Proclamation, continued...

Express the message of Christ Jesus in terms relevant to the team’s sport culture – It may help if you think of yourself as a cross-cultural missionary. While most of the Christian world thinks of how to communicate about faith in Christ across various language barriers, your task is to clearly communicate in the culture of sport. This will mean that your vocabulary should be full of the words and expressions that are common to the sport. This is the language they speak. Al Miller, Chaplain to the national football (soccer), net ball and track & field teams of Jamaica, says it this way, “Speak the language of your sport.” Your illustrations of spiritual matters should also come from the sport in which they compete and to which they have given so much of their hearts. Your witness to the love of Jesus Christ must be shared in the context of sport to be most readily understood and most strongly integrated into their lives as a whole.
Asking good questions is especially important to the process of proclamation. Well considered questions can help determine a person’s level of spiritual development and his/her orientation toward sport so that the Chaplain or Mentor can speak most appropriately to the hearer’s life.