The Game Is Over

Some people complain about how long the last minutes of a basketball game can take. At the high school level, one team can have as many as five timeouts remaining over the last minutes on the clock. When we are behind, coaches do everything they can to prolong the game. Timeouts make that possible. But, I’m out of timeouts. The game is over.

Last Saturday concluded my 32nd season on the sideline coaching basketball in some capacity, and with that I am retiring from the game. I tipped off my coaching career as a graduate student at the equivalent of the club level on the college campus coaching my own peers. The next season, an administrator gave a 23-year-old a chance to be a head coach of a small Christian school in southern Illinois. Later in Michigan, a coaching friend and I started a summer basketball camp now into it's 28th season. Most recently, I’ve spent the last 18 seasons at Simley High School, our local public school.

For many, joining a sport has a family connection, not so for me. My dad was a car guy not a ball guy. He could fix anything, but he couldn’t throw, run, jump, or shoot, like Not. At. All.

I have no older brothers and my uncles were into baseball, so I was into baseball. I don’t remember even touching a basketball before seventh grade. My size didn’t help. I was little, as in Tiny Tim little. In the ninth grade, I wrestled an exhibition weight class…85 pounds. A broken bone during the fall soccer season kept me out of wrestling, so I tried out for the basketball team. They must have been desperate because they kept me. As they say, the rest is history.

My playing career was nothing spectacular. I had decent athleticism, but not very big also meant not very good. Plus I was way behind in skill development. It’s why I’m probably a better player today at 54 than I was at 17. What was lacking in skill was overcome with an understanding and love for the game.

Over the years, I’ve won a lot and lost a lot, played against and with high level players, and matched wits with some outstanding coaches, sometimes getting the best of them and other times being taught a lesson by better coaches. I’ve played on dirt, gravel, grass, and carpet, had my shot swatted on the asphalt of Chicago streets, been dunked on in hot gyms and on the playgrounds of St. Louis, been called Michael Jordan while playing against diminutive Filipinos while on a missions trip, and have tried to explain the idea of traveling, double dribble, and fouls to Indian nationals who, during play, conveniently didn’t understand English.

The game has given so much to me. My older son, Michael, was a gym rat from his youngest days. Jeffery grew into a player and competed in the Minnesota State Basketball Tournament. Both Jennifer and Emily were mangers for our boys’ teams which gave me time with them on bus trips to away games. The minivan rides to and from practice and before and after games provided opportunities for daily conversations that shaped in part the adults they are today. And Brenda has been a team mom whether or not she had players on the team. I suspect she has made thousands and thousands of cookies and brownies for guys to consume after a hard fought contest.

More than individual games or spectacular plays, I remember relationships. Hundreds of players call me coach. During and after their playing days, I’ve counseled scores of players and influenced many as they’ve grown into men. Dozens of coaches are my friends and many of them have welcomed me into their lives on very personal matters. Players, parents, and coaches all know what my real job is, and God has opened so many doors to share hope with them that comes from Jesus Christ. It’s just a great game that I’ve loved for 40 years.

It hasn’t all been fun. There were three ACL reconstructions and some humiliating moments. I vividly remember my first technical foul my initial year as a head coach. It happened on our home court in front of all our fans, teachers, and administration. I remember the bad call and my worse reaction. I was so embarrassed at getting T’d up that I slipped out the back door of the gym avoiding all the parents and what I was sure would be the disapproving glares of the faculty. You’ll be glad to know I did not receive a technical foul in my final season.

If the game has given me so much, why am I calling it quits? Well, the decision was not entirely mine. For the previous 17 seasons at Simley High School, I coached with the same head coach. For personal reasons he had to step down from his position a month before the season began, a decision I fully supported and encouraged. I chose not to pursue the head coach position at our school. The responsibilities of that job just don’t fit with my real job.

Coaching is about relationships, relationships with players, parents, administrators, and fellow coaches. When a new head coach takes leadership of a team, he rarely keeps on his staff coaches from the previous staff. He has his own people with whom he is comfortable. That meant I was out, unless I was willing to coach a group of first year players. I agreed, but within a few weeks of the season, I knew this season would be my last. My coaching career was coming to a close.

