Sports on Sundays? When Sports Clash with Church

Also Available on:

Today's question says, "How do we deal with sports on Sunday mornings? I have all sons, and baseball is a fun thing, but many tournaments are on Sunday mornings. How do we practically walk through being committed to a team, but keeping commitments to God first. Are a few Sundays out of the year okay?"

Transcript

Note: The following is an auto-transcript of the podcast recording.

Hello friends. Today's question says, how do we deal with sports on Sunday mornings? I have all sons, and baseball is a fun thing, but many tournaments are on Sunday mornings. How do we practically walk through being committed to a team, but keeping commitments to God first. Are a few Sundays out of the year okay? Thanks so much for your help with this. Well, this is a question that I am sure many if not most families are wrestling with because it used to be that the only sport that really took place on Sundays was soccer. However, that is no longer true. Most sports now have games and tournaments on Sundays, and so how do we think through this biblically, both helping our children understand the importance of keeping Sunday as the Lord's day and worshiping with the local church, while also understanding the importance of being faithful to a commitment that has been made. And so this is something that I'm really excited to look into on the Foundation Worldview podcast.

For those of you I haven't met before, my name's Elizabeth Urbanowicz. I'm the host of this podcast, and our goal is to answer your questions so that you can equip the kids that God has placed in your care to carefully evaluate every idea they encounter and understand the truth of the biblical worldview.

Now, I'm going to start off answering this question with a question that I'm sure most faithful listeners can already guess what that question is. And that question is what is the goal? So as we think through this situation, what is the goal both of attending corporate worship on Sunday, and what is the goal of attending a baseball tournament? Now, I think when we think about corporate worship, the goals, there are multiple. There are many goals in attending corporate worship. Why do we meet corporately? Well, first, we are seeking to be faithful to the command to meet together. In the book of Hebrews, we are commanded to not give up the habit of meeting together as some are in the habit of doing. And so we need to be faithful to that command to meet together. Another goal of meeting corporately on Sundays is to worship God, to recognize that God is the highest and ultimate authority, that he is the highest and ultimate reality, and to turn our eyes towards him, so to worship him. Another goal for meeting corporately on Sunday mornings is to sit under the preaching of God's word that we're going to sit and hear God's word read. Then we're going to hear a pastor explain that and how that passage applies to our lives. Another goal of meeting together for corporate worship on Sunday is to encourage one another, to come together as the body of Christ and to encourage one another, to spur one another on towards love and good works. Another goal is to have our hearts conformed to the liturgy of Christ, to have our hearts and our minds fixed on who Jesus is and what he has called us to. Because all throughout the week, the world is consistently seeking to conform us to its liturgy, to its rhythms and routines, its desires and values and goals. And one of the main goals of worshiping corporately on is that our hearts and our minds would be conformed to the liturgy of Christ, the rhythms and routines that God has established in Scripture, that there are affections of our heart would be stirred towards Jesus.

Now in this podcast that we work hard to keep under 20 minutes. Obviously, I have just gone through these goals very, very quickly. If you're interested in learning more about the goal of corporate worship and how we should include this in our family, highly recommend that you check out our Parenting Series at Foundation Worldview. It's a five lesson teaching series. It's designed to be done in churches and in small groups. However, if you're interested, if you're not interested in doing this as a church or a small group, you can get the first lesson in that Parenting series for free at Foundation Worldview. So I highly recommend that you check out that series to learn more about this.

So those are the goals of attending corporate worship. Then we need to think through, okay, what is the goal of attending a baseball tournament? Well, the goal there, as this person already mentioned, is to be faithful to the commitment that we have made to a team, that it's important that when we make a commitment, we are faithful to that commitment. So this is a good goal to have, and we want our children to faithfully keep the commitments they have made.

So we see two really good things here, okay, meeting together corporately and all that's involved in that, being faithful to the command to meet together, worshiping God, sitting under the preaching of God's word, encouraging one another, having our hearts and minds conform to the liturgy of Christ. And then the goal of attending a baseball tournament to be faithful to a commitment that we have made. So then the question becomes, okay, so when we have these two competing events, and when we have these two competing goals, which one comes first?

Well, I think to anyone who claims the name of Christ, it should be very obvious that our commitment to the body of Christ and to worshiping God corporately, that supersedes the goal of being faithful to our baseball team. And so that's what should come first. And in this situation where there are baseball tournaments on Sunday morning or anytime kind of sports tournament or game, in these situations, the world is trying to conform us to its liturgy. It's trying to get us in its mold of treating Sunday, the Lord's day, the day when Jesus resurrected as just any other day, where we're just herring along from one activity to the next. And so we need to be really careful about making sure that our families are not being conformed to the liturgy of the world.

Now, for Christians in past centuries, this would have been an easy question to answer because Christians in past centuries just would've viewed corporate worship on the Lord's day as the utmost importance. Also, in many cultures in the past that have been strongly influenced by Christianity, there weren't these kind of events taking place on Sundays because they were so heavily influenced by the Christian worldview. But today, in our time and culture, we are feeling that cultural pressure to put aside corporate worship and just continue along with the liturgy of the world. And so I would say that in these situations, it is so important for us to put corporate worship above sports commitments.

Now, in some ways, we've gotten ourselves into these situations where we're having to choose either between being faithful at attending corporate worship or breaking a commitment that we made. And so I think in these situations, it's really important that we train our children to count the cost before making a commitment because it's very, very easy to say yes to something, especially something we enjoy doing. It sounds like this or this questioner's sons really enjoy baseball, and I grew up, and my dad really loves baseball. My brother played baseball. I went to hundreds and hundreds of baseball games growing up, watching my brother, and it was fun to watch. It was fun being outside. It was fun being, even if I was just on the bleachers watching, it was fun to feel like you're part of a team and we want our kids to enjoy this, but they need to count the cost, as do we.

