READING REPORT

7 Sports chaplaincy in a post-traditional religious context

Ed Uszynski

Introduction

Individuals seeking to minister in the role of sports team chaplain in modern- day North America must navigate the realities of contemporary spirituality and the differing forms religious life takes among its constituents. They find them- selves wading through the maturation of transformative upheavals still radiating from the 1960s, producing a reality that reflects the tumultuous cultural turns that took place during that period of US history. The modern chaplain negoti- ates not only the constantly unfolding social history surrounding the concept of religion itself but also its implications for individual spiritual seekers in this moment. Where members of a society once understood their collective and largely shared religious sensibilities as a sacred canopy shrouding their entire lives, they now think of their own individualized spirituality, considering reli- gion not as a worldview binding a people, but rather a consumerist slice of their individual existence, the notion of the sacred itself a matter of human construc- tion. This chapter considers the move toward this individualized notion of spir- ituality and its implications for those seeking to minister within its parameters.

The challenge of the ‘religious turn’

While ascribing a cultural shift to any one set of circumstances in history always oversimplifies, much of what constitutes modern North American spirituality should be understood against the backdrop of a particularly tumultuous decade in the last century. In the mid-1960s Harvey Cox (1966) popularized the now axiomatic contention that a constantly decreasing number of people – with emphasis on those living in the US – would derive their personal and cosmic values and explanations from traditional forms of religion. His words popular- ized and effectively brought to a tipping point an intellectual movement that had been gaining momentum since the Enlightenment swept through Europe two centuries before: God is dead (or is quickly dying) along with the hierar- chies and powers that perpetuate his existence – with science killing them all.

While the historical narrative of almost any recorded epoch of human his- tory is decorated with the sacred in both practical and institutional forms, the

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belief that theological superstitions, symbolic liturgical rituals and sacred prac- tices were products of an antiquated past that would be outgrown in the mod- ern era took hold in unprecedented ways. Forces of modernization loosened the dominance of clerical understandings of what constituted the sacred and intensified – at least theoretically – the disenchantment of the world, while the materialistic notion that humanity sat in the centre of the universe empowered people with their own sense of subjective agency.

Of course, the assertion that the rise of scientific progress would cause reli- gion itself to fade ever-more from the public square and diminish people’s appetite for religious fare was only half right. Indeed, while formal religious institutions waned, the people of North America were as religious as ever (iron- ically, perhaps more so) but in decidedly different ways than before. Though denominational life would statistically decrease, personal pursuit of spirituality in all its various and available guises would actually accelerate in the closing decades of the twentieth century. Religious life in the US – its customary hierarchical approaches significantly disrupted and thrust into a major period of redefinition – would increasingly move away from being characterized by a communal experience founded on communicated doctrine in the pursuit of a God, toward an individual experience based on identity-seeking and self- realization in the pursuit of autonomy. One sociologist in particular prognos- ticated the future effects of this shift and saw not only the demands it would make on those seeking to cultivate a spiritual life, but also what implications would arise for those seeking to minister to them.

Thomas Luckmann and the prediction of a self-centred spirituality

Though hardly alone in writing about the spread of secularization and the concurrent waning of traditional, hierarchical modes of religious life in the last decades of the twentieth century, sociologist Thomas Luckmann wrote with a particularly prescient understanding of certain predictable consequences result- ing from this shift as it was taking place.

In 1967 Luckmann wrote The Invisible Religion, a book incisively describing both the immediate and anticipated realities in view of the religious life being absorbed into the social landscape of his time. Luckmann predicted that people, while being free from the weight of religious institutions and the demands of dutiful religion, would now face the burden of constructing their own forms of religiosity to fill the gap left by organized religion’s retreat – they would be free essentially to create their own personalized canon of religiosity. Indi- viduals would need to determine what counted as sacred, what gave mean- ing and purpose to life, what list of values a life could be moulded around. These processes of personal construction also entailed the shaping and forma- tion of individual consciousness and personality, work influenced historically by the church or other predominant public institutions but now left almost entirely to the private sphere. According to Luckmann (1967: 97), the move

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away from hierarchical institutions like the local church ‘left wide areas in the life of the individual unstructured and the overarching biographical context of significance undetermined’ – creating a shapeless mass of choices waiting to be sculpted by each individual subjective artist.

