Youth Sports on Sunday Morning

Eric Liddell toed the starting line at the 1924 Olympics as the fastest man in the world.

Normally, there was little doubt Liddell would be the first person to cross the finish line. But after learning that the qualifying heats for his best event, the one-hundred-meter dash, took place on a Sunday, the Scottish runner decided to withdraw from the race.

Liddell was more than just an elite sprinter; he was also a Christian. And because Liddell held Sunday as the Christian Sabbath, he believed honoring God with his sport meant abstaining from competition on Sundays, even if he missed an Olympic race.

Liddell instead entered the four-hundred-meter dash, which was held on a weekday. He ran the race the same way he ran the one-hundred-meter dash, sprinting from the gun through the tape. He finished first, setting a new world record at 47.6 seconds and immortalizing himself as the archetypal Christian athlete. Two lines spoken by his character in the 1981 docudrama Chariots of Fire perfectly capture his “sport as worship” ethos that continues to fuel much sport ministry today: “I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast. And when I run, I feel his pleasure.”

From Liddell to the Little Leagues

While those fictional words still get used by speakers in Christian sport circles today, the reality of his actual conviction to not compete on Sunday — even in the Olympics — feels almost, well, embarrassing. Miss an Olympic final because it falls on a Sunday? Today, many of us feel we can’t miss an eight-year-old pool-play soccer game at 9:00am on a Sunday! As historian Paul Putz says, “The question these days is not whether elite Christian athletes should play sports on a select few Sundays; it’s whether ordinary Christian families should skip church multiple weekends of the year so their children can chase travel-team glory.”

We may not have to decide whether or not we should race on a Sunday at the next Olympics, but today Liddell’s decision — while sounding to many as antiquated as the dial-up phone — remains just as relevant because of the evergreen question behind it: “How can I best honor God with my youth-sports journey, especially when it affects church participation?” That question involves many decisions Christian parents wrestle with, including whether or not they’ll be at a game or in church on a given Sunday.

In our book Away Game: A Christian Parent’s Guide to Navigating Youth Sports, we describe how youth sports offers a ripe context for helping our kids become Jesus-followers, and we offer many practical examples on what that might look like. This article focuses on the conflict between church attendance and sports participation. We’ll examine the biblical command to gather as believers and how that gets fulfilled in the local church, asking questions along the way about discipleship priorities. We’ll then consider four types of Christian responses to the question of whether to participate in youth sports on Sunday mornings.

‘Do Not Neglect to Meet’

We’ll make this clear up front: Church attendance as a way of life is nonnegotiable.

By “church attendance,” we mean regularly gathering with other Christians to hear the preached word and worship God through song, prayer, and the ordinances of communion and baptism. Today, far too many professing Christians treat church attendance as optional; they embrace it enough to be counted among those who “go to church” on a census but not in a way that could be confused with commitment. Hebrews 10:25 clearly warns Jesus’s followers not to neglect meeting together. It doesn’t say how often. It just admonishes us not to be a “neglecter” and to make sure we habitually get together with other believers.

Unfortunately, youth sports has become a prime excuse to forgo assembling together — whether on Sunday or any other day of the week. Participation in sports often becomes a functional prop for disobedience.

Parents, remember that we’re held accountable for training our kids in the way they should go so they won’t depart from it (Proverbs 22:6), not for training them up in their sport so they have maximal opportunity to make a varsity team. Some parents may strive to do both, but today it’s become far too easy to emphasize one while neglecting the other. If we want our kids to be walking with Jesus once they leave our house, training at home is not enough. Their spiritual formation leans heavily both on what they learn from us and what they experience among a community of believers. Discipleship is a partnership between parents and the church.

But It’s Just a Few Sundays, Right?

These priorities are not always at the forefront of parents’ minds when considering their children’s athletic activities. The ongoing debate about whether it’s okay for families to skip church for sporting events usually involves questions like these:

• “Is it okay for us to skip church for travel ball?”
• “How many times can we miss church for sports before there’s a problem?”
• “Should we sign up for this league knowing there’s a chance we might play on Sundays?”

These questions often disguise the same inclination behind the dating and sexual-purity question, “How far is too far?” There are bigger questions we need to wrestle with first if we want to be aligned with God’s heart:

• “What role does the church play in the discipleship of our family?”
• “What does a priority on church attendance communicate to our kids?”
• “What value does Scripture place on corporate worship?”
• “What role does our family play in the lives of other people at church?”
• “What are God’s expectations for our rhythms of work, rest, and play?”

