Article

Character

Creed

Sport

6 August 2024

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

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.

Review

Awe and wonder

Creed

Easter

Film & TV

27 March 2025

5 min read

Heading Home: a pilgrimage that breaks out beauty along the way

We can learn a new language together as we travel.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A shaft of light from an opening in a dome lights a cross on a pedestal.

Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Kieran Dodds.

This film, this pilgrimage, this story begins in Jerusalem in the rotunda of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre with its Aedicule, a small chapel, containing the tomb from which Jesus rose.

Jesus' resurrection was revolutionary because it is the first fruits of a wider resurrection into a new heaven and a new earth, the new Jerusalem, where all that is harmful on earth is transformed into eternal glory and beauty.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre holds that vision within its walls, a vision that was then transported throughout the world through pilgrimage and creatively replicated in other locations so that all who entered their local church or cathedral would be transported through art and architecture to the New Jerusalem.

US philanthropist and author Roberta Ahmanson thinks that American Protestants, in particular, have neglected this story because of the Reformation's preference for word over image. As a result, in 2022, she gathered an eclectic group of Christian college presidents, church pastors, and Christian creatives taking them on a pilgrimage from Jerusalem to London via Italy and Aachen while filming their responses to the visual history of the New Jerusalem as found in the churches they visit. In their two-week journey, the group cover almost 2,000 years of church art and architecture.

Ahmanson explains that this search for the reality of the Kingdom of God as it is to be realised in the New Jerusalem at the end of time did not mean that pilgrims were to abandon the world. On the contrary, she says, "their job was to serve this world to make it more like the heavenly home where their ultimate citizenship lay." That remains the aim of this art and architecture as:

“By studying the nature of that promised place, as artists and architects and writers of the past have sought to express it, we are schooled to live lives of wholeness and beauty right here on earth. The longing for beauty is ultimately a longing to be Home, to be in the place where we are whole.”

The beauty of the churches visited on this pilgrimage provided a vision of the New Jerusalem to those who entered in order that they took that vision into their everyday lives when they left. Along the way, the pilgrims on this trip learnt how artists, architects and theologians worked in parallel for many centuries – from Saint Augustine’s vision of a New Jerusalem to Dante’s admonitions about the Last Judgment.

The film combines scenes of beautiful interiors with explanations of their significance from Ahmanson and others, plus it shows the reactions of various of the pilgrims as they allow their sense of wonder and understanding of Church history to be expanded. David and Joy Bailey, founders of Arrabon which cultivates Christian communities to pursue healing and reconciliation in a racially divided world, are two of those to have spoken about the impact the trip had on the group of pilgrims.

Joy said: “Everybody was very literate coming from these strong traditions of faith being either oral or written but to see it so visually impacting, it was breaking us all open and trying to find language for that took the entire trip.” David suggested that: “What the trip was helping you to see was this deeper rootedness, this long tradition that, I think, could actually be very helpful for us today because some of the things that were there were the understanding of humanity as plain on the outside and beauty on the inside, the glory that comes with the inward journey that reflects on Heaven as it is on Earth.”

Re-enacting, revisiting and reinhabiting Christ's journey to the cross and the meaning of his resurrection remains central to Christian experience

As we travel further from Jerusalem in the film, we are surprised to find that the template of the Holy Sepulchre continues to inspire and shape the experience of pilgrims. Ahmanson explains that: “In churches across the old Roman Empire, from Africa and Palestine to the furthest reaches of Britain, liturgy was created to tell the story and to bring the spaces alive in the telling. Pilgrimages to Jerusalem and later to Rome and then to the tomb of Saint James in Spain became a kind of geographic liturgy. When the trip became too long or … too dangerous, believers found alternative destinations. Across the continent, from Magdeburg in Germany and Constance in Switzerland, to Bologna and Pisa in Italy and London and Cambridge in England, round churches or smaller models replicating the Church of the Holy Sepulchre became pilgrim destinations.”

Re-enacting, revisiting and reinhabiting Christ's journey to the cross and the meaning of his resurrection remains central to Christian experience, particularly during Lent and Holy Week. Walking labyrinths, Palm Sunday processions and Passion dramas, praying the Stations of the Cross, washing feet on Maundy Thursday, sharing a Passover meal, the Good Friday three-hour devotional, and the Dawn Eucharist on Easter Day are among the many ways Christians continue to follow in the footsteps of Jesus while remaining where they are during this most special season.

Many of these practices provide the opportunity to go on pilgrimage while remaining at home. Just as with images of the New Jerusalem brought from Jerusalem to the churches of Europe, so with, for example, the practice of praying the Stations of the Cross which originated in medieval Europe when pilgrims were unable to visit the Holy Land, so instead “visited” the Holy places through prayer.

The film, and other creative off-shoots including exhibitions of photographs from the pilgrimage taken by Kieran Dodds and performances by spoken word poet Street Hymns (one of the pilgrims), with his fellow poets Hanna Watson, Jasmine Sims, and Lo Alaman, in response to images of the New Jerusalem, provide viewers with a similar opportunity to experience, reflect and pray. The aim of all these initiatives is, as Ahmanson explains, what has always been the aim; “to serve this world to make it more like the heavenly home” where our ultimate citizenship lies, and to do so by “creating beauty in buildings and art and music and serving the suffering and those in all kinds of need”.

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