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(More customer reviews)Three years ago, in response to a Sunday School student's question about what the kids were supposed to do on Sunday mornings in the Summer after Sunday School went on vacation, I found myself starting a summer soccer program at a small, rural Episcopal church in the Northeast. At the time, it seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. We had kids with an interest in it, and we had a field behind the church that we could use. And it was better to have the kids (and their parents) present at church in the Summer than off doing their own things. Only when I started planning the second summer did it occur to me that this was something that wasn't usual, especially in the Episcopal church. I started looking for books that might help me figure out how to do a better job of whatever it was that I was doing.My first forays into what I came to realize was the literature of recreation and sports ministry came up with some pretty awful tracts -- for that is what they were. The gist of them seemed to be that the content of the sports or recreation program wasn't important; the only thing that was important, according to these books, was to harangue the kids about Jesus as long as they would hold still. They were so wrong-headed, so counter-productive, so punitive, that one wondered if they had been written by closet atheists who wanted to poison kids on Christianity so permanently that they would never want to enter a church again. They were genuinely that bad.THEN I found this book. It gave me a good, well thought out scriptural basis for recreation and sports ministry.It traced the history of recreation and sports ministry in the English-speaking world and helped me understand why our little summer soccer program was unique (increasingly I am thinking that it is unique!)It gave me some practical advice about a whole range of topics concerned with organizing, funding, and operating a recreation and sports ministry.It had FOOTNOTES!!!! and it cited OTHER AUTHORS!!!!! Not one other source on the subject that I found had that much intellectual integrity; not a single one.We're now in the midst of our third year of summer soccer at Trinity Church, Lime Rock. If you want to see what it looks like, www.trinitylimerock.org is the parish website; you can find the soccer program under the "Young people" tab. Using advice from this book, the program's doubled in size from last summer. We get respect from the local youth soccer club, and from the proprietors of the summer soccer camps. The local paper has given us coverage for four consecutive weeks now. We see families in church regularly now that we saw on occasional Christmases and Easters in the past. We see adolescents who had moved on to other things in their lives back on the premises for soccer.Importantly, this book has helped me to realize that what we are doing is exciting and novel and effective, but that it is by no means all we can do in the recreation and sports ministry area. Since reading the book I've had some thoughts about programs for adults and more programs for kids that we can do. And right across from our church is the auto racetrack, Lime Rock Park. Who knows what the possibilities are?It is a really valuable book.
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How open is our culture to recreation and sports? The popular culture today is saturated with recreation and sports. The Olympics, Super Bowl, World Series, X-Games, Iron Man events, the Final Four in college basketball, and the playoff series in professional basketball capture the imaginations of millions of people in America each time they are held. The questions are, according to general editor John Garner, where is the church and how is the church using these tools to reach people, and will the church see the opportunity to use recreation and sports as ministry tools?The fact is, most churches are not reaching the postmodern culture and are being ignored by an increasingly non-Christian American culture because people see no relevance to their lives. What they do see relevance in is re-creative leisure; they pursue it at break-neck speed and often at great costs. Somehow the church must learn to "capture the imagination" of a world that is passing it by. If the church can capture the imaginations of people, it can get their attention, can gain access to their minds, and can reach the heart with the message of the love of God.
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