Global Sports Chaplain Ministry

I’m writing today from Orlando, Florida in the USA where I’m meeting with a large number of other sports ministry leaders from around the world. Among those in attendance are men and women who comprise the Serving the People of Sport Council. Our web site is – http://servingthepeopleofsport.net  and we’d love to have you stop by.

Among the numerous ways this council works to facilitate ministry with the people of sport (coaches and competitors of all ages, both genders and all levels of development) is sports chaplaincy. This week we met together and have put into motion a plan to develop sports chaplaincy around the globe in four important ways:

1. Major Events Sports Chaplaincy - (Olympic Games, World Cups of various sports, Super Bowl, NCAA Final Four, Commonwealth Games, Pan American Games, Caribbean Games, etc…) These may be global in scope, regional or even within one country. We will build a team to give this avenue of ministry leadership and to develop it widely and deeply.

2. Club and Team Sport Chaplaincy – This will be an effort to network with circles of sports chaplains serving around the world who serve teams or clubs at every level of sport, from young amateurs to the highest professional levels in every sport possible. We intend to gather and to disseminate the best practices and wisdom from these various networks of faithful servants as well as to connect people within various networks for exchange of ideas, mentoring and more.

3. Sport Mentoring – rather than working with teams, sport mentors work with individuals in sport. They may be in the teams served by club or team chaplains or they may be rather alone in their teams or in individual sport. This has been developed well by some of our friends in Europe and we will seek to grow this method of ministry elsewhere.

4. Sport Chaplain training – we will seek to provide training at the introductory level which could include on-line training, more intensive training that will be done on site over multiple days and even more academic and longer term training opportunities. This is an ambitious and difficult task, but one we’re committed to seeing through to completion.

Please join us in praying for the success of these four avenues of sport chaplain ministry development. If you’d like more information or details, please email me at lipe@earthlink.net  and I’ll be pleased to deliver.