Luckmann considered this the chief defining and most revolutionary char- acteristic of modern society – that personal identity formation would essen- tially become a private phenomenon, that the unstructured and undetermined aspects of one’s person would be arranged almost entirely through subjective choice. People are left – for better or worse – to figure out who they are, why they are and where they fit into the cosmic order essentially on their own. Beyond offering doctrinaire teaching on matters of life and death, traditional religious institutions had historically taken the primary role in prompting indi- viduals to view themselves through comprehensive identity prisms – with a significant percentage of people deriving identity from the community of the Church and the teaching of the Bible – yet now their loss of effective control over the population, left such work to an ever increasing percentage of individ- uals themselves. For Luckmann, individual identity, meaning and significance became substantially privatized, and the primary ‘spiritual’ pursuit of moder- nity became subjective or biographical identity formation and the quest for self-realization. Thus, ministers of the gospel (whether among athletes or not) would from then on operate primarily in the waters of ‘moralistic therapeutic deism’, a pervasive philosophy featuring a hands-off god who leaves humans to discern for themselves not only how to be good according to their own shifting standards but how to be constantly, maximally happy and self-satisfied (Smith and Denton, 2005).

Cut loose from the strictures of overbearing outside influences on their individual consciousness, North Americans, Luckmann (1967: 117) asserted, would now pursue ‘a radically subjective form of “religiosity” characterized by a weakly coherent and nonobligatory sacred cosmos and by a low degree of “transcendence” in comparison to traditional modes of religion’. With no single obligatory sacred system or hierarchy holding sway over public consciousness, in its place the autonomous consumer would select certain religious themes from the assortment available and build them into a somewhat precarious pri- vate system of ultimate significance, producing a constantly changing variety of ultimate meanings, which would leave in its wake a fragile and constantly changing sense of personal identity.

The quest for identity and self-understanding in our current cultural moment

Almost fifty years later, we live and experience the maturation of Luckmann’s insights. In describing the cultural moment just after the turn of the twenty- first century, sociologist Sean McCloud (2007: 300) contends that it is a period of extreme modernity, characterized by ‘fewer set identities, fixed roles, and uncontested grand explanatory schemes’. The product of late-modern technical

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and structural developments is a ‘globalized society in which risk permeates individual consciousness, constantly upsets feelings of ontological security, and requires the concerted development of trust’ (ibid.). Generally speaking, when it comes to matters of personhood, people are living with both feet firmly in the air in a constant quest to find themselves – and they are doing it largely on their own. Thus, in a world where they are ‘disembedded from fixed identi- ties, ascribed communities, and traditional authorities,’ humans are increasingly ‘moved to develop and maintain new identities, achieved communities, and authoritative ontologies’ (ibid.).

In this new world, Giddens (1991: 186) argues, humans are forced into con- tinually choosing and refining personal ‘lifestyles’, engaging in constant ‘reflex- ive projects of the self ’, since in late-modernity ‘self identity has to be created and more or less continually reordered against a backdrop of shifting experi- ences of day-to-day life and the fragmenting tendencies of modern institutions’. Given this backdrop, people must invest energy toward constructing an identity to live within, work exceptionally hard at forging genuine relationships, and constantly consider why any of it matters – if it does at all.

In describing late-modernity’s effects on the notion of personal spiritual- ity, Robert Wuthnow (2009) argues that a traditional spirituality of inhabiting sacred places has given way to a new spirituality of seeking. He suggests that people have been losing faith in a metaphysics that can make them feel at home in the universe and are consequently left to negotiate among competing glimpses of the sacred, seeking partial knowledge and practical wisdom along the way. Within this environment, a ‘person does not have an ascribed identity or attain an achieved identity but creates a transitory identity by negotiating among a wide range of materials’ (p.9–10). Wuthnow argues then that spiritu- ality itself becomes almost entirely a function of personal identity – the quest for a self – relocating the traditionally religious and moving it from within an institution to almost entirely within the person, creating a generation of people primed for incessant therapeutic intervention.

