Article
Character
Creed
Sport
6 min read

Letter to the Olympians

A veteran sports chaplain writes a letter to Christian Olympians, on how they can find joy amid the 'funerals and weddings' of the games.

Ashley Null serves as a chaplain to elite athletes and coaches. He is also a priest and an academic.

A swimmer at the end of a race, looks to the result screen.
Adam Peaty after an Olympic race.
BBC.

Dear Friend, 

Congratulations on being selected to compete in the Olympics - the greatest games in the world! I’m sure you can’t wait to get out there and show the world what you’ve got - your amazing talent and skill and all the hard work and dedication that has gone into becoming an Olympian. 

Now, it has been said that being at the Olympics is like experiencing 10 funerals for every 1 wedding. You know this if you’re in elite sport - every one person’s victory is at the expense of many others’ agony of defeat. 

These next few weeks will be full of the strongest emotions and potential challenges to how you think about your faith. What does it look like to integrate your faith and your sport in the midst of such pressure? 

First, God has called you to the Olympics to experience true joy. 

The first reason God gave the good gift of sport is for it to bring joy. 

“In the heavens God has pitched a tent for the sun. It is like a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, like a champion rejoicing to run his course,” writes the Psalmist. 

God compares our sport to a honeymoon - both physically and emotionally satisfying - what high praise for the joy of sport! 

Every race, every match, every competition, is an opportunity to experience this God-given joy. 

This joy will help you in the ups and especially in the downs over the next few weeks. The Bible makes this clear again and again, that it is joy that helps us endure the difficulties in life. 

These next few weeks, make a conscious effort to count every blessing, thanking God for the joy of sport and the amazing experience he has given you. 

As you compete you can witness to many the wonderful joy of sport... By not torturing yourself in defeat with self-loathing and shame, instead rejoicing with those who win and weeping with those who don’t. 

Second, but Elite Competition isn’t only about joy. It includes uncertainty, fear, and even loss. God can use all aspects of sport, both the highs and the lows, to draw you closer to Himself. 

The second reason God give gifts to his people is to use them as a school of discipleship. 

St Paul writing to Christians in Ephesus said: “So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ."  

God has given you this vocation as a ‘school of discipleship’ to learn what it looks like to love God and love others. 

As you compete and lean on the promises of God, you have endless opportunities to grow in living out your faith. 

  • To remember your identity is based on the cross and not your success and failures 
  • To remember the power you have to compete does not come from your own strength but from Christ who is at work in you 
  • To remember your standing before God does not change because of God’s grace, whether you win or lose, fail or succeed 
  • To remember that if you do lose, God will be there with you and use your pain, but that the pain will not have the last word in your life - God will work all things for good 

Third, you can serve others as you compete. 

As you compete you can witness to many the wonderful joy of sport: 

  • By competing drug-free and within the rules you can show an alternative to the winner-takes-all attitude so prevalent in all sport. 
  • By not treating your opponent as the enemy but valuing them as a ‘co-worker’ you can push each other on to excellence. 
  • By showing humility and thankfulness in victory, recognising that other Christian athletes have worked just as hard and prayed just as much, but that God has set aside gifts other than Olympic success for them. 
  • By not torturing yourself in defeat with self-loathing and shame, instead rejoicing with those who win and weeping with those who don’t. 

In all this you can show the wonderful, transforming news of the gospel at work in your life as you experience joy in the midst of the funerals and weddings seen at the Olympic Games. 

But what if things don’t work out as you hoped? God will be there for you and with you in the midst of the pain. As you grieve, look for Jesus. 

He will give you the comfort you long for. 

He will remind you that his love for you is stronger and will last much longer than your present pain. 
He will assure you that he still has good things for you. 

Ask his help to hold on to this truth. Because when you are hurting, it is so easy to listen to lies. You see, it’s a real danger to view God as your ultimate coach. 

The lie says that if you make good spiritual choices then you will be on God’s winning team and blessed with success. But when success doesn’t happen, the lie says it’s because you have made bad choices and don’t deserve to be on the team, at least not until you can prove yourself spiritually good enough again. 

In all of your sporting career you’ve probably been taught to only feel good about yourself when you’re winning, that if you lose, you’re nothing. Your coaches may have told you to use the shame of losing to motivate you to success. 

Friend, you need to separate your sense of worth, your identity, from your performance. Equating significance and achievement will always leave your self-esteem at the mercy of the natural ups and downs of being a top-level sportsperson. But only love has the power to make humans feel significant, performance never will. 

The good news of the gospel is that in God, you have unconditional love, not based on any of your performance. You are valued and loved not because of the talents you have or the way you compete. Your worth and value is seen in the love God proved he had for you when he died for you on the cross. 

St Paul tells us: 

“God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” 

Now, as people reconciled to God there is no condemnation, nothing can separate us from God’s love and we are adopted as God’s children - this is who you are. This is where you identity alone can be found. This is where you can find peace, even in the midst of a major loss. 

Friends, enjoy these next few weeks and the amazing opportunity it is. If you feel the pain of loss, know that with Jesus pain never has the last word. His love always does. If you win, know that it is a wonderful gift of God to be thankful for, and he will make good use of it, long after you have retired, giving you decades of joy. 

Solo Deo Gloria! 

 

Adapted by Jonny Reid, for Christians in Sport, from Pastoral Care in the Olympic Village by Ashley Null in Sports Chaplaincy: Trends, Issues and Debates. 

 

Article
Belief
Creed
Spiritual formation
6 min read

The young are sold jumbled nonsense in exchange for their spiritual birthright

Is our religious Compare the Market selling us short?