This is not how I thought my connection to the game would end. Actually, I’m not certain I’ve given any thought to how it would end. What I know is I didn’t get to determine how it would end. That’s true in much of life. Professional careers end when companies downsize. Marriages end when terminal disease strikes. Friendships cease when one or the other moves away. And on and on the examples go.

We have these moments given to us by God. We have these skills and passions knit into our DNA by our Creator. Yours are different than mine, and mine are different than yours. Some cook, others draw, a few make music, some turn wrenches, others write, and a handful run, jump, skate, shoot, pass, tumble, and swing. Each of the skills was uniquely implanted by the Designer. We are charged to use our skills in the time allotted to us, “redeeming the time” as Paul instructs (Eph. 5:16). When we do, we glorify God and contribute to his creation as image bearers (1 Cor. 10:31). Our charge is to live faithful to God today, maximizing today every opportunity he puts before us to use our God given skills to make much of the creator.

There’s more to say about the game I love, but the clock shows nothing but zeroes. May God grant me grace to identify the next role he would have me play.

As always I welcome your feedback and any suggestions you might have for an upcoming Lunchtime Musing.

Mike VerWay

Pastor for Preaching & Vision

At Some Point We Need to Move Beyond Training Wheels

I suppose they’re out there, but I haven’t met one – a kid who doesn’t like to ride a bike.

Most of us started out the same way. As little tykes we got a hand-me-down from a big brother or sister or maybe there was a present under the Christmas tree or at a five-year-old’s birthday party. And with some exceptions, we all started out with training wheels. The training wheels made riding the bike possible, but no ten-year-old showed off his cool training wheels to the other kids in the neighborhood. Like when a sixteen-year-old gets his driver’s license, a kid loves the day the training wheels come off.

While training wheels allow a little kid to do what he otherwise could not, training wheels prevent a bigger kid from doing what he could. From extreme riders to Tour de France competitors to middle age men getting back in shape, none of them could ride with any measure of success if training wheels were a necessary part.

Further still, while training wheels get a little one on a bike, does anyone really view riding with training wheels as an accomplishment? When the training wheels come off, so much more can happen.

TRAINING WHEELS AND THE GOSPEL

In a similar way event evangelism is the gospel with training wheels. Holiday concerts, wild game dinners, Vacation Bible School, and a week of meetings with a traveling evangelist all serve Christians in local churches to assist them in the proclamation of the gospel. Event evangelism gets us on the bike.

Event evangelism can be the easiest form for making disciples, as simple as extending an invitation, Our church is having a concert this Wednesday night at 6:30. Can you come with me? It can’t get much easier than that, kind of like riding a bike with training wheels – just get on the bike and start pedaling. There’s not much else required.

Great things can happen from these invitations. People come at your invitation, hear the gospel, and believe. When we get to heaven, we will meet untold numbers of those who came to faith because they attended an event where they heard the gospel. When these events come around, we should take advantage of the easy gospel opportunity. If, however, we rely on events to communicate the gospel, then like a big kid still using training wheels, we will miss out on so much more that could happen.

A GOSPEL CULTURE

We are trying to develop a gospel culture in our church. We use events to help us and are thankful for every opportunity they bring, but we cannot be dependent on events to communicate the gospel to our families and friends like a little kid depends on his training wheels to ride his bike. We want the language of the gospel to be a part of our everyday conversations, “woven in” as someone recently stated. This is the pattern of the New Testament.

While Jesus preached to great masses, individual conversations with Zacchaeus, Matthew, Nicodemus, Mary Magdalene and so many more were the way they came to faith. The same was true for Paul as he told the gospel to his jailors and to Onesimus.

TRUST THE GOSPEL

The Bible says the gospel is the power of God to salvation. Too often we mistakenly think we will mess up if we talk about Jesus. That’s a lie from the devil. The power that brings salvation is not in our capacity to deliver the message but in the message itself. Just trust God that His gospel is powerful. Tell people you want them to go to heaven, and tell them about Jesus. Leave the results with God.