As understandings of what constitutes the sacred continue to morph and expand, a person’s negotiated personal spirituality becomes much more a quest for self-understanding combined with subjective declarations of sacred lived moments as people attempt to grasp the sources of sacredness in their own lives. In short, they create and re-create their own subjective selves and cor- respondingly create and seek their own sense of the experientially labelled ‘sacred’. In such an environment, the vestiges of traditional religion combined with the constantly evolving texts of popular culture become cultural resources for constructing both meaning and identity; for comprising the spiritual and declaring the sacred. As Wade Clark Roof (1999: 75) suggests, within this late- modern ‘spiritual marketplace’, ultimately ‘responsibility falls more upon the individual – like that of a bricoleur – to cobble together a religious world from available images, symbols, moral codes, and doctrines, thereby exercising con- siderable agency in defining and sharing what is considered to be religiously meaningful’.

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North American sports chaplaincy in the wake of self-centred religion

As described above, all who seek to minister within contemporary culture must contend with and understand this relatively new social reality. Athletes con- stitute a particular sub-culture within North American society that not only reflects the maturation of the religious mentality described here but also adds several complicating layers of its own. Christian chaplains, then, are tasked with stepping fully into this cultural moment prepared to act as a guide, a conductor equipped not only to understand the default spiritual mentality of the typical athlete but also prepared to escort them toward an understanding of how the gospel intersects with their personal journey to shape their lives and identities. Three significant obligations arise for chaplains out of this cultural shift which I address below through a series of propositions.

Proposition 1: Athletes are on a quest for self-realization and tend to establish their personal identity through sports performance. Therefore, chaplains need to help athletes replace their quest for self-realization and personal identity acquisition for an identity fully realized in Christ.

Athletes constantly live within a culture where performance dictates individual worth and where personal identity and status is established (and maintained) through athletic accomplishment. Most athletes who participate in college programmes have operated against this backdrop since before their teen years and their sense of self is thus inveterately tied to personal performance and others’ opinions about that performance. Given the cultural moment antici- pated by Luckmann (1967), where seekers would be left to their own devices to establish a sense of self quite apart from ecclesiastical influence, athletes at least have the advantage of a definitive identity marker with a built-in audi- ence that gladly reflects back to them who they are based on performance. Their labelling as an ‘athlete’ carries many favourable connotations, and they are often positioned as part of the ‘in crowd’ on campus, in public and in the media.

However, the culture within which these athletes live also demands that they produce in order to receive the promise of love and affection – affection for athletes is intricately interwoven with their success in action. Their ‘self-gauge’ constantly moves and changes with each contest, with each adjustment of the standard of success, each failure to live up to expectations. They learn intuitively that the relentless pursuit of performance and others’ opinions to measure per- sonal worth is defective at its core – they are always one bad game, one major slump, one injury away from having their sense of identity and affirmation removed. While this identity may be fed heartily from their label as an athlete, it is tightly interwoven into their accomplishments, a performance subject to many other circumstances and challenges, an identity constantly layered with

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the insecurity that comes with human frailty and the inability to perform not only to one’s own standards but also everyone else’s.

The Christian chaplain must help an athlete understand what it means to trade-in his quest to find identity in sport performance, to understand that God accepts him because he is his beloved child through Jesus’ death on the cross not his talent level or game performance. The chaplain must help an athlete understand that if God accepts them just as they are and if He is their primary audience, they are free to be themselves with others without chasing approval or considering themselves a failure when their performance takes a turn for the worse. When an athlete sees him or herself through the eyes of Jesus, he or she develops the foundation for a secure identity. Over time, being truly loved, forgiven and accepted by God supplies confidence to play and live in complete freedom (see Lipe, 2013; Null, 2004).

