The Church Answers Podcast
Turning Community Sports Leagues into Positives for Your Church
(upbeat music) - We're doing a special series that the church answers podcast aside from our regular series. It's always sponsored by Cheney. This particular special series is in addition. It's not a substitution or deletion. It's an addition. This special series is sponsored by Upward. You're going to hear more and more about them. Let me just speak blunt with you about this. This is one of the ministries. We've had many of them at church answers, but this is one of them that I personally commend to churches on a regular basis. Now, that's not to say we don't commend our other sponsors, but I get a lot of questions from church leaders about what's a good outreach ministry for my community? I said, well, have you thought about doing sports? Hmm, no, and I'll give you more about that. Let's just talk about Upward for just a moment. Then we'll get to the main points about turning community sports leagues and deposits for your church. Who is Upward? Upward is one of the longest standing organizations that provide sports ministries for churches to reach their community. When you partner with Upward sports, your church will have a customized package. You'll choose the sports you want to offer. You'll have all the ministry resources, devotions, coach resources, gospel materials. It fits the church of any size. We don't have a gym, you don't have to have a gym. We don't have a good parking lot. Well, do you have a feel? They, they, Upward will make it happen in your church. And so you need to look at the information about Upward. You can see it here. Now, here's one of the neat things about Upward. They are offering, through church answers, a $500 sports startup grant. It ain't going to last forever. So my admonition to you is to contact Upward and say, "I'm ready to start reaching people." And my community church answer said, "You would provide a $500 sports startup grant." I want to hear about it. Do that, let them know church answers sent you. You can go to the link that is there and you can start your sports league now, your sports league. Now, that's going to be the point. How many times have you wined? How many times have I wined when I was a pastor and sometimes even when my sons were pastors and two of them are now. Three of them have been when I was, has his own Christian finance ministry. Two of them are pastors, but how many times have we wined? Oh my goodness, the church members, they're not coming to church on Sundays because they have sports leagues. They want the kids involved in. Or they have travel teams that take them out of the neighborhood and out of the community. And we wind about what sports leagues are doing to our churches. Now, winding is not biblical. I've done it a few times. I know what it's like to wind. But what if we turn this into a gospel positive instead of whining about sports leagues, we turn community sports leagues into positives for our church and instead of being on the defensive and having the victim mentality, we go on the gospel offensive and we say, look, there's nothing unbiblical about sports leagues. There's nothing unbiblical about bringing sports to our church unless you have some kind of weird aversion to it. I'm not gonna try to even find that out. Since it's not unbiblical, let's make sports a part of our ministry. If you're getting your church members going to sports leagues and having games on Sunday, you know what that means? That means they're receptive to it, they wanna do it. Instead of fighting it, join it, not join culture, but provide your own sports league when you have the opportunity. Now, the different ways of doing this. One is obviously, we've talked about that through upward to have your own sports league. But let's talk about different variations of it. And I really think upward's going to be the top choice, but there's some other possibilities. One thing is your church can sponsor a team. I love, I love going, I love Bradenton, Florida. I'm blessed because two of the places that I spend most of my time, Franklin, Tennessee and Bradenton, Florida are where my two sons are pastors, technically, Jess is in Spring Hill, but that's just south of Franklin, Tennessee. And I'm there quite often. And one of the things I love about going to Bradenton in particular is when I go to Bradenton and I go to one of my grandchildren's games, and I gotta tell you, I've got 11 grandchildren, and I think they're probably on 532 sports leagues, probably a little bit of exaggeration. But whenever I'm there, you wanna come watch our game tonight? You wanna do this? And they call me red red, it's really weird. The first grandchild was supposed to call me granddad and somehow it ended up being red red. So I got grandchildren that call me red red. It's really, really strange. I don't think there's ever been a red red in this world until me and they're constantly involved in their sports. But here's the great thing about it. When recently, I was at a baseball game and I have two of my grandsons on the same team. Their ages are very close to each other. One's a biological child, one's adopted. So their ages can be very close to each other. They're not twins because different birthdays, but they're on the same team. And I was able to go to their baseball game and I looked out into center field and there was this big banner over the fence that said West Brandon Church. I absolutely loved it. I mean, that's my church in Brandon. That's church where Sam is pastor. And then I looked at my grandchildren's jerseys and it had West be on there. And I just absolutely loved it because this is the church saying, we are going to get into the community sports league. Again, you can bring it to you through upward, but we're also going to get into the community sports league. And so there was a team that just, I can't remember what which animal or mascot they were called. It was one weird one. I don't think it was an odd part, but it was something like that. But the church is embracing these sports teams. And so when they sponsor a team, they go all out, but there's another point to this, not just sponsoring a team, but requiring expecting maybe some of their members to actually be coaches of the team. And so I look at the coaches and there was this person, this person, this person, and I knew most of them, but I find out they're all members of West Brandon church. And so they're not only embracing it by sponsoring it, they're actually coaching it. And you know what you can do when you coach a league, when you coach a team in a league, you have a lot of influence on the schedule. You have a lot of influence on practice. In fact, the coaches for this team say, hey, we're not going to be able to do anything on Sunday. And the league is fine with it. Okay, we won't schedule you for anything on Sunday. And so you're not only getting your name into the community, you are not alienating yourself with whining to the community. So you got coaches, you got sponsor teams. And then there's also this, if the church had its own league, that's one of the things that upward can do for you, create your own league, your own sports team. That's why I love them. And that's why I come to these podcasts and say, hey, if there is one organization that I love how they get in the community, it is upward. So you can sponsor a team, you can have members who are coaches on the team, and you can have your own league and you can have all three. That's why I always commend you to check out upward, to go to the link there and get that $500 grant. Hey, just don't forget to start planning for it. For the winter sports league, you need to start doing that right now. But these are three ways instead of whining about how your members are gone for sports events or travel teams embracing it and leading your own to reach the community for the gospel. I love what we're doing with the series with upward. We're talking about special ways you can reach your community. And of course, we do mention upward many times in here because we believe in so much. But the basic issue is, instead of capitulating to culture, you are using culture as a gospel way to reach your community. Three ways, sponsor a team. Get your members to coach teams. And even more so, have your own league or your own team. And that's where you bring upward in. Or you can do some combination thereof. It's exciting to see what happens when we stop whining and start being obedient to the great commission. When we stop saying this is why it can't happen instead of saying this is why God will make it happen. When we start saying it is right for us to go instead of whining about them not coming. When we start doing those things, we'll be gospel obedient and we will begin to see how God will bless our ministries and not presumptuously, but we know that he obeys his obedience. He responds to our obedience for the great commission. So look at this as possibility of turning community sports into positives into your church instead of the negatives that we often hear. All right, we're doing three part episode on this on the church answers podcast is the upward series. And I would be mentioning upward in these points, even if they weren't the sponsor, but it's particularly cause they are. Once again, contact upward. You can see the link there. Tell them that church answers sent you to us, to you. Or send them to you. I'll get that right one way or the other. And get that $500 sports grant and get your team ready. Get your sports league ready for the winter right now. All right, we got one more podcast to go in this series. This is fun because this is so incredibly, practically obedient to the great commission. And we'll be looking at that. We're gonna talk about three powerful relational connections and I'm going to give you a bonus in this as well. So it'll be three plus one. So we'll see you in the next episode as always. Thank you upward and thank you listeners and viewers on YouTube, give us a thumbs up or subscribe to us there. And if you're at a podcasting out, give us a rating and review. Thank you for being here. If you want us for one more episode that we've already downloaded this week, as we seek to reach people in our community. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)