The Chicago Bulls Study Bible

Even as I type these words, pundits from Manhattan to Malibu are pawing through the debris of the Fifties and the Sixties in search of a Magic Key to life in the Nineties. A recent piece in Wiredmagazine (David Batstone, "Cyberbeats," March 1998) claimed that "the literary maelstrom of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs paved the way for the digital revolution." Uh huh. Just clap an academic title on it ("From Howlto Hypertext," say) and you've got a paper for the next session of the MLA.

But these savants are missing the forest for the trees. Who are the most influential figures in American culture over the past 40 years? Not Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs; not Elvis, Dylan, and Janis Joplin (though now you're getting warm). No, the figures in this pantheon are a bunch of guys (and, of late, girls) who can hit the ball farther, run faster and more elusively, dunk more spectacularly, swing more acrobatically than any ordinary mortal.

We've all seen the occasional screed about sports as the new American religion, the documentaries about exploitation (those East German factories for Olympic gold medalists had nothing on the NCAA). But the influence of sports is so pervasive, no one seems to know where to begin to take the measure of its meaning. Here is a start.

(By the way, my title is borrowed from Joseph Stowell, president of Moody Bible Institute, who referred to that apocryphal but not entirely implausible niche Bible in a recent sermon.)

—JW

moved onto college campuses and into middle-class respectability. After 1869, when the YMCAbuilt its first gymnasium in New York City, it quickly realized the potential that recreation and sport had for attracting youth to hear the Christian message. This realization, coupled with recognition of the increasing role athletics was playing in colleges, led to the YMCA's becoming a quasi-religio-social fraternity intent on evangelizing the "big men on campus" and spreading the gospel through sport.

This sentiment reached an apex in the late 1880s when D. L. Moody convened his annual Northfield conferences during the summer near his home in Massachusetts. Moody attracted hundreds of college YMCAleaders annually to his meetings, which combined Bible teaching and discussion with rigorous activity and athletic competition. All-American Amos Alonzo Stagg of Yale, later the most successful college football coach of the first half of the twentieth century, was in charge of the athletic activities, and Moody and fellow evangelicals instructed the YMCAleaders in how most effectively to return to their campuses and use their athletic prowess as a means to attract converts to Jesus.

Out of these conferences, not incidentally, arose the Student Volunteer Movement and its "watchword" of "Reaching the world for Christ in this generation." Out of these conferences also arose Springfield College as a permanent successor to Moody's summer meetings, given to training YMCAleaders who would skillfully combine athleticism and evangelism.

When James Naismith, the eventual inventor of basketball, applied on May 27, 1889, to be a student at the YMCATraining School at Springfield, he answered this question among others: "What is the work of a YMCAPhysical Director?" He answered, "To win men for the Master through the gym."

So from the last half of the nineteenth century, not only did educators generally accept the notion that sport was inherently good, so that participation in and of itself resulted in moral growth and character development, but other educators, such as those affiliated with Springfield and the YMCA, were willing to grant sport an essential, if more extrinsic, role in preparation for lives of ministry and service. What a surprise, then, to realize that even if these commitments to sport and Christianity in educational settings were in place about a century ago, for a wide range of reasons too complicated to pursue here, everything seemed to fall apart around the World War I era.

Briefly stated: the key promoters of these ideas died or left the movement; the YMCA moved on in other directions; sport professionalized and lost its symbiotic relationship to Christianity; and the educational setting became much less hospitable to things overtly Christian. Efforts to combine sport and Christianity on English and American campuses had virtually disappeared by the 1920s, resulting quickly in a situation quite unlike that of the 1880s.

2. In 1998 athletics are a vital part of most Christian—that is, conservative Protestant—college campuses. Today most Christian colleges offer extensive intercollegiate programs for their student-athletes. Many also have academic departments providing major programs of study in wellness, recreation, and kinesiology. To get a handle on the scope and meaning of these programs, we need to ask what needs are these programs now meeting, and how do they fit into the overall campus life of students? Such a survey reveals that intercollegiate and academic programs on Christian campuses perform four major functions.

• Extracurricular involvement. We can locate the emergence of intercollegiate sports on Christian college campuses in the post- World War II era as a product of evangelical youth rallies, particularly those connected to the Youth for Christ (YFC) organization. In the 1940s and '50s, YFCdiscovered what it called "the sports appeal" in attracting an audience—especially among adolescent males—to hear an evangelistic message. On Memorial Day 1945, for example, 65,000 kids came to a YFC rally at Soldier Field in Chicago to hear a gospel message and listen to America's reigning indoor-mile champion, Gil Dodds, give a testimony to his faith in Jesus.

This was the era of the early expansion of big-time professional sports. Increasingly, high-school and college-age Christian young people followed via television and other media the careers of collegiate and professional athletic heroes who were also Christians. When those young people then went off to Christian college campuses, their expectations had been heightened by an expanding student culture. They looked forward to opportunities for involvement and participation in a range of extracurricular activities, including intercollegiate and intramural athletics.