Sports ministry organizations that produce chaplains must foreground the issue of identity as a priority. For example, Athletes in Action use their one- week camp experience, the Ultimate Training Camp, as an opportunity to redress the confusion regarding identity. In one of the main sessions, athletes are taught to imagine the God who created them and gave them athletic opportu- nity as their primary audience. As every human will one day give an account of their life to this same God, what He says is true about the individual in Christ becomes paramount – all other opinions fade into insignificance.

Given that scripture is replete with the language of an identity transforma- tion directed at the one made new in Christ, athletes are encouraged first to surrender their hearts to Christ, then to believe and clothe themselves (Rom. 13:14; Col. 3:10) with the identity markers that become immediately true of them as a result: ‘I am redeemed and forgiven’ (Col. 1:13–14); ‘I am justified by Christ and have peace with God’ (Rom. 5:1); ‘I am adopted by God’ (Eph. 1:5); ‘I am free from condemnation’ (Rom. 8:1–2); ‘I am God’s temple’ (1 Cor. 3:16–17); ‘I cannot be separated from God’s love toward me’ (Rom. 8:35–9). The platform of sport becomes an opportunity to worship God instead of self, to say ‘Thank you God for giving me a new identity in you and for an oppor- tunity to glorify you through physical movement’ instead of ‘Please love me for my performance everyone so I can maintain a sense of who I am.’

Luckmann (1967: 106) predicted that individual religiosity – conceived as the subjective formulation of personal identity – would increasingly rely upon the more transient support of other autonomous individuals, suggesting that ‘friends, neighbours, members of cliques formed at work and around hob- bies may come to serve as “significant others” who share in the construction and stabilization of “private” universes of “ultimate” significance’. Indeed, today an athlete may derive a great deal of her identity from what her teammates, coaches and parents say. The team unit, in particular, reflects the sectarian char- acteristics of a practical congregation and together they aid one another in shaping their individual and collective sacred cosmos.

The role of the chaplain, then, is to allow the athlete to break free from the grip of others’ opinions and definitions – including those of teammates and

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coaches – and to help her to recalibrate, to aid her in the renewing of her mind according to what God in the person of Christ says is true about her. The chap- lain does this in relationship, by helping the athlete first to see the emptiness of a life founded on the opinions of others before then teaching the fundamental assertions of the Bible.

Proposition 2: Because athletes have a limited understanding of what constitutes ‘transcendence’, they must be helped to expand their theological imagination to include a spiritual world that suffuses this material creation.

Luckmann (1967) foresaw a religiosity arising within American culture charac- terized by a weakly coherent and non-obligatory sacred cosmos and by a low degree of transcendence. He anticipated that tepid notions of transcendence would arise in the absence of a metaphysical referent, and his conclusions pre- figured equal and opposite errors arising from the intensification of religion– culture wars.

One error perpetuates a body–spirit dualism that forces humans to choose between embracing and exploring their own physicality while living fully in this world or denying their embodiment as somehow inherently evil while constantly seeking transport to another world altogether. The other error – and the one most prevalent since the 1960s – promotes a comprehensive material- ism that extinguishes any hope of being encountered from that other world at all. As we shall see, Christian sports chaplains must remedy these extremes, working with a robust notion of transcendence and what it entails for the human sojourning in this visible world.

An individual, whose entire existence as an athlete demands an awareness of their own and others’ embodiment, must become aware of how their definition of transcendence works in their own psyche. Indeed, an athlete’s default use of the word ‘transcendence’ typically arises within the field of play – a ‘trans- cendent performance’, a player whose skill ‘transcends the competition’, the need to demonstrate toughness and an ability to ‘transcend circumstances’ or ‘transcend the moment’. Their context provides physical manifestations of the material definition of the word: that is, ‘going beyond ordinary limits, surpass- ing, exceeding’ – but this understanding still becomes entirely limited by what is humanly perceivable and typically arises out of a ‘this world and nothing else’ perspective.

