I have always loved sports. Not growing up in the church, they were the center of my life. I remember one year, when I was around ten, I played eight sports in one year—two sports per season. I love any sport with a ball, and even now in adulthood I’ve come to love endurance sports like running, cycling, and swimming.

But being a father, wanting to raise my children in Christ and in the church, sports have been different for us. While my faith in Christ has relativized the importance of sports in our family (sports are not the most important thing to us), the opposite seems to be happening in the culture around us. As Christianity has declined in our society, sports have taken on a more cultic quality in American life.

One of the primary ways we see this is the increasing presence of sports on the Lord’s Day. The NFL, with its giant cathedrals of sport-worship, is the prime example. It is not uncommon for people to spend their entire Sunday not in worship, rest, or fellowship with God’s people, but instead glued to their TVs, flipping back and forth between nearly a dozen games that stretch the whole day. 

But even more, my concern is what’s being asked of our children and families. I suspect that a generation ago, youth and child sports leagues tried to avoid Sundays as much as possible to honor religious observance. This year, I was shocked to find a tournament scheduled on Easter Sunday. Clearly our culture knows what god it wants to worship on the sacred day of the week and on church holidays. 

There is a reality that Christians have to figure out how to live their lives in a culture that doesn’t share their priorities.

Recently I have been confronted with this issue as my daughters have gotten more involved in volleyball. To play on the best teams requires traveling to the Seattle area for eight to ten Sundays, which is basically every other week over a four-month period. Now, as a pastor, it is impossible for me to be away from church on Sundays like that. But even for people who aren’t pastors, this sports demand takes a family away from their local church 20% of the Sundays in a year—and that’s just one sport. If you add another season, and if you factor in other Sundays in the year when families travel for vacation or stay home sick, this means a youth could miss worship at their home church one third of the Sundays in a year. 

It can’t be denied that this is a massive spiritual price to pay in the life of a youth.

In our situation, we did find a team with local tournaments (Whatcom and Skagit), but still, many are on Sundays. We’ve told the coach our daughter will need to miss the early games of those tournaments because she needs to be at our church. But even with that, any fellowship that happens on Sunday afternoons, she is going to miss; and likely, my wife will be carried away several afternoons driving her to the games.

As you can tell, while we are insisting on upholding the Sabbath, our practice at this point is not overly dogmatic. I sympathize with the struggle as families want to give their children opportunities. There is a reality that Christians have to figure out how to live their lives in a culture that doesn’t share their priorities.

While the purpose of this article is to not be overly prescriptive about what families must do, I do believe that Christians must be prepared to suffer the costs for worshiping God. If there are never games missed, never telling coaches, “We’re not going to do that,” never telling youth, “Sports is not our god,” then something is disordered. 

The one thing I would prescribe is that a family should insist on being at least in a church every Sunday. If you are traveling for sports, find a church and attend it. (And I don’t mean watching an online service while you are driving in the car.) Without question, neglecting worship for sports is idolatrous. Such an act reveals where our deepest loyalties lie.

But I also believe that our church’s tradition about the Lord’s Day has important things to say to us.

Relaxing Our Standards

An irony occurred to me recently about this topic. In our denomination, we have a doctrinal standard to which all ordained officers must subscribe (The Westminster Standards). Since Westminster is a secondary authority, and only the Bible is given supreme authority and the status of inerrancy, ministers are permitted to take some exceptions to Westminster. These are places where we think the standards are flat-out wrong.

There are two exceptions that almost everyone takes, and one of them is related to sports on the Sabbath. This is what the Larger Catechism says (bold italics added):

Q. 117. How is the Sabbath or the Lord’s day to be sanctified?

A. The Sabbath or Lord’s day is to be sanctified by an holy resting all the day, not only from such works as are at all times sinful, but even from such worldly employments and recreations as are on other days lawful; and making it our delight to spend the whole time (except so much of it as is to be taken up in works of necessity and mercy) in the public and private exercises of God’s worship: and, to that end, we are to prepare our hearts, and with such foresight, diligence, and moderation, to dispose and seasonably dispatch our worldly business, that we may be the more free and fit for the duties of that day.

