Presence: a Key to Effective Ministry

If you’re not present, you don’t have a chance for ministry. Establishing a presence with the team or individual competitors sets the tone for all the ministry opportunities that could follow. Your regular presence with the players will create an identity for you among the coaches and the competitors. The following points are meant to help you establish a presence with them in the most important places. Once you’ve established your identity through presence, you can have influence with them without even being there.

Your presence at practice is worth more than your presence at competitions. Dozens, hundreds or sometimes thousands of people attend the competitions, to scream, second-guess and support the team. Who comes to watch practice? Only those most highly committed to the team are at practice. If you are there, your presence communicates commitment. The coaches and players are at practice every day and they know exactly who’s there. They also take note of it. There is nothing that builds loyalty and establishes your relationship with the coaches, players and the team as a unit like simply attending practice.

One afternoon while watching a Women’s basketball practice, an assistant coach approached me at courtside. She said, "Coach has something that she’d like to have you pray about." I was thrilled to see anything spiritual come from the head coach, so I asked her to tell me more. "She thinks she cusses too much and wants to stop," was the request. I assured her that I would pray for her about that and I did so. That day was a real turning point in my relationship with that coach and the whole team. That relationship continues to be strong to this day, three head coaches later. The opportunity came to me because I was there at practice.

You don’t have to do anything, but be there. It’s a perfect time to become familiar with those on the team, the coaching staff, the support personnel and more. It need not take lots of time. Most times, my visits to practices are brief and when I’m on the way to somewhere else or at the end of a workday on the way home. To simply observe practice and to pray for those you see is a dynamic ministry that will produce fruit with perseverance.

New website: wired4sport.com

wired4sport promotes the value of, integrity in and love of sport. My earliest memories of competition took place almost daily at the neighborhood playground.

I remember delightedly hanging in mid-air, reaching and grabbing, reaching and grabbing, metal bar after bar, my legs wildly swinging, going from one end of the monkey bars to the other. The official scorekeeper, my dad, would count out loud how many bars I conquered. When my arms gave out, I would rest and have him start the count all over again.

The goal...to set a new world record by going one bar further than the last time. As a young child, my competitive drive and spirit was alive and well. There is no doubt in my mind that I am wired4sport. My need to run, jump, shoot, hit, slide, throw, catch...to go one further, have the most points at the end, run one second faster was there from the beginning. I've had a love affair with sport ever since I can remember.

wired4sport promotes the value of, integrity in and love of sport. The writers for wired4sport are all folks who acknowledge and value that we are designed to play and compete. Being wired4sport is a vital part of who we are. All of us played sport as children and sport continues to be an important part of our lives.

It's been many years since I competed in the Monkey Bar World Championship but I remember the value of counting each bar correctly. When the hands would slip and the world champ fell off, the count had to start back to zero. As a child, the integrity of counting correctly demonstrated my true love and respect for the monkey bar competition.

wired4sport.com is a community of people who love and respect sport so much we can't help but count correctly, play fairly, and honor the spirit of competition. The valuable lessons and benefits we gained from sport compel us to tell our stories. We hope our personal narratives will resonate with your experiences and persuade you to share your stories, too. Feel free to visit wired4sport.com often and contribute your memorable moments and perspectives in sport!

Focus on matters of the heart, not on the flesh.

People of sport are unique in society because their best days and their worst days are out in the public for everyone to see. Their flesh, its best parts and its worst parts, are the easiest parts of them to see. How often have you watched an important contest on television and just as an official makes a call that goes against the coach, the camera zooms right in on his face and all the lip-readers in the nation know he wasn’t blessing the official. His flesh is now on display for a national or even international television audience.

If I took offense to every curse word and profanity that I’ve heard in my years on the field of competition, I’d be forever upset. As it is, I’ve had to learn to see past such behavior and to pursue the hearts of our coaches and athletes without respect to their failings. Having a sober view of my own personal weaknesses has also tempered my reactions to others’ bent to outbursts of anger or other foolish actions.

It requires more insight and more faith to see their hearts and to know them below the surface. Everyone has their personal weaknesses, their particular flaws of character, but we must be careful to not have these become the defining characteristics of those with whom we do ministry. We must look beyond that flaw and see the heart that the Lord so deeply loves.

Coaches

While attending the Illinois Football Coaches Clinic in Champaign last Thursday through Saturday, I observed some things about the coaches.
1) They love what they do. It’s almost an obsession with many of them.
2) Some of them seem very comfortable in their football environment, but much less so elsewhere.
3) Many of them are more controlled by peer pressure than the most insecure 13 year old kid.
4) When we talk with them about how their lives in Christ can shape their coaching, it’s sometimes seen as an intrusion (would rather not integrate those two) and other times they’re like little kids on Christmas morning unwrapping a huge gift.
5) When we talked about leadership development from Jesus’ model, it was energizing and fun for them. (Even with a 9:45 pm start…)
6) They will invest tons of time and energy to improve their knowledge, insight, skills and network for their teams’ benefit.