When a church becomes a community of believers engaged in gospel conversations and not only a place for gospel events, that church will see so much more happen in the making of disciples. 

As always I welcome your feedback and any suggestions you might have for an upcoming Lunchtime Musing.

Mike VerWay

Pastor for Preaching & Vision

When A Church Prays Together

No New Testament book references prayer more than the book of Acts. To be fair, Acts is longer than almost every other book and covers thirty years of early church life, so you might expect it to have more of one thing or another.

It’s trendy to read in the latest church how-to book or hear a national speaker call for a return to a “first century church” model. If the call is a return to corporate prayer, I say, “Amen!”

Acts 2:42 And they continued steadfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in prayers.

As the years pass chapter after chapter, the practice at the beginning of Acts continues. From city to city the prayers of God’s people deliver the apostles from captivity, introduce the gospel to new frontiers, and support those whose labor is the preaching of God’s Word. A common feature in the prayer references in Acts is the corporate nature of prayer, that is, Christians praying together with other Christians.

When Do You Pray Together with Other Christians?

At First Calvary Baptist Church, we use the phrase, “Christianity is always personal but never private.” By that we mean while each of us comes to Christ individually, none of us lives the Christian life individually, and that includes our time in prayer. Reading beyond the pages of Acts to the rest of the New Testament, the common assumption is that Christians pray together. When do you pray together with other Christians?

In our church we emphasize corporate prayer in multiple venues. In our Sunday morning worship we spend a significant amount of time in corporate prayer. At the start of worship, we all bow in silent prayer before God asking for his blessing on our worship and his ministering to his people in our worship. Midway through our worship we pray together as a pastor or other mature man in our congregation leads us before God where we praise, confess, and ask together. At the close of our worship, we pray together in response to the Word of God we received together.

On Wednesday evenings a group of people gather together for prayer, remembering our ministries, our missionaries, and the people of our church.

On any given night of the week, one or more small groups meet and a significant component of their meeting is corporate prayer. One of the most valuable aspects of a small group may be their connecting with each other through corporate prayer and their conversing together with God in prayer.

On various days throughout the year, we will gather for 12-Hour Prayer Meetings or something similar.

Everyone agrees the New Testament teaches that Christians pray. Beyond that, we can make a strong argument that the New Testament teaches that Christians pray together. If you do not or cannot pray together with others on Wednesday night or in a weekly small group meeting, the onus is on you to find a way to pray together with other Christians. For good reasons if you miss a prayer meeting or your small group meeting, then determine to initiate corporate prayer with another Christian.

Why Is Corporate Prayer Important?

• When you pray together with other Christians, you become more keenly aware of the needs, burdens, and challenges other Christians carry.

• When you pray together with other Christians, you take your eyes off self and set aside a “woe is me” mentality as you discover others have trials not all that different from yours.

• When you pray together with other Christians, you fight against disunity in the church and promote unity among followers of Jesus Christ.

• When you pray together with other Christians, you encourage a weaker sister by your approach to God on her behalf.

• When you pray together, you remind other Christians that problems are not too big for God and that God is the solution not self.

• When you pray together with other Christians, you prompt in another Christian the truth that Christianity is always personal but never private.

I want our church to become a healthier body. I want our church to experience the blessings of God like what we read in the book of Acts. I want our church to be more effective in our gospel outreach. I want our marriages to grow stronger, our children to believe the gospel, the preaching in our pulpit to be powerful, and the relationships in our church to be wholesome. I’m sure you want all of this too. No church, including ours, will experience the reality of any of these apart from corporate prayer. Let’ s make it happen.

As always I welcome your feedback and any suggestions you might have for an upcoming Lunchtime Musing.

