be really local, where you would just play in the neighborhood, or at best, maybe you know that the town next door, but now it's intrastate, and sometimes even going to different countries to play. It was very seasonal, where you'd play for six weeks play a sport. You know, you play baseball for six weeks in a structured way with uniforms and coaches, and then the whole rest of the summer you were just on your own to play with your friends if you wanted to keep playing well. Now it's year round, so when you sign up to play something, we've got something for that six weeks, but then we've got something after that, and we've got training sessions, and we've got this thing we're going to do, you know, in the fall, and just all around the year schedule they want you and then, of course, it used to really be about fun in the moment, and now it's about stress about the future, and for the kids and the parents, where it used to just be, we're playing a game today, and then that's it. We're going to go get ice cream, and now this game just has implications for next season, and what other team can we get on, and whether we'll make the high school team in 10 years. And so there's this real fear about this imagined future that just kind of hangs over every competitive environment for kids and for the parents that are watching them. So that's a list we've been rolling out pretty, pretty regularly, as far as just some real obvious low hanging fruit about what's different. Now, Brian, what else would you throw on there?

Brian Smith

Yeah, I would add two more. You kind of tease this, but this idea that sport used to be, it used to encourage a diversity of athletic experiences. And so you'd play, you'd play baseball, and then basketball and football. And now specialization is encouraged all year round. So we went from playing lots of sports to this encouragement from culture that the parents are taking in, really pigeonholing kids into one specific sport, and then the other one is with social media being so prevalent now, comparison of who we are as athletes went from just local, am I better than the kid next to me on the street to now we're comparing at a global scale, and it's creating this constant gap between where our kids are right now and where we see the best of the best. And how do we fill that gap? Well, the youth sport industrial complex is saying, join the next Elite League, get the $600 bat, join this team. And it's promising a lot and rarely delivers on. The recent stat is 70% of kids quit by 13 as a result of all this.

Darrell Bock

Let me throw in one that I think of as I watch, which is, and this is true of sports, even on sports I see on television on a regular basis, there was a time when competition was competition, and, you know, people competed against one another, but the presence of trash talking and belittling your opponent and getting almost getting into them psychologically in ways that aren't healthy, at least I don't think they're healthy, seems to me to be a part of aspects of the culture that that is another negative dimension of the way sports is developed as I try and gain an advantage on the persons I'm people I'm competing, competing with and against. You know, you can, in one sense, you compete with people for the for the recreation and for the exercise that represents, for the for the joy of just, you know, challenging each other, but you, but it's become less competing with and competing against somebody, and what that does to you in terms of your personality?

Ed Uszynski

Yeah, I was at a game the other night where a basketball game, a varsity basketball game, where a massive fight broke out after the game. And why did it break out? There's a whole bunch of different reasons, but one, and I'm thinking about this even as you say this, Dr. Bock, is just how enmeshed our identity becomes into the game. Again, fights have always broken out at games. There's nothing that's not that, that's necessarily new, but what you just said just intensifies the fact that my identity is so attached to this, the fear of my future is attached to this. I don't really have. And again, we haven't even said this, we live in a post Christian culture that's not been saturated with Christian values, you know, indirectly or almost by osmosis, the way it used to be. And so now everybody really is sort of just trying to figure out how to make themselves into something. You have to come up with your own way of establishing identity. And sports tries to be a way to do that. And so when that gets threatened, or in this particular case, you know this, this one kid, the star on this team, had been shut down. He got a bunch of technicals, and he just sort of lost his mind at the end of the game, got thrown out, and then he was the one that started the fight in the handshake line. It was, it was all about his identity. Just, again, I'm just putting it very simply, he's a junior in high school, and this was a threat to everything that he's about. And we all understand that, you know, that's not the right way to deal with it, but we understand that impulse that says, I need to fight now. I need to fight whoever is getting in the way of me feeling good about myself. You see that at every level. It used to just be that that was reserved for the professional levels, but now it really is making its way down to the lower and lower levels, and it starts with parents, like Brian said. So our identity is so attached to our kids performance that we start to have some really negative consequences in our own behavior at games and after games with our kids, which we could spend a lot of time talking about that if you want to

Darrell Bock

Well actually, that's where I want to go next is to think through. So I'm a parent with a kid and I'm a parent with a kid who might even love sports and enjoy sports and sees a value in sports. But what advice do you give to parents and for that matter, for church leaders who minister these parents about their engagements, what are, I guess, the way I want to ask this question is, what are the advantages I look for from the experience on the one hand? So, you know, we don't just be negative, but and then, what are the pitfalls that I need to be aware of as I think about putting my child in this environment?

