(Gainesville State players douse head coach Mark Williams in celebration.)
Many people get the mistaken idea that the only way to be missional is to plant a church in a crime ridden, poverty-stricken area. All churches should be missional, including suburban churches! I grew up in suburbia, so I know of the brokenness there--lack of community/relationships, lack of purpose/materialism, lack of peace/stress/anxiety/busyness. One of the best ways that a suburban church can do is use their resources to help bless those that are less fortunate financially, and by extending genuine love and kindness to these groups. This not only provides a powerful impact to those that they reach out to, but also results in their own transformation.
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Grapevine, Texas--one of
Money Magazine's top 100 "best places to live" in 2007--is almost 90% white, has a $90,000 median family income, and award-winning schools like Faith Christian School. Like most towns in Texas, Grapevine takes its high school football seriously. Faith's football team, for example, has seventy players, eleven coaches, the latest equipment, and hordes of involved parents. In November 2008, the Faith Lions were 7-2 going into the game with the Gainesville State Tornados.
Gainesville State, on the other hand, headed into the game 0-8, having scored only two touchdowns all year. Gainesville's fourteen players wore seven-year-old pads and dilapidated helmets and were escorted by twelve security guards who took off the players' handcuffs before the game. Gainesville State, a maximum security prison north of Dallas, gets its students by court order. Many Tornados have convictions for drugs, assaults, and robberies. Many of their families have disowned them. They play every game on the road.
before the game, Faith's head coach Kris Hogan had an idea. What if, just for one night, half of the Faith fans cheered for the kids on the opposing team? "Here is the message I want you to send," Hogan wrote in an email to Faith's faithful. "You are just as valuable as any other person on Planet Earth." The Faith fans agreed.
When the Gainesville Tornados took the field, they crashed through a banner made by Faith fans that read "Go Tornados!" The Gainesville players were surprised to find themselves running through a forty-foot spirit line made up of cheering fans. From their benches at the side of the field, the Gainesville team heard two hundred fans on the bleachers behind them, cheering for them by name, led by real cheerleaders (Hogan had recruited the JVs squad to cheer for the opposing team). "I thought maybe they were confused," said Alex, a Gainesville lineman. Another lineman, Gerald, said, "We can tell people are a little afraid of us when we come to the games . . . But these people, they were yellin' for us! By our names!" Gainseville's quarterback and middle linebacker Isaiah shook his head in disbelief. "I never thought I'd hear people cheering for us to hit their kids . . . . But they wanted us to!"
At the end of the game (Faith won, 33-14), the losing team practically danced off the field with their fingers pointing #1 in the air. They gave Gainesville's head coach Mark Williams what ESPN sportswriter Rick Reilly described as the first Gatorade bath in history for a 0-9 coach. When the teams gathered in the middle of the field to pray, Isaiah surprised everybody by asking to lead. ("We had no idea what the kid was going to say," remembers Coach Hogan.) This was Isaiah's prayer, "Lord, I don't know how this happened, so I don't know how to say thank You, but I never would've known there was so many people in the world that cared about us."
As guards escorted the Tornados back to their bus, each player received a bag filled with burgers, fries, candy, a Bible, and an encouraging letter from a Faith player. Before he stepped onto the bus, Williams turned and grabbed Hogan hard by the shoulders: "You'll never know what your people did for these kids tonight. You'll never, ever know." --from Almost Christian
What do you think of this story? What are some other ways that suburban churches and youth groups can be missional?
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