All these make me more committed to serving them well because when they are committed to Christ, they bring those same qualities to their lives of faith and service.

Talk about faith in the context of the game - don’t talk about religion.

Most competitors that I’ve known live with a constant tension between their lives in sport and their lives of faith. Many of them cannot justify the two and many more cannot live out their faith in the context of their sport experience. I’ve heard too many coaches or athletes say, “I’m a Christian, but I’m a coach/athlete.” BUT… In their minds those are contradictory. This must not continue to be so. Such attitudes are perpetuated when we simply import religion into the arena of sport and don’t work to integrate faith into the sport experience. This is not easily done, but must be pursued within the context of the sport culture. Thus we must speak of matters of faith as they appear in the fabric of the sport in which your team competes.

At the end of one college football season, I wanted to make one final, direct approach to an All-American punter who was about to graduate. I asked him to join me for lunch. I was all set to be very direct about his faith in Christ or the lack thereof, but as we talked over our pizza, he began to volunteer some information that was most amazing. He began to tell me that he now understood why he had chosen to play football in high school, why he had chosen to come to our university, why he had come to game day chapels so faithfully and why our relationship had become so important. He said, “I think it was so I could come to know God.” I agreed and he continued to tell me about the night before an important game how all these factors had become crystal clear to him and how he had committed his life to Christ. We went on to talk about how to pursue this new relationship with God and how it fit his life as a soon-to-be professional football player.

Look for the issues confronting your coaches and competitors as they compete and search the Scriptures and the Lord’s heart for His way of faithfully dealing with such. Speak the language of the game with your team. Use metaphors and similes that fit the sport’s culture and communicate the truth of Scripture through them.

Consistently encourage and keep your critical thoughts to yourself.

When you encourage good attitudes, enthusiastic competition, hard work and good behavior they will notice. When you silently endure foolish behavior, coarse language, bad attitudes and laziness; that too will be noticed. You will usually not even have to say anything, they’ll apologize right away. There’s no need for you to criticize. If they want your opinion, they’ll ask for it. When you’ve earned the right to be heard, they will ask directly.

Between football seasons one year, a player with whom I’d prayed individually each game day through the previous season, made a foolish mistake and received a ticket for driving under the influence of alcohol. I saw the notice in the newspaper and heard about it through the rumor mill, but he was racked by guilt. He was terribly embarrassed and had to face his parents with the matter. Later he summoned up the courage to call me for a lunch engagement. I knew what he had on his mind, but wasn’t about to cheat him out of the growth opportunity. We met and he apologized for letting me down. I assured him of my forgiveness and more importantly, the Lord’s forgiveness of him. We went on to talk at length about how to live a more disciplined lifestyle and how to honor the Lord in all of life. We remain great friends and he went on to play in the Arena Football League (U.S.A.) and has begun coaching college football, still following the Lord. A harsh, condemning attitude could have crashed our relationship and possibly soured him on following Christ.

When you offer your opinion without being asked, you are seen as presumptuous and often foolish. You may be found to be speaking without knowledge and one foolish comment could ruin your credibility for a long time. It’s always a good idea to encourage people when you catch them doing the right thing. It’s seldom a good idea to correct them when you’ve not been asked to comment.

Leading Volunteers

As I prepared my talk for an upcoming event, I gathered some thoughts about leadership with volunteers. As we serve the people of sport, many times we are in volunteer roles and we also find ourselves leading other volunteers in such service. Below are some thoughts about such leadership. I hope they are helpful to you.

Late last summer I was reading “Good to Great and the Social Sectors,” an addendum to Jim Collins’ tremendous book about business leadership which I had read a few years ago.

One of the main points in both books is to determine what drives the resource engine for an organization – whether that is the profitability of a company or the effectiveness of a non-profit organization like the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, a local church or something like a healthcare corporation.
· As I thought and analyzed how our ministry works, I came to the realization that our greatest resource was not necessarily money; rather it was the amazing team of highly committed volunteers we have gathered over these last 13 years.
· Volunteers are our resource of highest value.
· Obviously, finances are another highly productive part of our resource engine and that’s much of what tonight is about.
· I also saw that the areas in which we most effectively involve volunteers are the easiest ministries for which to find financial support.

Leading Volunteers well is a tremendous challenge.
· Pastor Bill Hybels of Willow Creek Community Church in the Chicago area is quoted as saying that the Church is the most leadership intensive enterprise in the world, because most everyone is a volunteer. You can’t fire them, they don’t work for you. The leader has no leverage beyond his/her personal investment in the volunteers.
· As we lead volunteers in our respective ministries, we have to find ways to engage them in something significant, something bigger than just completing a task. If we’re too demanding – they’ll walk away. If we’re too soft – they’ll get bored and quit.
· I cut my volunteer teeth serving with No Greater Love Ministries, a short-term missions and leadership development organization, based in DuQuoin, IL. I have been serving with them for nearly 25 years and still do because they make me a better leader.The big question for me in leading volunteers is always, “Is this something in which this person can invest his or her heart, time and energy, and have it really count for something?” I pray that our work together has real significance.