Michael Grimshaw (2000: 92) argues that athletes are privileged to experi- ence ‘postmodern salvific experiences’ within competition – a ‘total now-ness of being’ in the world without the other-worldly connotation of a traditional understanding of mysticism. These experiences are postmodern because they reflect the ‘no metaphysical referent’ extreme: they occur wholly within this world, without talk of infusion of anything from outside it, without mus- ing over the physical somehow being charged by the spiritual. Rather, it is ‘the recognition of authentic, holistic embodiment’. Grimshaw refers to ‘the

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newness and fullness of being with, where life and world wondrously conjoin’ and argues that the spiritual life is essentially the awakening and manifestation of the soul. Thus, both sport participation and sport fandom ‘enable us to real- ize that we can recognize, create and participate in the ‘‘unguarded moment’’ (ibid.) where we gain a new reading of existence, that moment when ‘the sense of rapturous enjoyment, at-one-ment, and the epiphany of “spiritual aesthet- ics” occurs’. At their best, sports offer both participants and spectators ‘expe- riences of the ineffable outside the constraints and parameters of religious institutions’ (ibid. 96).

Yet, by Grimshaw’s own reckoning, defining these undeniable experiences as ‘transcendent’ is to rely on a postmodern understanding of the word itself and implicitly assumes that ‘spiritual’ must be defined within a materialistic under- standing of the universe. That is, if we deny the spiritual world or the possibility that a non-material someone or something may exist not merely outside but also throughout the space–time continuum, then we have no other option but to redefine the notion of transcendent by limiting it to the highest experience available to our human senses within the world as we know it. Thus, while athletes are predisposed to understand transcendent as something outside the ordinary experience of everyday humans, an experience potentially available to them and their fellow athletes at the height of their athletic performance, they nevertheless set parameters around the word that fall short of what the gospel promises.

An orthodox Christian position acknowledges the interpenetration of the spirit world with the physical world. While each can be separately abstracted for discussion, God as the source of both an invisible spiritual world and visible material creation affirms the physicality of his created beings (and the subse- quent joy they may experience as a result of that embodiment), while desiring their perception of a world breaking into their own from outside, a spiritual world that literally interpenetrates every pore of material existence for those who acquire eyes to see.

The reigning modern philosophy does not seek to be infused by anything from outside this world but rather to find an autonomous yet satisfying personal ground-zero within it. In a disenchanted world we might find great solace in anything that gives us whiffs of something ‘other’ along the way – even if that transcendent other remains ironically and entirely this worldly – and sport competition may provide that for elite athletes who reach their athletic and physical summit. The possibility that a sports team or individual player may embody this postmodern sense of transcendence through performance, ena- bling him, as Grimshaw (2000: 97) suggests, to ‘burst totally and completely, yet fleetingly, into the now’, is certainly a goal worth pursuing. There is nothing wrong with experiencing the fullness of a total release performance and the natural high that comes with it; however, the Christian chaplain should help an athlete discern the difference between worshipping the experience itself versus worshipping the giver of the experience. Properly understood, the postmodern notion of transcendence can actually function sacramentally in the life of the

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athlete, making visible the invisible mysteries of God while pointing to Him as the giver and sustainer of such experiences.

This involves, among other things, stretching the theological imagination of the athlete by introducing and developing categories of thought that include mental plausibility structures geared toward exploring Jesus as God come in the flesh, that introduce the wonders of a future age as depicted in the book of Revelation, that renew the mind by meditating on the truths of the Triune God’s gospel as related in the Bible. It is perhaps indicative of our cultural moment that far too many preachers and ministers shy away from teaching the Bible with an aim toward engaging the audience’s imagination. In many cases their own imaginations have been dulled by too much concern with bursting totally and completely, yet fleetingly, into the now. Christian ministers must do the work of confronting their athletes with glimpses of another world, however dimly lit it may be.

Proposition 3: Athletes are positioned to be more pluralistic in their beliefs than the average person. An effective sports chaplain will help athletes understand how the Gospel compares to and intersects with other belief systems and social imaginaries.