Brian Smith

Yeah, we keep encouraging parents that you have an incredible opportunity again to be the primary discipler of your kids. And sports provides like almost the best environment for you to do that. When your kids go to school each day and they come home and you ask them the question, how did your day go? You get the one word answer, "It was good. It was fine". And as parents, unless we really dig and talk to people, we don't really know what their day was like at school. We don't know how they interacted with the teacher, who they sat next to, who bullied them, or maybe who they bullied. But in sports, we don't have to guess about any of this stuff. We really do have a front row seat to seeing our kids go through every possible emotion, the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. Those are gifted opportunities for us as parents, if we trust some if we trust youth sports for more than just the earthly metrics. So what we keep saying is, man, what if? What if we trusted youth sports for a bigger investment than just them, getting a spot on the high school team, or getting that 2% of people who actually get the college scholarship? What if we're actually trusting sports for too little in our kids lives? What if we trusted it to help us teach our kids like things, like loving other people or experiencing peace in a hard situation, or learning that the value of self control when seems like all odds are stacked against you, it seems like parents really do have an incredible opportunity through these moments in sports to help our kids understand, like at best, the gospel at a deeper level, the way we interact with them after a loss could help them understand the grace that's given to us through the gospel at best, man at worst. In 20 years, it means our kids are wanting to come home for Thanksgiving dinner with us.

Darrell Bock 

And what are the positives? I mean, that is a positive to be able to build into their lives in a way that's important. What I guess, beyond that, what are the positives? I take it that the core of it is that character development piece

Brian Smith

Yeah, so, that's the, let me say this to add, and then you can go like, that's the that's the instrumental value, the positives of it. There's an intrinsic goodness to just watching your kid play sport, and you don't need to trust it for anything other than just enjoy watching your kid play like that's a massive positive for our kids involved in youth sports, is I, I have the opportunity available, available to me tomorrow night when my son wrestles to just sit in the wooden bleachers. And I'm going to be uncomfortable sitting in there, but I can take a deep breath, release this imagined future and just enjoy watching my kid wrestle without expecting it to do anything other than enjoy it in the moment like that's a massive good that's available to us every single time our kids play. We can just enjoy it.

Darrell Bock

You know, I think we I think we need a book that answers this question, why are bleachers so uncomfortable?

Ed Uszynski

We've been sitting in some terrible ones lately. Well, you know the whole character thing, Dr. Bock, it really depends on there being a teacher there to teach character. Sports, sports don't teach character. They just provide the petri dish for it to happen. They provide the greenhouse potential, but you need to have somebody there that's actually looking for character. So I'll tell you this the kid that got in the fight the other day at the game, I just found out he's playing tonight. First game after this all happened, he's playing and so adults are failing, and I got to be careful now, because I don't know who's going to wind up listening to this, although I would say it to them, adults are failing that kid and all the other kids that watch that because there were no real consequences. I think he might sit out a little bit at the beginning of the game. Well, that's not a consequence. Coaches used to actually be there used to be a culture that expected character to be taught by coaches and those in authority. It's really not expected anymore. So all that does is it just it takes our responsibility, as Brian has said, as our kids first discipler, and frankly, the kids that we have influence over. So it's not even just about our kids, but we have stewardship over other kids that are crossing into his or her life, and I'm going to be held accountable, man, I just keep coming back to this. Look, I want my kids to do good in sports, this is what we were talking about earlier. You're in Texas, probably a lot of listeners are in Texas where sports is really important. I live in Ohio. It's a god here, it's an idol. It's important to us. Even as Christians, it's super important to us. It's a big part of our of the rhythm of our life. We think it's okay for sports to be important. We're not participation trophy dads or coaches. We want people to earn stuff and to strive for excellence and all that stuff that that Ohioans and Michiganders and Texans hold near and dear to kind of how we think about life. But I need a correction because I'm spending way too much time worrying about a performance, performance metrics, and I'm not going to be held accountable for that before the Lord. I'm going to be held accountable for whether or not I taught my kid to walk in the ways of Jesus, whether I was creating an environment in my own home and in the car rides home after the game, and the way I act in the bleachers, because that's a big part of my life. Am I showing him and her how to walk with Jesus in the midst of that? I don't get to leave that to the side. I think that's one of the big problems today as Christians, that we've allowed this sports part of our life to be something separate from our spiritual life and our sanctification life. And we're saying no, those need to be merged together. I need to do some gut check work in my own soul, and I need what I'm paying attention to be balanced out. It can't just be about performance metrics. There has to be some virtue metrics in there, and maybe some of us need to just forget about performance altogether and just swing the pencil all the way in the other direction and ask, what would it look like for me to actually be paying more attention to how the inside of my child is being formed and less to how much playing time they're getting?

