My favorite time of the season is just around the corner. I am not talking about the seasons of fall, winter, spring, or summer. I am talking about football season! I travel to nearly all home and away local high school football games on Friday nights and love to watch college football games on Saturday. I am not as big a fan of the NFL as I am the NCAA game, but I do like to watch the NFL come playoff time.
Though I never played a down of organized football, I played in the roughest and toughest league around. On various weekdays after school and weekends, my neighborhood teenage friends and I would assemble a game of tackle football. We would play come rain, wind, or snow. Our playing surface was a back yard with all of the rocks included. We did not have helmets to put on and we sure did not use pads. We became familiar with the ground. Scrapes and scratches were just a normal part of the routine. When tackling, we would sling each other around, often going in circles, until one or both players fell down. Age divisions did not exist. High school students could toss the middle school students around and middle school students could gang up on a high school student in an attempt to bring the big behemoth down.
Having watched hours of football games and having played hours more of real football and football video games, I have become an expert in understanding the inner workings of the game. Although watching giants knock the breath out of each is other is appeasing to the eye, what I have really to come to enjoy about football is the strategy employed by coaches. A team with less talent, less strength, less speed can still win football games if they have the right strategy in place and if their coaches teach proper technique. As unorthodox as it may sound, football is really just a chess match using people in the place of a pawns.
Strategy is important in ministry too. If you are a ministry leader and you are not obtaining the spiritual results you desire, you may be in need of adopting a new strategy. Typically, a lack of effort by ministry leaders is not the problem. A lack of prayer is another matter, but even with substantial prayer, a weak strategy can produce weak results. Take the veer offense, for example, in football. You can pray three times a day to score more points on the field on a Friday night, but chances are that once the game is over, the score on the scoreboard is going to look the same. Why? Because the veer, used in the 1970s, has a hard time of keeping pace with the high speed, no huddle offenses used today. There are always exceptions to the rule, but generally speaking, your strategy determines your score. And your score determines your wins and losses.
I would agree with Thom Rainer in Transformational Church that churches often measure success by the wrong scorecard (bodies, budgets, and buildings). But I would also suggest that churches measuring success with the right scorecard (read Rainer’s book) are often stuck with weak results because they are using the wrong strategy. To reach the next generation, church leaders must begin to meet together to discuss the best strategy for this all-important task. Since the next generation is not coming to church, the church must find ways to GO to the next generation (Matt. 28:19-20). I would advise the evangelistic method or technique (since I am writing about football) called servanthood evangelism embraced and taught by ministry coach Steven Sjoren (he’s really a pastor).
James Emery White chronicles how evangelism is now both a process and an event in his book The Rise of the Nones. White declares that the typical unchurched person is no longer simply unchurched, but more than likely is a “none”, meaning that person is unaffiliated with any religion. Churches and church leaders must be innovative in strategy and patient in work as they help a generation who claims to believe in nothing. It is not that the next generation will not go to church or will not believe in Christ as Savior. It is just this process of becoming a church member or even considering the claims of Christ often takes longer today.
Let me option back to football for a moment. National attitudes about youth participation in football are evolving. A study conducted in July came out of the University of Massachusetts finding that four out of five parents expressed the opinion that children under the age of fourteen should not play tackle football. Many rule changes have been adopted by football legislative bodies to make the game safer at all levels.
As a football traditionalist, I do not like all of the rule changes and I think that in some ways the legislative bodies have crossed the line and ruined the game in certain aspects. But I also have to admit that football is a safer sport and that this is good news overall.
Now, I am going to throw it back to NGM. It pains me to see the changing spiritual landscape of our great nation. I would desire that the next generation were already familiar with the Bible’s content and the man named Jesus. However, 42 BLUE, 42 BLUE – if the sport of football can change for the better, I do not see why churches cannot do the same. We have the best news in the form of the gospel and we have to find the best and safest way to hand the gospel off to the next generation. My strategy of choice is NGM! Let’s circle up and call the right play, BREAK!