By the late 1960s, such expectations led in part to the formation of the National Christian College Athletic Association (NCCAA), which now numbers about 100 Christian liberal arts and Bible colleges among its members. The NCCAAprovides a wide range of tournaments and postseason championship participation for the student athletes from its member institutions. These students arguably choose to attend NCCAAand other nonmember, but Christian, colleges in part because of these opportunities for involvement in intercollegiate athletics, which they have been led to believe is simply part of their "birthright" as college students.

• Evangelism and ministry. Not only do athletes come to Christian college campuses to play and compete, but many of them also come because they perceive athletic participation as a means to ministry—both during and possibly following their days of intercollegiate competition.

One upshot of YFC's discovering the appeal and use of sport celebrities to attract youthful audiences in the 1940s was the eventual formation of organizations such as Sports Ambassadors and later the Athletes in Action affiliate of Campus Crusade. Between 1945 and the late 1950s, Gil Dodds coached track and cross country at Wheaton College, and his teams bought into his personal philosophy that Christian athletes should use training and competitive settings as opportunities for sharing their faith with non-Christian athletes. In 1952, Youth for Christ received via Dick Hillis, YFC's representative in Taiwan, a request from President and Madame Chiang Kai-shek to send an American basketball team to play exhibitions against local athletes there. YFCnot only sent the "Venture for Victory" team, composed mainly of Taylor University and Wheaton College athletes, to play exhibitions, but also encouraged team members to share their faith during halftime and postgame evangelistic services at the game sites. From these experiences, Hillis formed Orient Crusades mission (now oc International).

The word spread quickly, not only back to Taylor and Wheaton, but throughout the growing network of Christian colleges playing intercollegiate sports, that sports could be an attractive means to spreading the gospel. Sports Ambassadors in 1952, Fellowship of Christian Athletes in 1954, and Athletes in Action (AIA) in 1966 all initiated versions of a similar vision for ministry and evangelism through sport.

For young fundamentalist and evangelical athletes who otherwise might have had second thoughts about the legitimacy of their physical and competitive performances as Christians, this was exactly the kind of encouragement they needed. Meanwhile, Christian colleges came to realize the functional value in their presenting opportunities for ministry through sport and athletics as an extra incentive when seeking to recruit skilled athletes for their student bodies. Thus sport was seen not only as offering opportunities for participation but also as fulfilling a higher sense of calling.

• Student recruitment. In the higher educational economy of the 1980s and '90s, the traditional-aged student pool gradually shrunk. Denominational loyalties and heritages weakened, and a more generalized evangelical and transdenominational ethos expanded. No longer did Evangelical Covenant youth, for example, automatically attend North Park College simply because it was their school. Suddenly, more and more Christian colleges were chasing fewer and fewer potential students and competing head-to-head with one another for them.

In addition, many of these Christian colleges were relatively new as undergraduate liberal arts institutions, with relatively weak institutional identities, particularly as academic strongholds seeking to attract the academically more qualified high-school graduates. They also felt the pressure from competition with more established secular and formerly church-affiliated colleges with strong intercollegiate athletic programs.

One result of having too many colleges and too few students is that during the late 1980s and '90s, a significant number of Christian colleges placed full-page, color advertisements in Christian magazines, such as Campus Life and Christianity Today, presenting their intercollegiate athletic programs as a primary reason why high-school students and their parents should consider these colleges. An interesting rhetoric emerges in these promotional ads, blending the symbols of sport with appeals to academic reputability and an overtly Christian atmosphere on campus. One ad says in part, "If you're in high school and want to play for a pro in college, call _____ College," and another states, "Compete at the onlymajor evangelical Christian university participating in 16 sports for men and women on the NCAADivision I level, including football at Division I-AA." The messages are clear: Come to our schools because of their sports programs.

• Institutional PR. Rather than seeing sport and academics locked in some sort of zero-sum game in which limited institutional resources probably cannot support both excellent academics and excellent sports, many people are quite willing to take a "halo effect" approach instead. In such instances, people assume that "real" colleges or "quality institutions" that excel in sport also must be good academically. This point was once made tacitly by a former president of Oklahoma University, who was quoted as saying he wanted a university the football team could be proud of. This is a variation on the preceding promotional need, in the sense that given the relatively modest academic reputation accorded some institutions, perhaps winning in sport can become an indirect means to enhancing what exists academically.

Because of the coaching certification, Briercrest hopes that a significant number of the graduates will move into coaching, but many also hope to find positions in more directly ministry-related vocational settings, including camps and sport evangelism. Two indirect, although not inconsequential, benefits from the successful program have been an increase in Briercrest's total student body and increased success of its intercollegiate teams because of better athletes coming for this program.

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