Darrell Bock 

Okay, so I have two sets of questions left. One is you mentioned that there are certain virtues that you want to highlight as a part of the sports experience. So why don't we tick through those real quick? And then I have just to let you know where I'm going, I want you to give advice to churches that have parents who are living in this world, and what would you have churches attitude be towards the parents and the families that are participating in the in this and, and that relationship? So let's do the virtues thing. First, what virtues are you guys highlighting as you talk about athletics?

Brian Smith

Yeah, do this Ed. And then I'll, I'll tackle what churches can do.

Ed Uszynski

Funny, I was just about to say the opposite. I'll get us started. So we pick seven, and so we want the virtue of love to be developed in our kid when really what love winds up meaning is that they start to see others around them, that that's something we want to be developed, because that's what Jesus did. He walked into spaces and he saw people. He often saw the least likely people, the people that everyone around him didn't expect him to see. Well, what does that look like on a team as a six-year-old, to actually start noticing the kid who's struggling, even if maybe you're one of the kids who's struggling. What does it look like to take interest in your teammates beyond just the surface level, like these are the kinds of things that we're talking about. Sport culture is going to teach you to have it just be all about you, and to put yourself at the center of the narrative. Jesus would say, well, as you're striving to, you know, be on this team and to excel, you can also be other-centered in the midst of that and see what happens. We talk about peace instead of anxiety. This current machine is an anxiety, it's an anxiety factory. So how do you experience peace in the midst of it? What does it mean to lean into Jesus in such a way that you know in your soul that no matter what happens here, all will be well, and learn to be content in it. In the midst of sports, we talk about humility versus entitlement. We talk about joy and fun versus just winning as being kind of the ultimate experience. What else Brian, what's another?

Brian Smith

Well, self-control and impulsiveness. One from the parent side is we need to practice some self-control and not buy into the lie that what happens in the next three hours is going to determine the next three years of our kids' athletic existence. And so we need to practice some self control when it comes to that long game, but also at the game itself, with what we say and what we don't say, it's going to be really challenging for me to teach my son about self control if I'm sitting in the bleachers not practicing self control and yelling things at coaches and refs. But man, what. What a beautiful thing sport would be if, if, by the time they're done playing, they can learn just some basic skills for having self-control in moments when they want to explode. And so we teach really practical things like the value of just taking five deep breaths and kind of the biology behind that as well. So yeah, we're trying to, within all of these, just give really practical suggestions for how you can teach these things to yourself, but then also impart them to your kids.

Ed Uszynski

Think there's one more, and that's gentleness. What is biblical? What is Jesus' gentleness look like, versus shame? And just all that goes with that, because, again, the typical flow of youth sports encourages shame. It's a shame producing culture. What does gentleness look like? And again, let's start with ourselves as parents, in the way we respond, in the way that we correct, in the way that we train up a child, in the way he or she should go. What does gentleness look like in that context? I think that's the that's the other one. I think that was seven total. So in all those chapters, we've given very practical ways to do it, and questions to ask and things to look for, perspectives to communicate to your kids. Some of it's age specific, but again, it's like, however these shoes fit, put them on, you know, wherever you're at on the spectrum of having kids. Involved in sports, they all need some version of the things that we're talking about in here.

Darrell Bock

Okay, let's go to the church question. What advice would you give to churches that have parents that are committed themselves for one reason or another into this space, and what advice do you give to them?

