Character Coach / Sports Chaplain Blog

For the last several days I have been in Vilnius, Lithuania and Moscow, Russia in support of our teammates of FCA Ukraine. While here in Moscow, I had a great talk with a young man who is pursuing ministry in ice hockey. He was an elite level young player and then a professional until age twenty. As we discussed what he misses most about playing with a hockey team he said, “My teammates. In the summers, when we would go to a summer camp to train and compete, I would come home after the camp and cry in my room. My mother would ask what was wrong with me and I would reply that I miss my teammates.” For this young ice hockey player, his team and teammates provided community and purpose for his life. After he was passed over for further advancement in professional hockey, he was suddenly thrust into the real world of work and this world provided neither community nor purpose. He was adrift. He descended into a life of alcohol and drug abuse, crime, and eventually homelessness. In th...

In recent years more and more Christian competitors, coaches, and sports chaplains have become uneasy about the degree to which they have become identified by their most recent performances. They find their emotions, relationships, and even their sense of personal worth to be tracking with their win/loss records, their most recent times, distances, heights, and other measurements of personal performance. While knowing this can’t be right, most have no other way to grasp their worth, their value, and their identity as a person. The culture in general and the sports industry in particular are happy to give an identity to sportspeople. This is usually in an effort to market, to lionize, or to degrade a person for their own purposes. If that’s not enough, those in sports media are more than happy to reduce a sportsperson’s life to a cliché, a meme, or a sound bite on their evening broadcast, blog, or talk radio show. We who work in Christian sports ministry will often tritely say...

What does Sports Chaplaincy look like? Sports Chaplaincy looks like sunny afternoons at football practices in the heat of August. It looks like quivering lips at the funeral visitation for a coach too soon taken from his team. It looks like the bright lights of a stadium on a fall evening. It looks like the dim lights of a locker room after a disappointing loss. In short, Sports Chaplaincy looks like opportunity. We see the hearts of men and women, boys and girls, in the glaring lights of sports arenas and in the shadows of injury, disappointment, and grief. Each of these moments looks like an opportunity to speak the life of Christ Jesus into their searching souls. What does Sports Chaplaincy sound like? Sports Chaplaincy sounds like loud sports arenas; their blaring music, shouting crowds, chanting fans, and bellowing announcers. It sounds like the banter between teammates in a locker room before practice. It sounds like the hushed voices and the beeps of a heat monitor in ...

For many years I have heard people in the church say, “80% of the work gets done by 20% of the people.” I always heard it as an axiom, not as a true mathematical principle. I recently read a book titled, The 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch in which he dives deeply into the veracity of the 80/20 (Pareto) principle. While it was pretty easy to get lost in the mathematical weeds, I found it to be quite helpful in a few ways. A few of the thoughts I drew from the book are listed below. The author talked both of 80/20 analysis and 80/20 thinking. Rather than reducing all of life into mathematical formulas, he talks about applying the principle to all of life. The big idea is that, most of the time, 80% of outcomes are produced by only 20% of inputs. The select few will be most productive for almost any enterprise. Here are some examples that you may consider in your life and ministry. ·         20% of your relationships probably produce 8...

Our friends and colleagues at Cede Network ( @CedeNetwork   http://cedesports.org/network/ ) have uploaded a series of excellent, brief (most around two minutes), videos titled, Sports Chaplaincy 101 . Each of the videos addresses one of a wide variety of subjects like: What is the origin of chaplaincy? What is the process of becoming a sports chaplain? How do I serve an injured player? How do I serve as a chaplain to an individual athlete? What is the role of a chaplain in a multicultural setting? How do you walk with a player through bereavement? How should I collaborate with other chaplains and field professionals? Please take a few minutes to browse through these videos. I trust that some, or all, will enhance your service of sportspeople. There will surely be more uploaded in coming days. Thank you, Richard Gamble and Cede Network. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ni-i0ukUpQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MV6GyFS37c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V...

From 15-17 March of 2018, I was privileged to participate in the second Sports Chaplaincy Summit in Charlotte, North Carolina, USA. Those in attendance represented sports chaplaincy ministries from around the world and the academic community. We were hosted by Cede Network and Joe Gibbs Racing ( http://cedesports.org/network/ http://joegibbsracing.com/ ). Bob Dyar and Richard Gamble hosted leaders from Illinois, Colorado, Washington, and Tennessee in the USA, Australia, Germany, Spain, Portugal, and England. We were joined electronically by a colleague from South Africa as well. Our time together included a tour of the Billy Graham museum, delicious meals together, nights spent in the homes of local friends and Cede Sports board members, reports, updates, and important deliberations regarding the continuing development of sports chaplaincy ministries around the globe. This form of ministry is growing in many parts of the world and our team aims to facilitate its growth and to gi...

On 6 April, the Humboldt Broncos club of the Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League experienced a tragic bus crash. The experience crushed the team, the community, and the entire world of junior hockey. In the midst of their pain and grief, their team chaplain served very faithfully. His authentic, grief filled, Christ honoring talk at the memorial service is at the link below. Please take a few minutes to watch it and to learn from this excellent model of serving in crisis. http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/humboldt-pastors-anguished-speech-where-was-god/