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A perplexed looking woman hold her cheeks up with her fingers.
Sherise Van Dyk on Unsplash.

There is an old joke that goes around the Church of England. It concerns a parish that was having problems with bats who had nested in the roof of the local parish church. The vicar calls up the Archdeacon to ask for advice on how to get rid of them. The Archdeacon replies drily: “Just get the bishop to confirm them. They’ll leave the church pretty soon after that.” 

Thia joke came to mind when reading of a recent report by the Pew Research Centre which suggested that 36 per cent of those raised as Christians in the UK now no longer self-identify as Christian. 

As a bishop, I regularly go round parishes leading confirmations, a service where people make a public commitment to living as a Christian. With adults or older teenagers, I'm usually fairly confident they are serious about their faith because it takes some swimming against the tide to make such a counter-cultural move. When I confirm younger children - 10- or 12-year-olds, perhaps - I confess to a little niggle of doubt in the back of my mind. I’m sure some have a sincere faith. Yet in many parishes or even schools it can be a bit of a rite of passage, the kind of thing everybody does, which ironically takes more courage to resist than to go with the flow. The joke stings when I meet adults who were confirmed as kids, yet who left the church as adolescence kicked in, never to darken its doors again. 

The detail of the Pew report reveals a more complex picture. In a list of countries where adults have changed religious categories from the one they grew up in, the UK comes sixth, behind such countries as South Korea (where the number is 50 per cent), Spain and the Netherlands. It’s about the same in the UK as in Australia, France Germany and Japan, which all come in at 34 per cent. 

In other words, what we have here is a global trend of people, mainly in western, or western-influenced countries, exploring different religious options from the one in which they were brought up. Two factors lie behind this trend. The first is that in countries like the UK, where religion is in decline, you’re unlikely to face ostracism if you change faith, as you might if you stopped being Christian or Muslim in certain parts of the Philippines, Sudan, Pakistan or Indonesia. In the west, the pressure to remain is just not there. In places like India, Nigeria, Israel and Thailand, places where either religion is core to national identity, or where there is severe religious tension, 95 per cent of adults say they still belong to the religious group that they were raised in. 

The second factor is that in western cultures, individual autonomy, the right to choose, is paramount. We are used to shopping as one of our primary activities. The right to shop around for spiritual alternatives, in a kind of religious version of Compare the Market, is hardly surprising. 

Put this survey next to another recently published by OnePoll, suggesting that Gen Z people (in their teens and twenties) are much less likely than their parents to be atheists, and more likely to describe themselves as ‘spiritual’, and a more interesting picture emerges. 

It is like thinking that it would be a good idea to learn another language and deciding to mix German verbs, Spanish tenses, French grammar, Portuguese nouns and Arabic verbs. 

Most of the switching, says the Pew report, involves people moving to the ‘unaffiliated’ category. Rather than changing from Christian to Muslim, they're changing from Christian to, well, nothing. Or perhaps everything. People are moving away from fixed forms of religion to a more general and diffuse sense of spirituality. The 20-something, brought up nominally Christian, now feeds her own inner life by enjoying nature, reading Tarot cards, shopping for crystals or buying a mindfulness app on her phone rather than going to church. It’s do-it-yourself religion, perfectly fashioned by an acquisitive age that wants us to be restless and dissatisfied so we buy more things that we think will make us happy. 

It‘s common to find forms of ‘spirituality’ these days that chooses the bits it likes from a number of spiritual traditions of the past, while leaving aside the less attractive parts. It’s like a fruit smoothie mixed in a blender – a statue of the Buddha, a little Native American wisdom, a touch of feng shui, a whiff of incense, all mixed together to make you feel peaceful and more in tune with the world. The goal of all this is usually some sense of personal serenity or calmness. Yet this is typically far from what the spiritual traditions of the past had in mind. 

It is like thinking that it would be a good idea to learn another language and deciding to mix German verbs, Spanish tenses, French grammar, Portuguese nouns and Arabic verbs. You might prefer French nouns to Latin ones, but the result will be highly idiosyncratic and not make a great deal of sense. As Ludwig Wittgenstein pointed out, religions operate like a language in having a set of practices that make sense in relation to one another and to the underlying beliefs that hold the thing together. Each spiritual path has an integrity within itself which doesn’t work if you try to blend them all together. 

To think we know better than the ancients who over centuries developed the spiritual traditions of prayer found in the different methods of religious practice is, not to put too fine a point on it, a trifle arrogant. Whatever we come up with might bring us a sense of momentary peace, but it is unlikely to have the long-term effect that the deeper traditions of spirituality were meant for. 

Prayer was never meant to be a technique to de-stress, to find personal tranquillity. It was not a way to find yourself, but to find God, and then you might find yourself – and the tranquillity - as a by-product. It was not a way to reassure you about your familiar ways, but to disturb you into new ones. 

If spirituality is about finding personal peace, confirming us in our own individuality, endlessly stimulating new desires and longings, then swapping a Christian upbringing, with its insistence on attending church, and sitting next to awkward people who aren’t like you, confessing sins and learning to pray, for this kind of jumbled, personal spirituality seems very attractive. But what if spirituality is about learning practices that focus your mind and heart not on the trivialities of TikTok videos or Candy Crush, but on the true source of all goodness, beauty and truth? What if it is about learning the counter-intuitive skill of loving your neighbour as much as you love yourself? If so, then the kind of communal practices lying right under our noses, learned in a place like Church with all its flaws - a tried and tested spiritual path laid out for us by those experienced in the spiritual life in generations gone before, might just offer the most benefit in the long term. 

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