Humans, even those still characterized by fundamentalist leanings, seem to carry a measure of impulsive pluralism within them – despite doctrinal demands to the contrary – and are constantly negotiating competing belief systems. That is, while our desire to answer questions of ultimate concern may be finally answered within one system, that same system, even if predominant in the life of the believer, may also find competition from another belief network that touches the immediate concerns of everyday life.

Consequently, a person may not practically settle on just one system to cap- ture their religious imagination. Even those who profess ultimate allegiance to one form or another may indeed find under close surveillance that their lived experience is divided out among several competing belief systems, a bricolage that produces religion à la carte. Wade Clark Roof (1999) calls the current social environment a ‘spiritual marketplace’ where North Americans actively seek out and incorporate various worldview elements to fit their individual needs and aspirations. Sean McCloud (2007: 298) notes ‘the increased visibil- ity of combinative religious practices among Americans’, where ‘combinative means the improvisory picking, mixing, and combining of beliefs and practices from a variety of religious traditions’, a practice that has become ‘a more visible and accepted part of public discourse in the contemporary era’.

While this is true of the North American population in general, athletes may be more prone to pluralism than the average non-athlete simply because of their exposure to and interaction with teammates, opposing teams’ players and different coaches over the course of a playing career. They learn to work with others whose thinking and beliefs about core issues of life may be entirely contrary to their own. The team dynamic practically forces different views of

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the world into the consciousness of each player, and long times spent together practising, travelling, eating and playing open opportunities for these differing beliefs to be shared.

Within this cacophony of worldviews, the God revealed in the Bible posi- tions himself with all or nothing propositions. The narrative thread coursing throughout the biblical text pits Jehovah against all other gods, and, while peo- ple mingled their beliefs just as fluently then as now, such practice gets swiftly condemned in just one commandment: ‘I am the Lord thy God . . . . You shall have no other gods before me’ (Exod. 20: 1–2; Deut. 5: 6–7). Indeed, the story of both testaments could be summarized in people’s unwillingness to resist their urge toward idolatry of various sorts, constantly allowing other pursuits to take first place in their own heart.

An effective chaplain will help players negotiate the many belief systems and their associated idols that compete for primary allegiance in the athlete’s heart and mind. To this end, the chaplain must be competent in understanding the core beliefs of different worldviews and able to give a response for how the claims of Christianity interact with the various dimensions of relevant social imaginaries. John B. Thompson (1984: 6) defines the ‘social imaginary’ as ‘the creative and symbolic dimension of the social world, the dimension through which human beings create their ways of living together and their ways of representing their collective life’. As a social imaginary apologist, the chaplain is constantly asking and answering the question ‘How do various approaches to organizing life compare and relate to one another, and how does the gospel interact with each of these beliefs?’ Hence, she is competent at taking the raw material of popular culture, the language of communication media and the symbolism of college life and deconstructing it, exploring its inherent mean- ings, symbolic reach and psychological power to shape the individual life.

The chaplain also acts as a guide through the practical realities of choosing one way of thinking and living over another, while at the same time revealing the idols of the heart that so easily pollute the true worship of God. Rarely in popular media are social imaginaries (other than perhaps the Christian world- view) held accountable for their actual effects in the lives of real human beings. A good chaplain does this not in a condemnatory manner, but with a sobri- ety that takes seriously the adage that ideas have consequences and choices to organize one’s life around a particular philosophy (even if done unconsciously) will manifest themselves on the surface of one’s life eventually.

Besides being exposed to different beliefs, athletes standing out from the rest of the team by believing anything too stringently or becoming a lone voice championing any particular belief system (whether traditionally secular or religious) get frowned upon by gatekeepers of most teams. It is an unspoken though generally understood maxim: ‘Don’t let your beliefs – in anything – get in the way of what we are trying to accomplish as a team.’ Therefore, regard- less of upbringing or predisposition about their own beliefs, most athletes have been conditioned to operate as pluralists by praxis if not conviction. They are encouraged to live as practical relativists, living fluidly among a mixed bag of

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worldviews, subtly encouraged to steer away from dogmatism of any kind – outside of total commitment to the sport they play. Indeed, for the athlete there is a self-preserving safety in worldview pluralism.

