Earlier this week the fourth annual Fellowship of Christian Athletes Character Coach / Sport Chaplain Conference was held in Baltimore, Maryland (USA). It featured the NFL’s Super Bowl Champion Baltimore Ravens’ chaplain – Pastor Rod Hairston as the chaplain to chaplains; Pastor Tom Brawner from Overland Park, Kansas; Coach Joe Ehrmann from Coach For America and some guy from Carbondale, Illinois as presenters. Thanks to everyone who participated in every way.
This region of the USA is growing exponentially in its training, assignment and development of character coaches who are serving with junior high, high school and club sports teams. For the pre-conference training session, Maryland FCA Director Mark Stephens was hoping for 55 people to attend and 95 showed up. I spent three hours sharing with this tremendous group of men and women on Monday afternoon and then the conference began for everyone else.
Pastor Hairston was inspirational for all. Tom Brawner again delivered substantive teaching related to the source of our identity and its implication upon the lives of the sportspeople we serve and for our own lives in Christ. Coach Ehrmann was deeply impactful as he talked about our role in helping develop Transformational Coaches. He also had his mentor, Larry Moody (for over thirty years a chaplain on the PGA Tour), the man who led Joe to Christ while he was playing in the NFL, to join us for an invaluable questions and answer session. I did a presentation about ministry in moments of crisis and then had the opportunity for my teaching to be tested later in the evening as our rented van was towed from a downtown parking lot. (Thankfully, it seems I passed the test due to some great teammates.) A number of character coaches and chaplains from various backgrounds comprised a panel for a question and answer session. We solicited questions from the conferees on paper and selected several to address. A pair of area volunteer character coaches shared their passion for this ministry, their enthusiasm for their teams and their vision for the growth of such opportunities with our gathering of 135 men and women from all across the USA, Mexico and Brazil. Mikado Hinson, Sport Chaplain to the University of Houston Athletic Department, served as our masters of ceremonies and did a great job. We employed various media as parts of our conference as marvelously facilitated by our host church. Jordan Barnes did a phenomenal job of managing all the logistics and Amy Elrod conducted a number of interviews which will later be shared on our website (www.fcachaplains.org) as we upgrade our on line training and resources. Jeff Martin of FCA was not in attendance, but his leadership through the months of planning was instrumental to the conference’s success.
Resources were distributed free of charge by Cross Training Publishing (www.crosstrainingpublishing.com). Larry Moody’s Search Ministries (http://www.searchministries.org) contributed CDs and DVDs as well as his ministry’s 1-2-3 philosophy of evangelism. Everyone received FCA’s Sport Chaplain / Character Coach Training Manual. Several other resources were made available for sale and many were enriched by those purchases.
The conference was structured with numerous breaks, on site meals and with plenty of time for discussion, networking, relationship development and time to think and to process what was delivered by the presenters. We were pleased with the growing number of women and the ethnic diversity of the people who attended this conference. We were also very pleased with the inclusion of character coaches and sport chaplains from Athletes in Action and Nations of Coaches. We do not want this conference to be limited to FCA’s brand name, but want to embrace everyone serving in similar ministries.
Next year’s conference will be scheduled soon and will be held in Kansas City, Missouri at FCA’s National Support Center. Please watch for the announcement and plan to join us. Your ministry will be enhanced by our presenters, by growing your network and by connecting with mentors in this transformational ministry in sport.
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