IN YOUR FAITH

The minister spoke of beer, and not to condemn the product.

As church leaders from across Southern California packed a Biola University auditorium recently, the keynote speaker told of a brewing company, thirsty for the widest possible audience, that spent millions to advertise on sports broadcasts after its study revealed 96 of 100 Americans played or watched sports or talked with someone who did.

“The beer companies figured out where the people are. The church hasn’t got a clue, in a lot of ways,” said David Gibson, a Minnesota pastor who uses sports celebrities to attract as many as 6,000 men to an annual evangelical breakfast in Minneapolis.

“We might bemoan that fact, but that’s where the church needs to be.”

As Christianity approaches its third millennium, evangelical leaders are increasingly spreading their message on the wings of sport.

Churches that once limited their athletic involvement to a parking lot backboard now sponsor skateboard festivals and Super Bowl parties, marrying modern technology and marketing to old-fashioned preaching in order to, in Gibson’s words, “engage a non-believing culture.”

Said Ray Caldwell, the Los Angeles director of Athletes in Action, an international sports ministry: “Every Sunday, you have millions of people playing or watching sports that would be terrified to set foot in a church.”

No longer need they set foot in church to hear the Christian message.

Evangelical organizations are stepping outside church to meet sports fans on their turf, from surfing ministries in San Clemente and roller hockey ministries in Fountain Valley to Final Four and World Cup parties that substitute video testimony from Christian athletes in place of the halftime show.

In interactive ways that transcend professional athletes publicly thanking God for their skills, and in diverse ways that eclipse the college basketball tours that introduced evangelical religion to athletics three decades ago, sports ministries now spread the word to audiences large enough to fill stadiums and small enough to fill living rooms.

Although some Christians abhor the NFL, blaming its popularity for declining attendance at Sunday services, the evangelical movement embraces the opportunity to reclaim the league’s biggest day in the name of Jesus.

The Super Bowl has attracted the four largest audiences in the history of American television, including a record 138.5 million for the 1996 game between the Dallas Cowboys and Pittsburgh Steelers.

“The interest of the people is already focused,” said Rodger Oswald of Church Sports International, a San Jose-based ministry. “We’re piggybacking off that interest.”

So, as this year’s Super Bowl approaches--Sunday in San Diego--evangelical Christians invite friends to parties that promise fun, food and potential salvation. Sports Outreach America, a coalition of Christian sports ministries, sells its Super Bowl party kit to churches and individuals for $39.95 via a toll-free phone number, fax line or World Wide Web site.

The kit features a 12-minute video that splices NFL action with Christian messages from Mike Holmgren, coach of the defending champion Green Bay Packers, and Green Bay players Don Beebe and Eugene Robinson.

For an additional charge, party planners can order packs of trading cards, with photographs of NFL players on the front and testimony about their belief in Jesus on the back.

The video, timed to fit neatly within the halftime period, concludes by challenging viewers to join in accepting Jesus as their savior. Steve Quatro, Sports Outreach Los Angeles’ executive director, estimated 300,000 people attended 5,500 such parties across the United States last year, and he said both numbers are expected to increase this year.

“There’s the presentation of faith and the selling of faith,” said Ben Hubbard, chairman of the comparative religion department at Cal State Fullerton. “I think there’s a line between the two, and I think you know it when you see it.

“Super Bowl for Christ, that’s where I see it.”

Evangelical leaders believe the urgency of their message--one cannot attain eternal life without accepting Jesus as savior--justifies its being spread in creative ways. They act upon the biblical command Matthew writes that Jesus gave after his resurrection: “Go and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19).

While that command binds all Christians, Hubbard said believers of most denominations tend to share their faith through social action and personal discussion rather than group proclamation. Catholics, for instance, prefer to teach their beliefs in schools, demonstrating their values to the larger community by assisting the poor, hungry and sick.

“There are many ways to make disciples of all nations,” he said. “This kind of hard-sell approach is not that common. This is really an evangelical Protestant thing.

“To what extent do you make the spreading of Christianity a marketing gimmick? It strikes me a video at halftime about Christian athletes is a gimmick.”

Marketing the Word

Dan Denton doesn’t flinch at the mention of the word “marketing.” Denton, pastor at South County Community Church in San Clemente, led a “Beach Outreach” in August, surrounding a Sunday service in the shadow of the city pier with a surfing contest, rock bands and an expo of surf products.

