Questions of Sunday Sport
Mark Greene reflects on the pressures and priorities of Sundays, and how we might create a meaningful Sabbath in the midst of frenetic family life.
“Thank God it’s Sunday?” Not a phrase that, I suspect, runs gleefully off the lips of many Christian parents these days.
There’s getting ‘em up, scrubbing ‘em up, feeding ‘em up, taking ‘em down, picking ‘em up, dealing with various levels of enthusiasm for church, for Sunday school, for hanging around church halls tugging at your sleeves in the hope that persistent interruption will lead to speedier departure. And then there’s getting ‘em home and feeding ‘em up before the rumbling of empty stomachs turns hyenic whining into wolvish rebellion. After all that, many a parent may be secretly wishing for a return to work. Thank God it’s Monday.
This general difficulty of making Sunday work as a family day, never mind a Sabbath day, has been aggravated by the steady increase of children’s sporting fixtures. Sunday is now the match day of choice. And the match time of choice is around 11 o’clock and that puts kids’ sport in direct competition with church attendance.
We certainly can’t blame the sports’ coaches. After all, they are part of that increasingly endangered species of noble adults who are still prepared to give up time to run kids’ activities. And they are generously providing a wonderful service in a time slot that suits the majority of the population – putting on fixtures before lunch so that the family can spend the rest of the day together. Just like churches.
But what about Christian parents who know that their primary age kids, unless they are very talented or go to private school, are unlikely to get enough sport or exercise at school, and, given the dearth of playing fields, are even more unlikely to be able to play soccer or cricket more than once a week.
Responses among Christian parents to Sunday sport vary widely (but we are a long way from the days when Christian conviction would forbid a kick-about in the park and would lead an Olympic sprinter like Eric Liddell to forego his chances of a medal by refusing to run in the heats on a Sunday. We may feel that we have progressed beyond what many would regard as a dourly legalistic and somewhat limited understanding of God’s view of legitimate forms of relaxation and restoration, but, I wonder, are our Sundays any more satisfying?)
Some families elect to allow their kids to play in a limited number of Sunday games – one in three. The problem is that if you aren’t available for most of the games, you are unlikely to start the games you are available for – again unless you are very talented. Indeed, one family I know lets their son play every game that starts after church. He’s rather good, so the coach wants him whenever he can play. Usually, however, coaches reward regular availability with regular selection.
Recently, one pastor, deciding presumably that Sunday services were made for people, not people for Sunday services, changed his main service from the morning to 3 o’clock in the afternoon. This liberated his son, and all the church kids, to play sport and still come to church. It was a bold decision but whilst it self-evidently opens up the opportunity for kids to play sport, it just as clearly closes down other opportunities for other kinds of activities – trips to visit friends and relatives, for example.
(Obviously, there is nothing in the Bible that tells us the time when Christians should gather for corporate prayer, sung worship, teaching, communion and fellowship. Indeed, it’s extremely unlikely that the early church would have met in the middle of what would, in Roman times, have been a working day. Times of services have always responded to cultural conditions. So, in the UK, the popular 10.30 or 11 o’clock service times arose to give dairy farmers time to milk their cows before church. However, whereas cows do have to be milked on a Sunday morning, kids don’t have to play soccer – though, if ungratified, the moaning may well not sound dissimilar.)
Naturally, we don’t want kids to think that God is a spoilsport, nor to deprive them of the opportunity to take part in legitimate and pleasurable sporting activities. However, if kids think that God is a spoilsport because they can’t play sport on Sunday then there is likely to be something amiss with both what the local church is offering and their experience of God in their own families. Indeed, one of the ways that we can most helpfully be liberated to enjoy a diversity of activities on a Sunday is to have experienced an enriching time of corporate worship, prayer, teaching and fellowship which potently reminds us who we are in Christ, what we have to celebrate and what our priorities should be. Conversely, services which fail to feed and refresh send adults and kids back home debilitated and disconnected, and often somewhat resentful – time is too precious to be wasted like this.
How then should we respond to the challenge of Sunday sport for our kids?
Perhaps the best way to work through the question is to consider the wider aims of corporate gathering, Sunday worship, Sabbath and family time and then ask in what ways kids playing sport on Sunday might enhance or damage those aims.
First of all, we need to take children’ spirituality seriously. Church for children is not just another activity and Sunday school should not just be a way to keep kids amused while the adults are in a service. No, children need a place to come to God, to learn the benefits of corporate worship, to pray, to grow in the faith. They need to be resourced spiritually for their week ahead.
Secondly, kids need to learn to make lifestyle choices. You can’t do everything and the choices they make or that are made for them will set patterns for the future.
