What I Learned about God’s Mission Watching the World Cup
What I Learned about God’s Mission Watching the World Cup
Like millions of other people, my family has been watching the FIFA World Cup over the last couple of weeks. Since it has been played in North America, it was easier this time to catch the games, and the USA Men’s Team was competitive, that is until they ran into Belgium. It has all been very exciting.
I’ve never understood soccer well. No one played it when I was growing up. I’ve suffered through some terrible kids and grandkids games, but I never really grasped the game beyond a basic level. However, this go-round, I watched some YouTube videos about soccer strategy so I could have some idea of what was going on. Turns out, it is exciting when you have a passable understanding of what you are watching.
As you are aware, soccer is less popular in the USA than a lot of other sports for very solid reasons provided by others. But I want to explore an explanation that I heard recently about why soccer feels out of step with American culture. Our son Seth made this observation when we were visiting his family in New York the week that the USA beat Bosnia-Herzegovina: unlike more popular sports in the USA, soccer strategy often involves moving backwards. Soccer teams move the ball back and forth and side to side in endless permutations looking for a weakness in the defense to exploit. They routinely kick the ball backwards, even to their own goalie, to reset and try another path toward the gooooooooooal.
Moving backwards seems very un-American. In our culture, we expect to see constant forward progress toward a goal. No one in baseball moves backwards from 3rd or 2nd base to 1st base. All the movements are forward towards home plate. In basketball, you must move the ball across mid-court in a brief period, and moving behind the center line means turning it over. Going backwards is prohibited. In American Football, any backwards movement is failure. It is called “losing yards” and it’s how you lose games.
Americans are forward facing and future oriented. We want to see constant progress. We expect every play to work and every possession to lead to a score. We want our companies and our churches to post constant growth numbers. We want to see growth every quarter. Up and to the right is the only acceptable graph. Downward trends are failures. Going backwards is a travesty. And this hyper fixation on “progress” leads to a certain type of hyperactivity that may hinder us more than we realize.
Soccer's propensity, on the other hand (or foot!), to move forward and back, side to side, probing opportunities, seeing them shut down, backing out, and trying again repeatedly until the right movement presents itself, is more like what life experience is actually like. It is certainly what domestic ministry and global missions feels like. There is no straightforward movement toward victory when you are talking about the advance of God’s reign in the lives of people, communities, cultures, and countries. The evil one sees to that. People are inconsistent. Every step or two forward is followed by going sideways and some backward movement, too. We pray, probe, and wait and then we advance when a soft place opens. It is frustrating and it takes more patience than the more popular sports in the USA. But when we embrace an openness to move backwards and learn to play this way, we can join God in playing the beautiful game and make real progress in breaking through all types of resistance, winning hearts for Christ, and transforming lives and cultures around us.