Most pastors (and I am one of these) believe that forbidding recreations on the Sabbath goes beyond what is commanded in the Bible. I agree with that, and think sports can be a great form of refreshment, and I love me some pickleball on Sunday afternoons. John Calvin is famous for lawn bowling on the Sabbath (though the story may not be true). I even think for youth who work hard studying all week, they find sports to be a pleasurable reprieve from schoolwork. Our family says no schoolwork on the Sabbath (6pm Saturday to 6pm Sunday), but would it be a restful blessing to forbid sports? I think a case can be made that sports are, in fact, both restful and rejuvenating. John Frame summarizes the Biblical vision for the Lord’s Day this way:

We should plan the Sabbath day as a total experience for ourselves and our families, including worship, recreation, and deeds of necessity and mercy… There ought to be a balance in these activities that enables us to say at the end that we have been with God in a special way—that we have worshiped him, enjoyed his creation, and loved the people he has made in his image. This total experience may well be different from week to week, from family to family, from church to church, from culture to culture. (The Doctrine of the Christian Life, p. 547)

(One note on that: if a parent is particularly demanding about their child’s athletic achievements, it could be that sports are not pleasurable, and therefore should not be expected on the Sabbath. This would particularly apply to practicing and drilling.)

But the irony is that the one thing we have cut out of the Standards is (possibly) the one thing that most threatens our faithful Sabbath observance. Should we be cutting this out? Should we be flinging wide open the door to sports on the Sabbath, with no restriction or warning?

There is an historical context for the prohibition against recreation on the Sabbath. Just a few years before the Westminster assembly began, King James I re-issued the “Book of Sports” and ordered that all clergy in England read the declaration from their pulpits. This requirement from the government, promoting sports on the Sabbath, provoked a Presbyterian and Puritans backlash, which then showed up in the Standards.

The Bible’s view of the Sabbath is clearly that it is meant to be a gift of grace.

This does not precisely correspond to our context, but one overlap is that the Westminster divines were facing cultural pressure toward sports on the Sabbath and they resisted this pressure. What will it look like for us to resist as well?

This may all feel negative—these are all the things you can’t do on the Lord’s Day—but the spirit of the Bible is that God commands us to do things for our good. He made us and knows how we were built and what we need to function right.

Refusing Real Grace

The Bible’s view of the Sabbath is clearly that it is meant to be a gift of grace. Our Lord says, “The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath.” But one of the things about grace is that we often don’t know what truly makes for our happiness and good.

The Westminster divines used Isaiah 58:13-14 to justify a prohibition on recreation on the Sabbath:

If you turn back your foot from the Sabbath, from doing your pleasure on my holy day, and call the Sabbath a delight and the holy day of the Lord honorable; if you honor it, not going your own ways, or seeking your own pleasure, or talking idly; then you shall take delight in the Lord, and I will make you ride on the heights of the earth; I will feed you with the heritage of Jacob your father, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken. 

What does “doing your pleasure” mean? In this passage, the Israelites are being judged for trusting in their own definition of rest, instead of the Lord’s. In our day, it is like someone saying, “The Sabbath was made for man, so I am just going to stay home from church and hang out in my pajamas because that is what sounds restful to me this morning.” This is an example of someone trusting in his own mind, or his own sense of pleasure, for what is good for him. 

Grace does not work that way. None of us would have thought that we needed the Son of God to die on the cross for our sins. But in fact, that is the kind of grace we needed—something we wouldn’t have asked for. And it is far better than what we would have invented. Our version of grace would have been something like, “I wish God would just leave me alone and let me enjoy his blessings without him meddling in my life.” That is not true grace.

My personal experience has been that by doing what the Lord commands, the Lord’s Day has been an immense blessing to me and my family. All through graduate school and seminary, I never did school work on the Sabbath. The Lord provided. I still take a day of rest on Fridays (since I am working Sundays), and it is a gift.

So, when it comes to sports, though our church does not put a restriction on them on Sundays, Christian families should still recognize that sports are one of the great idols of our generation, and that we will be tempted to obey the pattern of life given by the volleyball league more than the pattern of life given by the church. If we find ourselves saying “yes” to the coach and “no” to the church, we should recognize that we are not just disobeying the Spirit of God’s law, but we are in fact saying “no” to the grace that our Savior wants to give us.