Third, kids’ sports affect the whole family. Suppose, for example, you have three children, as my wife and I do. One wants to play soccer at 11, the other wants to train with his swimming squad at 5, and the third just wants to have a nice day. It’s certainly possible for one parent to drive the ten year old to soccer at 10.45, miss out on church and get home at 1.15 for lunch. The family will then be together til 4.30 at which point the other parent will drive the 13 year old to swimming and return for supper at 6.45. It’s possible. But it makes a family day or even a family visit to friends or relatives impossible and it means that, whatever the pleasures of watching a child pursue a sport, they are enjoyed singly. One child’s sport is another’s separation from a parent, and both parents’ separation from each other.
And the impact of that needs to be considered in the context of a family’s wider schedule. Is there space for relationship and relaxation together at any other time? Or does pressure of work, inside and outside the home, mean that, once money has been earned, people fed, clothes washed, rooms cleaned, roses pruned, bills paid, there is actually very little time to spend together during the week? What is the overall quality of our family relationships? Do we pray together? Know each others’ challenges? Listen to each others’ dreams?
Clearly, Christians differ on what the role of Sabbath is in the light of the ‘rest’ we have in Christ. However, most agree that, whilst keeping one day free from work is not a sign, or a necessary expression, of our salvation in Christ, conforming to the rhythm of life that God establishes in creation (Genesis 2:2-3 )is both wise and liberating.
Biblically, Sabbath has several goals. It is not just a time to stop work but a time to appreciate the work that has been done. It is a time to recognise that just as God liberated the people of Israel from the incessant demands of their Egyptian taskmasters, so contemporary Christians shouldn’t be slaves to the incessant demands of 21st materialism. We stop in trusting recognition that God is our provider, that there is more to life than making money, and that others too (including parents) have a God-given right to a day without labour which they can share with others.)
Still, you can stop work but not be liberated from that terrible sense of having no space to think, no moment to relax, no moment that is not already accounted for by some activity that doesn’t refresh your soul. In sum, we may do no work on Sunday but actually it may still feel just as stressful as any other day of the week. And for many it does. With or without kids’ sport on a Sunday.
Sabbath is, after all, not just about what we don’t do, it is about setting aside time to do those things that are vital to a healthy relationship with God and His people. And that applies to kids as well as adults. Sunday should be a time when kids meet in purposeful fellowship with God’s people to acknowledge with other believers who God is, and to reflect together on how they can “encourage one another to love and good works” (Hebrews 10:24-25) in the week to come.
Marva Dawn puts it this way:
“Sabbath keeping is often disparaged as not useful, but we certainly do serve the world better out of the wholeness, order, revived spirits, empowered emotions, healthy bodies, renewed minds, authentic relationships, and nurtured sense of ourselves that Sabbath keeping creates.”
Is that what your Sabbath does for us and our kids?
And if it doesn’t, how can we begin to create a life that does?
Not easily. There are, of course, some things we can do to make Sunday less frenetic – make sure that kids’ homework is done by Saturday nights, that schoolbags are packed, shoes cleaned and so on. We can find out what things others in our family find refreshing and restorative. And we can find out what they find draining. For some people, cooking on a Sunday, is a chore because they do it every day. But for others it’s a joy. Maybe it’s time to change who prepares Sunday meals or to simplify what we cook on a Sunday. Or make the preparation more participative. It’s quite possible to give Sunday eating a sense of specialness and celebration without creating lavish or complex meals. You can light candles and serve chocolate spread with breakfast, chocolate pudding with lunch and chocolate cake with tea.
Similarly, we might consider how we can create a more relaxed atmosphere on a Sunday, the sense that there is time for one another. One couple I know have adopted the Jewish time-scale for Sabbath – from sundown on Saturday to sundown on Sunday. They and their primary age kids begin with a short prayer time, eat together and then do something relaxing – play a game or watch a film. Personally, I’ve never felt comfortable with that format but the issue for each of us is to find ways that make our Sabbath more of what God intends it to be – for ourselves, for our children – if we have them – and for the wider community.
That means that some families will be able to accommodate Sunday soccer matches into their rhythm of refreshment, relationship, rejoicing and conscious focus on who God is. Others will not. Either way, the question of Sunday sport isn’t about whether kids kick a ball but about whether we create a rhythm of family life that is distinctively different from the incessant, driven, stressful, materialistic, relationally poor, emotionally shallow and spiritually shallow way of living that pervades our contemporary culture and so diminishes us all.
And that is a goal worth working hard for all week.
This article first appeared in Christianity & Renewal and is reproduced by kind permission.
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