Faith – An All Age Sport….

The World cup this year has even more teams entered than ever before. Either FIFA is genuinely trying to encourage participation through valuing diversity and opportunity, or, FIFA is an unscrupulous and money driven autocracy kowtowing to whichever dictator or state or rogue politician has opened up their cheque book the most. To answer that you will have to do a serious study of where the last few world cups have been held. To save you looking that up I give you Russia, Qatar and The USA as the most recent hosts…with Saudi Arabia on the horizon.

The ethics of international football aside welcome to the four yearly season of excitement, hope, celebration and then almost certain disappointment. (this I narrow to just the men’s game as if you support the women’s team you are much more likely to see both victory and trophies..)

I have long thought that you need various things to win a world cup namely

1) Very Good players

2) Who perform on the day as individuals and as a team

3) Refereeing decisions to go your way

and

4) a bucket load of luck

And even then you might still lose! After all with 48 teams trying to win it – the odds, to misquote Effee Trinket, are definitely not in your favour. At the end of this world cup there will be 1 happy team and 47 unhappy teams. Of course it is unlikely that any of the minnows (Curacao or Cape Verde anyone?) will get to the final and win, but it is as they say a game of 90 minutes where the occasional shock takes place.

Still, it’s every young footballer’s dreams to both play in and win the world cup. As a young child I scored the winner in the world cup final many many times in my ‘jumpers for goal posts’ playing career.  (More accurately I’ve scored the winning try in the Rugby world cup final more times but this is football’s hour so I’m happy as an immigrant South African to go native just for a bit..)

When did I realise that I wasn’t going to be a top footballer? – quite early in life really. I wasn’t scouted aged 6, I was never invited to join an academy football team, I never broke into the England under 21 team. Even the great footballer Ian Wright who famously only found success ‘later in life’ started his football career at the ancient age of 22.

To make it as a footballer it takes youth, skill, determination and a willingness to develop, learn and grow

Now fortunately there are no age limits on being Christian – we can never be too young or indeed too old to ‘make it’ – but we are called in a parallel way to be just as dedicated, just as willing to learn and grow as the elite footballers of our day. Tomorrow in Church we make the second in our series exploring what Kind of Church God is calling us to be at St Christopher’s and we will be exploring just what it means to be an all age church. How do we exist together as people of all ages? What is it that the young need to learn from the old, what indeed do the old need to learn from the young, and how do we create an atmosphere that welcomes not just people of all ages, but people at very different stages of their life of faith. After all you can be a 12 year old who has been coming to church all their life, and you can be a 92 year old for whom it is your first year.

I do not have all the answers, but I do have the right questions and I hope together we can explore and reflect on what God says about ages in the bible and how we cannot just coexist’ but help one another to flourish

The service just to remind you is at 5.30pm on Sunday and if you have a favourite football top and or scarf please do come along and wear it with pride – club or country or anything else!

A reminder too of the BS4 Arts trail event that we are hosting this weekend all day Saturday and most of Sunday which we’d love to see you at – as an event that connects outreach and church themes of Creativity, Hospitality and Community it is in more ways than one right up our street!

Peace and blessings

Andy