Parents, we need the church, and the church needs us. Only when every part works properly will the whole body grow and thrive (Ephesians 4:15–16), and that growth includes our children’s spiritual development. Instead of wondering how many Sundays we can miss, the more important question concerns how we can be faithful, fruitful members of our local church body, whether that involvement finds us sitting in the pews in communal worship or in the stands and on the fields as the missional arm of the church. Across a calendar year, what intentional disciplines do we have in place to keep our family on a trajectory of spiritual growth?

“Church attendance as a way of life is nonnegotiable.”

At the same time, let’s make sure we’re not putting all our kids’ spiritual-growth eggs in the Sunday basket. Do you have a plan for spiritual feeding beyond Sunday morning? Some of us feel overwhelmed about missing a Sunday because we know there’s nothing else happening the rest of the week to develop our kids spiritually. We need to make sure that’s not the case.

Four Christian Sports Families

Over the last decade, in our interactions with Christian parents involved in youth sports, we’ve encountered many different convictions. Broadly speaking, we’ve found four approaches to addressing the tension. Each of these paths comes with its own dangers that need to be addressed.

1. ‘We want to be in church on Sundays, but youth sports won’t let us.’

This group feels powerless. They would genuinely prefer to be at a worship service on Sunday morning instead of sitting in the stands watching a game, but they feel they have no choice. They signed up for this team and the tournaments they play, and it just so happens that a bunch of them finish on Sundays. (Some tournaments won’t run before noon on Sunday, but today most do not give any thought to interrupting church attendance.)

If this describes you, know that even today it’s possible to participate in youth sports while sticking to a Liddell-like conviction to never miss Sunday-morning services. You may be even more countercultural than he was, but you don’t have to go against your conscience just because the Youth Sports Industrial Complex no longer has one.

As Pastor David Prince reminds us, adults get to make choices, and we can choose not to be controlled by youth sports.

Sports have never caused anybody to miss church ever — not one time in the history of the world. Sports can’t cause you to miss church. You choose to skip church. You’re not a victim to the sports team’s schedule any more than you’re a victim to anyone else’s schedule. You decide what you do and what you don’t do. I grew up in an area that had a lot of really nice lakes, and the lake never caused anybody to miss church, even though a lot of people skipped church to go to the lake.

Most coaches will understand (even if some won’t like it) if you tell them up front that you won’t be available for any games that happen before noon on Sunday. If a coach says your child can’t be on the team because of that conviction, there are plenty of other teams where it won’t be a problem. But most of the time, if you communicate clearly and with respect, coaches will work with you.

Your children won’t fall behind because they sat out some games. If Chick-fil-A can dominate the fast-food chicken-sandwich market while being closed on Sunday, our kids can skip Sunday-morning games without destroying their sports future. On the contrary, by never choosing church over games, we might be damaging their spiritual future while actually doing little to nothing for their athletic future.

2. ‘We’re Christians, but we don’t think showing up at a service is that important.’

At the other end of the spectrum, some parents don’t feel strongly about church attendance at all and willingly accept absence for almost any reason: out-of-town friends visiting, a rare beautiful day, or because they just don’t feel like it.

In some cases, these families never recovered from Covid lockdowns. Or maybe they’ve grown disenchanted with the organized church and, while they wouldn’t categorize themselves as “deconstructing” their faith, they’ve soured on attending structured services held in a building. For any number of reasons, church attendance has become optional for them. When it comes to youth sports, they follow the game schedule as it presents itself and don’t think much about what it might communicate to their children about the relative priority of church involvement.

But as we wrote above, not only is regular church attendance nonnegotiable for Christians trying to live obediently; it’s also one of the main faith-developers for our kids. We can’t disciple our kids alone. We can’t expect to put our kids in a winning position spiritually if we neglect the “teammates” provided by the church. That’s as impossible a task as trying to play a football game with just you and your kid on one side of the field while facing a full squad of eleven on the other. Scripture speaks of the church as a body with many members for a reason. A healthy congregation has strengths and specialties that will train and sharpen your children spiritually in cooperation and coordination with you.

In addition, participating in body-life isn’t just for our family’s spiritual development. Living in an individualistic, consumer-driven culture, we sometimes can get so focused on what’s best for our family that our responsibility to the family of God gets lost in the mix. But remember: Consistently showing up for a service isn’t only about us.

We show up to fulfill the role God has given us in other Christians’ lives, to make sure we’re stewarding the responsibility God gives us for each other. We show up to invest in a handful of lives whose stories intersect our own at a particular moment in time. We show up to know enough of others’ stories to have something to pray about for them and to have follow-up questions when we see each other.

We show up to play our role in the body of Christ. And you can’t do that if you’re never in the community.

3. ‘We don’t miss the Sunday-morning church service for anything.’