So what I would recommend for anybody watching and listening before the next sports season starts, before you actually make a commitment to a team, ask for the schedule ahead of time so that your family can look through, okay, when are the games, when are the practices, when are the tournaments? And then make clear to your children, which games and practices and tournaments you are not going to be able to attend because you're going to be faithfully attending corporate worship.

Now, this is something also just as a little caveat. Another webinar or a webinar that I highly recommend you check out is one called Three Reasons to Stop Sending Your Kids to Kids' Ministry because a lot of this is not going to make sense to our kids of why we're choosing corporate worship over a baseball game if they are just being shuffled off to a kid's ministry. Because a kid's ministry is usually very much about entertainment and games and fun, where those things in and of themselves aren't bad. And I think those things could even be valuable in the middle of the week. I think those things can be valuable during the Sunday school hour. But if our children are not in the actual service and they're not hearing the preaching of God's word, they're not taking part in the corporate worship. If they're not seeing what is being done with baptism and communion, none of this is going to really make sense because it's just going to think, it's just going to seem like, well, why am I choosing one form of entertainment over another? So highly recommend you check out that webinar, Three Reasons to Stop Sending Your Kids to Kids' Ministry.

So mark on your calendars, the dates you will not be able to attend the different practices and games and tournaments. Then ask the leaders, ask those who are coaching if your sons can still be part of the team if they aren't able to make those games and tournaments. And the answer might be no. And while that would be very disappointing, there's probably something, an alternate form of baseball that you could look into, or it can just be a situation where we're teaching our kids to really count the cost of following Jesus. Because a lot of times we get ourselves into these situations where there's kind of no really good option because either we choose corporate worship as we should, and then we back out on our commitment, which we really shouldn't be doing that, or we're faithful to our commitment and we back out of corporate worship, which we really shouldn't be doing that either. So to make sure we're counting the costs beforehand. And then once we ask if our children can still be part of that sports team, if they can't make those tournaments or games or practices, if the answer is yes, then we need to talk to our children about this ahead of time to set expectations. Say, okay, we're so excited for you to be part of this baseball team. We know God has really gifted you in this area. We know it's a lot of fun. We're going to be committed to this team. However, this team is asking us to do some things that don't align with what God has revealed in Scripture. They're asking us to miss some of our corporate worship gatherings where we are worshiping Jesus in order to play in the tournament, and we're not going to do that. Your coach already knows that. So these tournaments you're not going to be at in these games, you're not going to be at. Just so that there's appropriate expectations there.

Then I think it's important also to think through different circumstances because it might be that a tournament, usually a tournament, you're playing multiple games. Baseball is a very long game. Usually a baseball game is a minimum of two hours. Sometimes it's more like four hours. And so it might be that there's a baseball tournament on Sunday that runs from 9:00 AM till 6:00 PM Well, if you have corporate worship and it's over by noon, couldn't you make a 1:00 PM game? Yeah. So think through, could you attend part of the tournament after? Could you talk to the coach about that ahead of time? Now, a lot of this is going to be dependent on how you view the Christian's relationship to the law, the Mosaic law. If you view the Christian's relationship to the Mosaic law as every single command or the commands in that law are all ones that Christians have to follow, then that really would, playing baseball on a Sunday really would be breaking the Sabbath. And so that would be something you would have to say no to. Where if you think that there's some of the laws in the Mosaic law that still apply to us, not because they're in the Mosaic law, but because they're part of the new covenant and the law which God has revealed for believers, then you would say, well, this might just be similar to other activities we do on a Sunday afternoon. And so you could make the decision then to be part of that baseball tournament in the afternoon.

Now, the questionnaire also asked, would there be some exceptions are a few Sundays out of the year? Okay. So from my opinion, I would say no, a few Sundays out of the year are not okay, because then we're just establishing this pattern of, oh, well, when it's a really important game, then we're not going to go. So if we're making this consistent throughout the year, just a few Sundays out of the year, I don't think that that would be appropriate. I think that we need to talk through that ahead of time.

However, I do think that there might be several outlier situations here that we would need to think and pray through. Talk to the elders at our church about. One of them would be, what if your son's baseball team is in the state championship? Okay, that's something that you cannot anticipate ahead of time because nobody puts that on their calendars because very few teams make it to the state championship. Only two teams, in fact make it there. So if your son's team makes it to the state championship, it's a once in a lifetime opportunity. Is that okay? Well, I don't think there's a definite yes or no answer. I think it's going to be a matter of conscience there that you're going to have to think and pray through and bring others into that decision as well. But I think if it's a one-off thing and it's like an extreme circumstance, I think it's something that you could consider.

So this is my 2 cents on this. Highly recommend those of you watching and listening to talk through these types of situations with those in your local church to get your elders perspective on this. But I think our overarching takeaway should be that we need to make sure that we are not putting our kids in a situation where it's a lose-lose situation because we need to teach them to count the cost before making a commitment. And so if this team is going to have games on Sunday mornings and they're going to require that our kids are there, that's a price that we cannot pay because we need to be faithful to what we've been commanded to in the scriptures to meet together, to worship corporately.

Well, that's a wrap for this episode. But as always, my prayer for you as we leave this time together is that no matter the situation in which you and the children, God is placed in your care, find yourselves that you would trust that God is working all things together for your good. By using all things to conform you more into the image of His Son. I'll see you next time.