Denton’s church financed and publicized the event primarily through donations, spreading word through advertisements provided free by local surfing magazines and Christian radio stations.

According to Competitive Media Reporting, a New York-based marketing survey, the beer industry spent $716 million in 1996 to promote its product in mass media.

“If we’re competing with that industry, good,” Denton said. “Those guys are doing a lot of marketing.

“Somebody has to counter-program the culture. Somebody has to take a stand for right and wrong. The church should.”

If church leaders can take that stand in the presence of youth, they say, so much the better. Many evangelical Christians preach with special fervor to children and consider sports an ideal way to reach them. According to Gibson, the Minnesota pastor and a national leader in sports ministries, 80% of those accepting Jesus as their savior do so by age 18.

The Orange Seahorses, a soccer ministry based in La Mirada, teach at local camps and clinics, including summer camps at Fullerton College and Biola, a private Christian university in La Mirada.

Randy Freeman, who recently moved to Portland, Ore., after several years of counseling and playing with the Seahorses, responded to a camp appeal about Jesus.

“I was like a lot of 10-year-old kids. Sports was about the most important thing for me, especially soccer,” Freeman said on the Seahorses’ video. “I loved to play soccer. So I went to a soccer camp one year, and the counselor shared with me about Jesus Christ and that he had died for my sins. I understood that as a 10-year-old. I had done things wrong. I received Christ for the first time then.”

Quatro said church leaders called him most often last year with two questions. If churches didn’t want help in booking a famous Christian athlete as a speaker, he said, they wanted help organizing ministries in the non-traditional and cutting-edge sports popularized by MTV and ESPN.

Churches throughout Southern California embraced the so-called X-Games ministries with sports from surfing to mountain biking.

As many as 300 teenagers attended weekly “American Gladiator”-inspired stunt contests at Southwest Community Church in Palm Desert, and up to 900 flocked to weekly skateboard festivals at Sunrise Christian Fellowship in Simi Valley.

“We’ve gone from one ramp to a whole skate park,” said James Craft, youth pastor at Sunrise. “When kids hear of a place you can skate without getting hassled, they want to be there.”

Sports Outreach Los Angeles, founded in 1992, has worked with more than 500 Southern California churches in organizing youth and community events surrounding the Los Angeles Marathon, Rose Bowl and California 500.

With the notable exception of Catholics, Quatro said, churches of many Christian denominations have teamed with the evangelical group in sports outreach efforts, including some churches that do not share its fervor in turning every event into what Gibson calls a “witnessing opportunity.”

“If they want to connect with the people in their community, sports is a great way to do it,” Quatro said. “We try not to get involved in denominational distinctives. We just tell people God loves them.”

Evangelical leaders, however, do not lose sight of their primary purpose, to challenge youth to accept Jesus as savior. Upward Basketball, a Tennessee-based group that encourages prayer and testimony about Jesus as part of games and even of the postseason banquet, charges $35 per player to provide boys and girls with jerseys, gym bags and awards and provide coaches and pastors with training videos, publicity materials and computer software to organize leagues.

“Our goal is to take care of the administering so you can do the ministering,” the group’s introductory flier states.

At Abundant Life Assembly of God in Cupertino, where hundreds of teens attend Friday night parties that offer skateboarding, roller hockey, basketball, volleyball, trampolines, a video arcade and snack bar, pastor Vito Impastato said activity ceases for a “halftime” ministry presentation. Children can choose to leave, Impastato said, but those wishing to resume play after halftime must gather for the presentation.

“We want them to accept Christ and be changed,” Impastato wrote in a booklet designed to help other churches organize similar ministries. “If nothing else, we know that 950 young people heard the message of Jesus Christ at least once.”

Perhaps no event testified to the popularity of youth ministries in non-traditional sports better than the Exodus Tour, a daylong festival in October at San Diego’s Qualcomm Stadium.

Rescue Records, a Christian music company based in San Diego, solicited donations from corporations and local businesses to cover the costs--$60,000 alone to rent the stadium--of a jamboree of skateboard and mountain bike exhibitions and competitions, car shows and graffiti contests, and dancing to Christian bands playing rock, rap, ska, punk, hip-hop and rhythm and blues. Every so often, activity stopped, and someone spoke, sang or preached about Jesus.

