Our rhythms across seasons of life—and seasons in sport—should clearly communicate to our children: We belong to Christ, and belonging to Christ means belonging to his people. The end goal isn’t just attendance in a building. It’s faithfulness to God and his people.

Eric Liddell toed the starting line at the 1924 Olympics as the fastest man in the world.

Normally, there was little doubt Liddell would be the first person to cross the finish line. But after learning that the qualifying heats for his best event, the one-hundred-meter dash, took place on a Sunday, the Scottish runner decided to withdraw from the race.

Liddell was more than just an elite sprinter; he was also a Christian. And because Liddell held Sunday as the Christian Sabbath, he believed honoring God with his sport meant abstaining from competition on Sundays, even if he missed an Olympic race.

Liddell instead entered the four-hundred-meter dash, which was held on a weekday. He ran the race the same way he ran the one-hundred-meter dash, sprinting from the gun through the tape. He finished first, setting a new world record at 47.6 seconds and immortalizing himself as the archetypal Christian athlete. Two lines spoken by his character in the 1981 docudrama Chariots of Fire perfectly capture his “sport as worship” ethos that continues to fuel much sport ministry today: “I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast. And when I run, I feel his pleasure.”

From Liddell to the Little Leagues

While those fictional words still get used by speakers in Christian sport circles today, the reality of his actual conviction to not compete on Sunday—even in the Olympics—feels almost, well, embarrassing. Miss an Olympic final because it falls on a Sunday? Today, many of us feel we can’t miss an eight-year-old pool-play soccer game at 9:00am on a Sunday! As historian Paul Putz says, “The question these days is not whether elite Christian athletes should play sports on a select few Sundays; it’s whether ordinary Christian families should skip church multiple weekends of the year so their children can chase travel-team glory.”

We may not have to decide whether or not we should race on a Sunday at the next Olympics, but today Liddell’s decision—while sounding to many as antiquated as the dial-up phone—remains just as relevant because of the evergreen question behind it: “How can I best honor God with my youth-sports journey, especially when it affects church participation?” That question involves many decisions Christian parents wrestle with, including whether or not they’ll be at a game or in church on a given Sunday.

In our book Away Game: A Christian Parent’s Guide to Navigating Youth Sports, we describe how youth sports offers a ripe context for helping our kids become Jesus-followers, and we offer many practical examples on what that might look like. This article focuses on the conflict between church attendance and sports participation. We’ll examine the biblical command to gather as believers and how that gets fulfilled in the local church, asking questions along the way about discipleship priorities. We’ll then consider four types of Christian responses to the question of whether to participate in youth sports on Sunday mornings.

‘Do Not Neglect to Meet’

We’ll make this clear up front: Church attendance as a way of life is nonnegotiable.

By “church attendance,” we mean regularly gathering with other Christians to hear the preached word and worship God through song, prayer, and the ordinances of communion and baptism. Today, far too many professing Christians treat church attendance as optional; they embrace it enough to be counted among those who “go to church” on a census but not in a way that could be confused with commitment. Hebrews 10:25 clearly warns Jesus’s followers not to neglect meeting together. It doesn’t say how often. It just admonishes us not to be a “neglecter” and to make sure we habitually get together with other believers.

Unfortunately, youth sports has become a prime excuse to forgo assembling together—whether on Sunday or any other day of the week. Participation in sports often becomes a functional prop for disobedience.

Parents, remember that we’re held accountable for training our kids in the way they should go so they won’t depart from it (Proverbs 22:6), not for training them up in their sport so they have maximal opportunity to make a varsity team. Some parents may strive to do both, but today it’s become far too easy to emphasize one while neglecting the other. If we want our kids to be walking with Jesus once they leave our house, training at home is not enough. Their spiritual formation leans heavily both on what they learn from us and what they experience among a community of believers. Discipleship is a partnership between parents and the church.

But It’s Just a Few Sundays, Right?

These priorities are not always at the forefront of parents’ minds when considering their children’s athletic activities. The ongoing debate about whether it’s okay for families to skip church for sporting events usually involves questions like these:

• “Is it okay for us to skip church for travel ball?”
• “How many times can we miss church for sports before there’s a problem?”
• “Should we sign up for this league knowing there’s a chance we might play on Sundays?”

These questions often disguise the same inclination behind the dating and sexual-purity question, “How far is too far?” There are bigger questions we need to wrestle with first if we want to be aligned with God’s heart:

• “What role does the church play in the discipleship of our family?”
• “What does a priority on church attendance communicate to our kids?”
• “What value does Scripture place on corporate worship?”
• “What role does our family play in the lives of other people at church?”
• “What are God’s expectations for our rhythms of work, rest, and play?”

Parents, we need the church, and the church needs us. Only when every part works properly will the whole body grow and thrive (Ephesians 4:15–16), and that growth includes our children’s spiritual development. Instead of wondering how many Sundays we can miss, the more important question concerns how we can be faithful, fruitful members of our local church body, whether that involvement finds us sitting in the pews in communal worship or in the stands and on the fields as the missional arm of the church. Across a calendar year, what intentional disciplines do we have in place to keep our family on a trajectory of spiritual growth?

At the same time, let’s make sure we’re not putting all our kids’ spiritual-growth eggs in the Sunday basket. Do you have a plan for spiritual feeding beyond Sunday morning? Some of us feel overwhelmed about missing a Sunday because we know there’s nothing else happening the rest of the week to develop our kids spiritually. We need to make sure that’s not the case.

Four Christian Sports Families

Over the last decade, in our interactions with Christian parents involved in youth sports, we’ve encountered many different convictions. Broadly speaking, we’ve found four approaches to addressing the tension. Each of these paths comes with its own dangers that need to be addressed.

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