Rugby and the Church
Some reflections after a month of rugby and seminary studies
Allow me, if you will, to make a case for the relationship between the church and a rugby team. This past month, Southern Hemisphere rugby nations have been touring in Europe, and I have spent large portions of my weekends preparing my fantasy team and watching rugby, not to mention bringing my kids to their first-ever rugby practices and joining the weekly game of touch rugby our local club puts on! Needless to say, rugby has been ever-present on my mind as I wade through my coursework these past weeks.
I am a rugby fan. I was converted at 15 when my high school history teacher announced he was starting a men’s rugby team at Edmonton Christian, and all you had to do was sign up. Now, that is a team I can make. No tryouts mean no cuts! I quickly put my name on the list.
As you can well imagine, many other students did the same. Our ragtag rugby team comprised a few proper high school athletes, some athletic ne’er-do-wells, and others like me, who are more in their ne’er-do-well category than the athletic one. Truth be told, we were just interested in the hitting aspect and little interest in the athletic facet. For many of us angsty teens, mashing people into the mud of a rugby pitch seemed like an effective tool for therapy. Thankfully, rugby is a sport that allows many athletic abilities and body shapes to be played. I got my field time as a front-row player, a hooker – one of the big lads!
My rugby team was like a church. Most of us had very little knowledge of the sport and had never seen a rugby ball before! But a few of us had played and had an experienced and trained coach, and together, we figured out what it means to be a rugby team and even managed to secure a city championship!
The apostle Paul makes the famous case for diversity in the church, “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. 13 For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit.” (1 Cor 12:12ff) He goes on to explain the necessity of each member of the body; they are all needed for the church to function. A rugby team is no different. Just as a rugby team has many members… you get the idea.
The beauty of a rugby team is that you have the big lads up front, huge rectangular men who are big, heavy, strong as an ox, and good for basically one thing: pushing. At the other end of the spectrum, you have the fast lads in the back, skinny, agile, quick, and good for one thing: scoring. Between the two spectrums, you have players of all shapes and sizes rounding out the team so that the ball might be moved from the big lads to the fast lads, and at the end of eighty minutes, hopefully, you have more points on the scoreboard.
The church is very much the same. Up in the ‘front,’ you have the ‘big lads,’ the minister, the elders, and the deacons. These church members are the ones who are given the keys of the kingdom (Mt 16:19) and are tasked with preaching, administration of the sacraments, and church discipline. At the other end of the spectrum, you have the ‘fast lads.’ Parishioners vary from life-long to brand new and are tasked with the duty of loving God and loving their neighbour. (Mt 22:37-39). Between these two spectrums, the entire church works together so that lives might be transformed, communities blessed, the Kingdom of God revealed, and the Gospel proclaimed across the globe. Hopefully, at the end of the ‘eighty minutes,’ God will be glorified because the best thing about being the church is that there are no points; Christ has already won!
In high school, the afternoon before our first game, our rugby coach called us into the classroom. Before we met our opponents on the pitch, we needed to understand the game we were about to play! We had practiced running forward, passing backward, tackling, scoring, and kicking but really had no idea when to do what and why! In that classroom, our coach began his instruction by making the case that rugby is the most Christian sport. He offered a more straightforward explanation of what I had already said, and later that day, I experienced it in action.
As a new rugby player, I only knew how to do the assigned tasks: hit the ball carrier, get to the rucks, throw in at the lineouts, and hook the ball in the scrum (sorry for all the jargon). I had yet to learn what the scrum-half was supposed to do, the flankers, or the fly half (or was he the standoff? Or the first-five-eight? Why are there so many names for the same position!?). I walked onto that rugby pitch in North Edmonton, heart pounding with fear and excitement, not sure what I had signed up for, but what I experienced was nothing short of life-changing.
As one of the ne’er-do-wells, one of the guys in high school was on the edge of the school community, rugby was a life-changing experience – my coach said as much at my wedding! On the rugby pitch, I had specific roles and duties; I had to respect and trust my teammates because I was part of something bigger than myself. Rugby is a game where individual brilliance rarely shines. It usually only exists because of the hard work that happened a few phases of play before when some other player made some small, inconsequential move that opened up the field of play for someone else to look brilliant. I trust you can see the correlation to the working of the church.
Rugby is genuinely the most Christian sport of them all.
This was written for and originally posted at Kerux, the student blog at Calvin Theological Seminary