We’ve also met parents who believe a Christian should never miss church, regardless of the circumstances — including overwhelming fatigue, traveling for the holidays, or the early days of a global pandemic. When it comes to youth sports, these parents won’t even consider missing church for a game. They deal with the tension by drawing a hard line and never crossing it. There’s really no tension for them at all!

We applaud the commitment of these families not only to gather with their church weekly but also to communicate convictions that rise above current social assumptions. We certainly support the idea of making worship with the people of God an unfaltering norm instead of neglecting it altogether.

But parents also need to be careful not to subtly train their kids to miss the point of the gathering in the first place. It may sound strange, but for some, being in the pew can take on a quasi-idolatrous place in their life, separated from the spiritual life it points to. Consequently, their kids will have a hard time understanding what it means to be on mission in the context of sports — or anywhere else.

We’ve known dads who prioritized sitting in the front row every week as though that were the goal, while caring little about how their kids processed what they heard and doing little to foster spiritual growth or live out the gospel at home. When we treat church attendance as if it were a self-righteous box to check, we can harm the faith of our kids, teaching them to embrace the outward appearance of godliness while denying its power to transform the way we live (2 Timothy 3:5).

4. ‘We’re more concerned about being the church in the world instead of being in church.’

A fourth group (and one we need to give more thought to) values church attendance but also values the missional opportunities afforded by youth sports. They’ll miss church for several tournaments a year but don’t want it to become a habit. They always feel a hitch in their spirit sitting on the sidelines at 10:00am on Sunday, but they are also intentional about being the hands and feet of Jesus at those events.

This group invests energy in creating spiritual experiences with their kids while on the road. They might listen to the sermon from their home church. They might visit a church in the city where a tournament is happening — perhaps even trying a different denomination or style of worship to give their kids a broader experience. They see themselves as “sport missionaries,” even though they’re still learning what exactly that means in different seasons of their children’s sport journey.

But this kind of family has a problem if they say they want to be missional yet don’t put any intentionality behind it. It’s easy to devolve into passive attendance, to just sit and watch game after game, never straying from the usual superficialities that fill most grandstands. Simply identifying as a Christian doesn’t make a difference in other parents’ lives — behaving like one does.

Sport missionaries don’t just chat endlessly and randomly with people. They risk asking questions that get beyond the surface and have a genuine curiosity and concern for other people’s lives. They embody what it looks like to follow Jesus in their responses, both for those who don’t know him at all and for believers who just need to be spurred on “to love and good works” (Hebrews 10:24). They don’t just hope their kids serve their teammates well; they look for ways to serve other parents.

Where Do We Go from Here?

Before running the four-hundred-meter final, Liddell was handed a folded piece of paper. Opening it later, he read, “In the old book it says: ‘He that honors me I will honor.’ Wishing you the best of success always.” The masseuse who gave it to him was reminding him of 1 Samuel 2:30.

Liddell’s conscience led him to honor God by refusing to run his best event on a Sunday; God honored Liddell by allowing him to win a race he wasn’t usually as successful in. The real prize for Liddell was not victory but knowing, whether he won or lost, he did all for the glory of God.

“We gather not only because it benefits us (though it does). We gather because of who we are.”

Sometimes God honors us with positive sports results; sometimes he doesn’t. But he will always honor the family that puts him first. As families, we would do well to regularly and honestly evaluate whether our priority is the same as Liddell’s, regardless of how the specifics of our children’s sports journey play out.

But understand that, as Christians, putting God first necessarily includes prioritizing his church. We gather not only because it benefits us (though it does). We gather because of who we are.

In Christ, we are members with roles to play in his body (1 Corinthians 12:27). We are not spiritual freelancers raising athletic kids with Jesus on our own. We belong to a people. And our presence matters in their lives just as much as their presence matters in ours.

The youth-sports question, then, isn’t just, “How do I make sure my kids get enough church?” The question is, “Are we living as faithful members of Christ’s body in a way that produces growth in all of us?”

Living out this communal identity guards us from an overly individualistic approach. After all, the local church is not a weekend accessory to a self-directed Christian life. Remaining connected as the people of God is central to our identity. And youth sports must orbit around that reality — not the other way around.

For some families, that means drawing a firm line concerning Sunday mornings. For others, it means carefully limiting how often sports pulls them away. But for all of us, our rhythms across seasons of life — and seasons in sport — should clearly communicate to our children: We belong to Christ, and belonging to Christ means belonging to his people.

So, the end goal isn’t just attendance in a building. It’s faithfulness to God and his people. Long after tournaments and travel leagues end, one body will remain, and one kingdom will endure.

By God’s grace, may our families be found anchored in both.