August 22, 2005

"This Is a Football"

Football season is here, with high school games on Friday night, college games on Saturday, NFL games on Sunday, Monday night football, and even other games on some other nights. Football season is here! I will pause now to let some of you cheer and some of you groan about that fact.

I am told that the great football coach Vince Lombardi began every new season with a lecture to both the veterans and the rookies on the basics of football. He literally held up a football and said, "This is a football." He talked about its size and shape, how it can be kicked, carried, or passed. Then he took the team out onto the field and said, "This is a football field." He walked them around, describing the dimensions, the shape, the rules, and how the game is played. He did that every year -- even after the Green Bay Packers began NFL champs and then won the first two Super Bowls ever played. Can you imagine how "basic" and "fundamental" that must have sounded to his veteran players? And yet maybe that explains why Vince Lombardi was such a successful coach, because he began with the basics.

The new fall season in most of our churches is a time to start with the basics, too. I am not talking about "fundamentalism" in the sense of a philosophy that is too rigid and too basic to relate to modern life. But I am talking about making sure that our people know the basics of the faith, the reasons why we do what we do as United Methodists, and how this whole "church" thing works.

Pastors can no longer assume that their congregations know the basics of the faith. We live in a society that is increasingly interested in spiritual things, but also a society that is increasingly ignorant of the basics of the Christian faith. Pastors need to be teachers (that is one of the first definitions of the word "pastor" and of course it was the one name which Jesus most often accepted, "rabbi" or teacher). Pastors need to teach, to teach teachers, to teach classes and small groups, and to teach the basics of the faith first before getting into abstract theological arguments and concepts. I believe that our people are hungry for the basic fundamentals of the faith, because so many of our people don't know them.

If you were going to coach your church like Vince Lombardi, where would you start? Would you say, "This is a cross" or "This is a Bible" or "This is love" or "This is faith" or "This is Jesus"? Wherever you start, start with the basics. It worked for Vince Lombardi.

from Bishop Michael J. Coyner

Indiana Area of the United Methodist Church
"Making a Difference ... in Indiana
and around the world"

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