Mike VerWay

Pastor for Preaching & Vision

We Only Have Minutes to Live

Some in pop culture are so famous only their first names are necessary – Elvis, Barack, Beyoncé, Kobe. Their celebrity status, their adoring fans, their self-promotion, and their major accomplishments combine to make their names household words across the globe. By now, you know Kobe died in a helicopter crash Sunday morning when, according to the latest reports, the craft slammed into a California hillside approaching 200 mph. All nine souls aboard the aircraft perished.*

Social media quickly spread the news of the death of Kobe Bryant and the images of the crash site. This wasn’t how the story was to play out for the 18-year-old kid who grew to stardom in the NBA over 20 seasons and will be a first ballot entry into the Basketball Hall of Fame later this year. Friends, teammates, opponents, and fellow celebrities mourned openly their sorrow at his death. The words tweeted, written, and blubbered over and again were “devastating” and “tragic.”

Yes, the deaths of the nine passengers were devastating and tragic, but no more devastating and tragic than the funeral Brenda and I attended on Sunday afternoon of a 59-year-old woman whose body succumbed to cancer or any funeral you recently attended. Death is always devastating and always tragic, and death is no respecter of persons.

The psalmist teaches both the socially low and socially high experience death (43:2). According to the psalm, death doesn’t care if you are rich or poor, foolish or wise (43:10). Death has no regard for who you are, what you’ve accomplished, or what potential awaits you. Death is not interested in your world class athleticism or your Midwestern work ethic or your careful nutrition or your safety measures.

Death doesn’t ask your permission. Death doesn’t move according to your timetable. Death doesn’t care about your plans for today or tomorrow. Death has no regard for a baby not yet born or for a man who has lived 100 summers. Death respects no one. Death fears no one. Death exempts no one. Death just keeps coming. Death is relentless in its pursuit of you, your parents, your children, your siblings, your grandkids, your friends, and every human on the face of the earth. Death will not stop hunting you and yours until it catches you and kills you.

In an interview after his retirement when asked about his post-playing days, Kobe offered, “Life is too short…” Everyone knows this intuitively, and yet many still conclude, “that will never happen to me.” But it will happen to you. Human experiencing shows this, and the Bible declares it (Hebrews 9:27).

Because we do not know what a day will bring (Proverbs 27:1), we should live this day and this moment as if it is our last. That means…

1. Believe the gospel of Jesus Christ. Jesus taught us that he alone is the possessor of life (John 14). To believe on him is to secure the gift of immortality, a gift he made possible by his substitutionary death on his cross.

2. Take care of today’s problems today. Paul told the Christians in Ephesus not to “let the sun go down” without taking care of problems with people close to them (4:26). Haven’t you been to funerals where family members were visibly troubled by the broken relationships made all the more painful by the death that draws them together? To the extent that you are able to right the wrongs, break down the walls, build the bridges, mend the fences, or whatever imagery fits you, do what you can to fix what’s broken between you and other people before death makes repair impossible.

3. Make your minutes count. Compared to eternity, our lives a nothing but a vapor (James 4:14). Like a vapor, we appear on earth’s grassy fields and snow covered hills for seconds. The collection of those seconds means minutes. In those minutes, God intends for us to do something of eternal consequence as we “redeem the time” (Ephesians 5:16) and work for Christ in a way that accomplishes something that reflects his glory and blesses the church (Philippians 2:16). Make good use of the minutes. Don’t waste them accomplishing only what matters in the moment but doesn’t matter for eternity.

Kobe is the latest, but he’s not the last. Kobe is the most famous but not the only one on the helicopter. We are on the clock too. It’s just a matter of when and how. We no longer fear death because of the resurrection of Jesus, but we do understand its inevitably, so we prepare accordingly and trust God for his grace in the moment for us and for those whom we love (Psalm 23).

*In addition to Kobe and his 13-year-old daughter Gianna, also killed in the crash were John and Keri Altobelli and their 13-year-old daughter, Alyssa,; Christina Mauser, an assistant basketball coach at the Mamba Academy; and Sarah Chester and her daughter, Payton, 13.

As always I welcome your feedback and any suggestions you might have for an upcoming Lunchtime Musing.