“We weren’t just targeting the skaters, the bladers, the gang members or the BMX riders,” said Dennis Martinez of Rescue Records. “We did a study of, how can we reach the kids?

“We want to bring kids out of the woodwork and feed them the message.”

Organizers borrowed from the rave music scene in promoting the event, advertising largely through postcards and fliers distributed by kids on their streets and at their schools. Martinez said the festival attracted 16,000, all admitted free, prompting him to hope for an actual 1998 tour, starting in Las Vegas in April and spreading across the Southwest.

No matter how hungry they feel non-believers must be for salvation, evangelical leaders acknowledge they must fight the temptation to “feed them the message” by omitting the religious dimension when advertising these events.

“The focus, in my mind, is motivation,” Caldwell said. “Is my motivation to trick someone into hearing about Jesus, or is my motivation love and caring? There’s a big difference. One is deception. The other is honesty.”

But it is dishonest, no matter how deep your sincerity, to lure non-Christians to sporting events without disclosing the religious part of the program, Oswald said.

“You need to be honest about your evangelism,” he said. “You can’t say, ‘I’ll get them there and then I’ll slip in the gospel.’ That’s deceitful.”

Keeping Score

Although events in major league stadiums and video testimony or personal appearances by famous athletes attract attention, youth pastors report their greatest success when Christians invite friends to church activities.

The Seahorses, who field four men’s teams in local recreational soccer leagues, emphasize such one-on-one relationships in spreading their message around town and on missionary tours to Mexico and Japan. After games, players generally offer food or drink to their opponents, then strike up a conversation in the hope of developing personal relationships that allow for discussion about Jesus.

“Sometimes, if you beat a team in a pretty intense match, they don’t want to hear from you,” said Paul Gizzi, Seahorse director and a former professional goalkeeper.

The message--that push to steer men and women onto the only road Christians believe leads to eternal life--has not changed in 2,000 years.

Even the apostle Paul employed sporting metaphor. Technology advances, but the message Paul shared with Greeks in a letter written about 20 years after Jesus died is the same message Brazilian superstar Jorginho shares in a World Cup ’98 video, joined by several teammates from the squad that won an unprecedented fourth Cup at the Rose Bowl in 1994.

Jorginho: “More important than to raise that cup of four times world champion is to receive from the hands of God the greatest prize in the universe, the eternal life which only Jesus Christ can give you.”

Paul: “In a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize. . . . They do it to get a crown that will not last, but we do it to get a crown that will last forever” (1 Corinthians 9:24-25).

Today, many Christians keep score. In a practice debated within the evangelical community, pastors and event organizers trumpet the number of persons saved--those publicly accepting Jesus as savior. The Super Bowl party flier advertises 9,100 “decisions for Christ” among the hundreds of thousands that attended last year’s parties.

Of the 950 young people visiting the Friday night parties at the Cupertino church, Impastato reported 45 new believers.

Even Gibson, who said he saw 800 stand and accept Jesus during the evangelical breakfast with sports stars that attracted 6,000 men to Minneapolis’ Target Center, acknowledged leaders must temper their enthusiasm for such score-keeping. Unless local churches and ministries welcome and support them, those who proclaim their new belief in front of encouraging Christian audiences tend to abandon it when faced with skeptical friends or hostile families.

“I think there’s a tendency to look at noses and call it success,” he said. “Whether one person responds or several hundred people respond, we just want to be respectful. Success, ultimately, is where they’re going to be down the road.”

Denton’s surf ministry raised money for the Surfrider Foundation and the San Clemente High surf team as well as delivered food, clothing and toys to sister churches in Mexico.

But as a minister in a denomination that emphasizes faith above all, including good works, Denton appreciated most of all the chance to share his message with surfers and beachcombers alike. Although he said 54 people accepted Jesus as part of the “Beach Outreach”--all promptly baptized by walking a few steps into the Pacific Ocean--Denton insisted he wasn’t keeping score.

“We want to do God’s will, God’s way,” Denton said. “It’s not like we have to have 50 people in the water. It was all about having church on the beach.

“We all get to go to church. We all get to surf. A whole bunch of people met Jesus. That’s the ultimate God’s party for us. It’s really a party with God.”