Brian Smith

Yeah, we would start by saying churches need to start talking about sports. We need to be louder as a church, when it comes to sport, it is one of, if not the biggest idol in our culture today. And when was the last time we've heard a sermon from a pastor on a theology of sport or even a theology of play? And so I think one of the reasons we are just exasperated, confused, we don't have language and categories for what this youth sport industrial complex is doing in and through us, is we're not we're not being taught how to think rightly about it. And so yeah, we would start there as man that the church needs to be louder on this issue, not just saying you need to attend church and not travel ball over that we actually need to teach our people how to think rightly about sport and that it's actually a really good thing that God created that for us to enjoy. But with any good gift, we have a tendency to take it and make it make an incredible idol out of it

Ed Uszynski

Brian, let me say this, if I could, most of us just don't have any experience as pastors and teachers. I was a teaching elder to church for a long stretch of time, and definitely wired that way. So is Brian. Brian's a teacher. We're not getting a lot of input on how to even do that, so we acknowledge that. And isn't it interesting that all the different satanic strongholds in our culture tend to be topics that we are afraid to talk about, or they have serious consequences. So money is an idol, and that's a really, really hard topic to talk about in a church setting, sex is an idol. We don't talk about sex during Sunday services. You know, at best, maybe you're getting something on the side. Race is a huge, huge topic that's just smothering every bit of our social environment. But we, we don't talk about that.

Brian Smith

Great four-part series there.

Ed Uszynski

Yeah, well, it really is. And so sports now is this huge idol, and we don't talk about it. So yeah, we're encouraging ourselves and those we have influence over in the church again, not just to talk about it as this demonic thing that you should stay away from. No, it's a good thing that's being distorted, like all good things get distorted in this in this culture, in this godless culture, how do we be obediently involved with it, instead of just sports being used as illustrations for sermon topics, what if it became the topic?

Brian Smith

And your people, every week, are having touch points with everybody in the community. They're gathering in these athletic spaces and rubbing shoulders with their neighbors and people from neighboring towns. It's a golden opportunity again, for the church to say, "hey, when you're in these spaces, here's what it looks like to think and speak and act like Jesus. Here's what it looks like to maybe be missional in that space, through your words, or maybe just by what you don't say." And so let's give our people some really practical ways that they can be present in sport, but actually be the church on mission in those spaces. We're not giving permission to skip church, but be the Church throughout the rest of the week in those spaces.

Darrell Bock

Yeah, I think that. I think that's one of the underestimated parts of this, is that it puts you in an environment where you're around people who where you have the opportunity to reflect who you are as a believer in a way that hopefully might engender some conversations about Christ and about life. Because, go ahead, go ahead.

Ed Uszynski

Well, we just have saying, let's instead of always being defensive, and again, we understand that there's a threat to the people are not showing up for our programs, and they're not coming into our spaces the way we want them to. Totally get that understand what that feels like. But what if we went on the offensive and said, we actually want your, we want your family to be on a discipleship trajectory, and we yes, being here on Sunday or Wednesday or whenever we meet, is definitely part of that, and we want to keep poking people to say, this is not optional. This has got to become part of your rhythm. But if you're gone for some weeks and maybe even some months of the year, here's how to continue to be having spiritual conversations when you're on the road. Like, you don't just take the whole weekend off because you had to travel four hours out of state to go to a tournament. Here's some discussion questions that you could have a conversation about. Just try. Again, your kids may not want to do it like they like most of our kids don't want to do it, whether they're in our living room or they're in a hotel in a different city, but it's like in our family, we're at least going to take some time to have this conversation, or we're going to listen to this set of messages that we were given by our pastor or our youth pastor, that we just want to make sure that we're getting some spiritual input while we're out here on the road. That's a really different approach than what most of us are doing quite frankly.

Darrell Bock 

Well, I want to thank you guys for taking the time to broach this topic with us again. The book is called Away Game. Okay, might be fun to be the home team, but a lot of times you make your best progress. I'm going to make a performance observation here. You make your best progress as a team when you're able to win on the road. And so I'm looking forward to people seeing this, and we thank you our listener for being a part of this. We thank you for listening. And if you're if you like this show, please leave a rating or review on your favorite podcast app. It's a great way to support The Table and to help other people discover it. And we hope you'll join us next time when we discuss issues of God and culture to show the relevance of theology to everyday life.