Mike VerWay

Pastor for Preaching & Vision

About That One Time When We Had Elephants at Church

I grew up in a church setting where evangelism was driven by events. We had Watermelon Sunday and Popsicle Sunday. Old Fashioned Sunday encouraged attendees to dress in pilgrim attire or overalls and bonnets, while Western Sunday meant to come with your cowboy boots on. Western Sunday was a challenge growing up on the south side of Chicago; there weren’t a lot of us who wore cowboy boots and ten-gallon hats with regularity.

Circus Sunday was a big hit. We actually had elephants in our church parking lot. I don’t know who owned the elephants or how they got to our church. I do know my dad and his friends laughed well into his last years, joking about my dad following the elephants, scoop shovel in hand. The thinking was, Have an event, invite your friends, give the gospel, and see what happens.

In some ways it worked. On our big event Sundays, we would see 2,000 in attendance. Our pastor preached the gospel. There were some who believed the gospel and today remain faithful followers of Jesus Christ.

Sustaining the events proved problematic. Like the rest of mass marketing, bigger and better was the cry, “We had elephants last month, what can we do this month?”

I remember airplane and helicopter pilots dropping candy and money from their aircraft to the outreached hands below. One Sunday we watched the skydivers pull the cords on their chutes, landing in the soccer field. That was the draw on Skydiver Sunday. What could top that? Maybe we could have the space shuttle land on our street!

I do not want to completely discredit events intended to be opportunities for gospel preaching. I suppose some might look at Peter’s preaching at Pentecost (Acts 2) as an example of event evangelism. Further, I do not want to discredit the motives behind the events. I believe they were pure. Our leadership wanted to see hundreds of people hear the gospel and be saved from God’s righteous wrath.

The unintended consequence was it taught us evangelism is what happens when you bring someone to an event at your church.

The event is the carrot. The overemphasis was “bring somebody;” missing was, “talk the gospel to your sister, friend, or co-worker.”

I think there is a place for bringing someone to an event where Christ is preached (John 4:29). We have held events at our church throughout the years where the purpose has been to bring someone to the church location where a concert will happen, a youth event will occur or to attend something else we offer. We preached the gospel at the event, and all in attendance heard it. However, for outreach purposes, events are supplemental and not primary because the New Testament emphasis is not on events. The New Testament emphasis for evangelism is person to person, one disciple of Jesus Christ fulfilling the Great Commission to another human being (see three examples in Acts 16).

What Happens at Our Church

Every Sunday our pulpit pastor reminds the church of the responsibility to chase the lost. While we use events to help us in the communication of the gospel to the lost, our primary means of chasing an unbeliever is one-to-one evangelism. We look around us and see who is close by. We see family members. We see co-workers. We see classmates. We see neighbors. We see parents of our children’s friends. These are the people we should chase with the gospel. In the providence of God, our paths intersect. My task and yours as a disciple of Jesus Christ is to live faithfully to Christ before them (Matthew 5:16) and to speak the gospel to them (Acts 1:8). An event may help us, but the primary means by which a disciple chases an unsaved person is through personal one-to-one communication.

As an aid to help you to chase the lost, consider Jesus words to love your neighbor (Matthew 22:36-40). Who lives next door to you, behind you or across the street from you? What do you know about that person or family? Do you know names? What is the history of the people who live in that house? Are they believers? Are you loving your neighbor? Is the gospel coming from you to the people God has placed immediately around you?

The Great Commission is often this simple: love people and talk about Jesus.

We will continue to have events as a part of our church ministry, though don’t look for elephants any time soon. When we do, I hope you will extend an invitation to lost people to attend. However, our events will not be day-to-day, week-to-week, or even month-to-month. We will chase the lost one person at a time, each of us embracing the responsibility and privilege of declaring the love of Jesus Christ. Our gospel events will be the intentional interactions we pursue with others that lead to giving the gospel.

As always I welcome your feedback and any suggestions you might have for an upcoming Lunchtime Musing.

Mike VerWay

Pastor for Preaching & Vision