With football season here and fall temperatures following, Scott Freeman, Community Groups Pastor, shares with us a book that addresses what many of us struggle with... letting sports get the best of us.
As an avid lifelong sports fan and a former high school
baseball coach, I have often struggled with keeping sports in their proper
place in my life. More than once I have
lost perspective and allowed athletics to become an idol to me. I have had to preach to myself that while
sports are a gift from God (most of them anyway) and that they are capable of
teaching us valuable lessons, they are a small part of God’s creation and
cannot become more important to us than the Creator himself!
With this struggle in
mind, I was instantly hooked when I picked up a copy of Chad Gibbs’ book God and Football: Faith and Fanatacism in the SEC at Crossway and read
the back cover. Forty-eight hours later
I had read the entire book and was ordering copies to send to my dad and every other
Christian sports fan that I know.
Gibbs decided to write the book when he recognized that
entirely too much of his happiness depended on the outcome of his favorite
sports teams. If his team won on
Saturday, the rest of the weekend was glorious.
If they lost, his family knew to tread lightly around him and that nothing
could redeem the next few days. In the
book, Gibbs travels to each of the twelve Southeastern Conference schools for a
football game during the 2009 season. He
spends each game day with Christian fans and also connects with a number of
Christian campus organizations (FCA, Campus Crusade, RUF, etc.) to get their
take on whether their fanaticism for their team crosses the line and becomes
idolatry. He then attends church with
the same fans on Sunday and makes some hilarious (and at times convicting)
observations.
- Would we paint our chests and faces out of excitement for God?
- Why do churches plan events around the football schedule, but the SEC doesn’t need to call the First Baptist Church of Athens or First Methodist of Gainesville before making out its schedule each year?
- Why do a few hundred people slide in the back door at the last minute for church services, but tens of thousands show up hours and hours before kickoff to tailgate?
As Gibbs discusses each of his 12 weekend experiences, he gives readers a very entertaining story, that I would wholeheartedly recommend, while also summarizing each chapter with some great theological truths.