A Christian chaplain, however, brings a ‘narrow gate’ (Matt. 7:13–14) approach to her message, helping an athlete understand the uniqueness of the gospel in relationship to all other belief systems alongside the call to single- minded discipleship inherent in following Christ. The role cannot be diluted to simply being an interesting and knowledgeable worldview sage, but must include the prophetic call to identify and turn away from all other idols, a lifelong work that begins with a resolved mind to genuinely follow Christ, repenting of a pluralism that denies God his proper place on the throne of life.

Conclusion

This chapter has attempted to situate sports chaplaincy in the current cul- tural moment, taking into consideration how modern religiosity plays itself out among people, before considering the specific manifestations of those inclina- tions among athletes. As sociologists like Thomas Luckmann argued in the last half of the twentieth century, the decade of the 1960s saw a substantial decrease in people’s reliance on institutional religion to establish personal identity, to portray and demarcate the idea of transcendence and to offset the relativization of truth claims. Perhaps more than at any time in recent history, people would be left to their own inclinations to cultivate their religious appetites and to search for answers relative to identity, transcendence and truth. Indeed, we now live in the society Luckmann and others envisioned almost half a century ago.

Sports parallel institutional religions quite nicely in what they provide, including a strong sense of significance and identity developed among a group of teammates who function practically as a sectarian congregation, moments within competition that ‘transcend’ daily life and opportunities to be exposed to various worldviews. But they do nothing to fully satisfy or counter the emptiness of an identity forged in performance; they do not offer a glimpse of something beyond their material existence; they add to but cannot help a person sort through the claims of various social imaginaries and their merits. To have someone – in this case, a chaplain – who can point beyond these socially constructed boundaries may play a critical role in the spiritual formation of an athlete seeking something outside the norm.

The role of sports chaplain includes coming alongside the athlete to help him or her wade through the realities of their quest for stable identity, to help him entertain the possibility of a dimension beyond the visible and to help her adjudicate truth claims. The effective chaplain helps a seeker move away from endless seeking toward a place of habitation, recapturing a sense of dwelling in the midst of a culture that has almost completely conceded that this possibility remains entirely beyond our grasp.

The Christian chaplain must understand the incredibly powerful (though ultimately superficial) religiosity derived by athletes from their participation

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in sport, while unapologetically inviting the athlete to trade in his identity garnered from sport for an identity conferred by Christ. They can cultivate and open the eyes of the athlete to see another reality, helping them con- sider a space–time continuum that extends beyond what can be seen in this world. They can hold up the supremacy of the gospel in the relativistic race toward nihilism, helping them remove all other gods competing with Christ for dominion in their life. That is the challenge of sports chaplaincy (and really any kind of ministry) in our age: to help athletes see that while sports do indeed provide Grimshaw’s ‘postmodern salvific moments’ which are undeniably pow- erful and identity shaping and at times even worldview altering, they can never satisfy the soul like ‘Christ in you, the hope of glory’ (Col. 1:27).

References

Cox, H. (1966). The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective, New York: MacMillan.

Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Grimshaw, M. (2000). ‘I Can’t Believe my Eyes: The Religious Aesthetics of Sport as Post- modern Salvific Moments’, Implicit Religion, 3/2: 87–99.

Lipe, R.D. (2013). Free to Compete: Reflections on Sport from a Christian Perspective, Kearney, NE: Cross Training Publishing.

Luckmann, T. (1967). The Invisible Religion: The Problem of Religion in Modern Society [Problem der Religion in der modernen Gesellschaft], New York: Macmillan.

McCloud, S. (2007). ‘Liminal Subjectivities and Religious Change: Circumscribing Gid- dens for the Study of Contemporary American Religion’, Journal of Contemporary Religion, 22/3: 295–309.

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Teenagers, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thompson, J.B. (1984). Studies in the Theory of Ideology, Berkley: University of California

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