Character Coaches

During the past weekend I was in Kansas City, Missouri for a Fellowship of Christian Athletes staff meeting. As I was there I had conversations with two gentlemen who are doing a tremendous job of leading volunteers in sport chaplain ministries in their respective areas of the country. Ed Pulkinen in the Savannah, Georgia area and Lester Walls in Jackson, Mississippi are using a similar strategy to impact their communities for Christ as their volunteer sport chaplains influence coaches and student-athletes.

Here’s how it works. These men find people who will serve as sport chaplains in their own communities, they train them, provide a simple model for ministry, facilitate the relationships with the coaches and turn them loose. They give them oversight and monitor their progress during the season and then review the season with them after its conclusion.

Ed has taken this strategy one more step. He assigns one person as the school “character coach” and that person directly oversees all the “character coaches” for the various teams at that school. His goal is to have each chaplain have only one sport to serve, thus each school could have over a dozen individual sports chaplains in volunteer service. Across his area, that could mean as many as 500 people eventually serving as sports chaplains. Wow, that’s an ambitious strategy and one which deeply benefits each community.

This is a model for ministry which I believe to be wise and powerful. I am excited to know these men and to encourage them in their pursuit of the Lord’s will for helping the men and women of sport in their communities to honor Christ by how they compete in sport.