The Tour and the Church

The following is an article for the Kittson County Enterprise, July 10 edition.

I love the Tour de France. I realize it’s a completely niche sport that not everybody can get into—and that’s fine—but I find it absolutely fascinating. I also remember the first time I watched a cycling race. Honestly, I had no idea what was going on. There were riders out front called the breakaway, something called a peloton (a large group of riders) and the commentators were talking about stages and the general classification and all sorts of things that didn’t make a lot of sense. Then they mentioned the teams. How, I wondered, can a team possibly help one of their riders? It’s not like they could push one another. Was it just moral support? I was lost.

I suspect this is something like what it is to walk into a church for the first time. Most people who grow up attending a particular denomination have an idea of the traditions, customs and signs of worship within that church, but this makes it hard to remember that there are many people outside that church that have no idea why you do things the way you do. Just because they are not part of the in-crowd does not make them inferior or any less valuable in God’s eyes. It’s a dangerous practice for a church to assert their superiority over those on the outside—in fact, I can imagine few ways to be less Christian!

We all know people who obsess over sports. They know facts and figures and teams and strategies, and they will let the world know when a coach or general manager or player makes a bonehead move. They are the first ones calling for coaches to be fired or players to be traded. They know exactly what the team should be doing. If they were in charge the team would always be in better shape. And unfortunately, the internet has made these people impossible to ignore.

We have the same people in churches. They know what the church needs to do and be, who should be in and out, and what the mission for the future looks like. But, unlike our sporting-obsessed friends, they do have power to make some of these changes. This is particularly dangerous because church only functions well when the Holy Spirit is given free reign to make a mess of things. When we come to church with our own, little sinful agendas then the church can easily be led astray from the mission God would have for it.

As I learned more about cycling it became clearer and clearer why the riders race the way they do. The teams matter because a bicycle rider who rides behind someone else can save upwards of 30-35% of their energy. The main group of riders, called the peloton, matters because the riders safely tucked in that group are saving an immense amount of energy compared with the riders out in the wind. Team members will sacrifice themselves, pedaling squarely into the wind, in order to better serve the interests of their team; in order to pace their team members to victory or to whatever goal they had that day. Some days teams are trying to win, some days they are trying to keep their best riders safe for another, more critical day in the long haul of the race.

Cyclists, perhaps more than any other athletes, have to balance the needs of the individual against the goals of the whole, and that is an exceptional metaphor for the work of the church. If you are spiritually fed by worship at your church that is a very good thing, but it is not the primary goal of church. There are two main purposes for church: one is to worship God and the other is to spread God’s word to those in need of hearing it. If you are fed in the process then great, but sometimes, like those cyclists out in the wind, members on the inside need to be made uncomfortable for the sake of those in greater need. After all, if you’ve heard the word of God and understand the promises you have been granted, then the most important thing is not for you to be comfortable but for you to bend over backwards for the other who has never realized the import of that message for their lives.

I have the Tour de France on while I’m writing this piece. Right now the peloton is bearing down on a small group of riders who have been out in the wind all day. They broke away early in today’s stage and got a large gap—so large in fact that it seemed impossible that the main group would ever see them again. But, as it turns out, the large group had it measured all along. They saved their energy by sending out their own sacrificial lambs to the front of the group to pull them along. If nobody was willing to sacrifice their own chances to win, the big group would have had no chance of ever making up the deficit, but since each team had riders willing to put the team’s glory before their own they did what would have otherwise been impossible.

If we put God’s glory before our own what could we do? What could our churches look like? It’s an immense challenge, but each of us is called to die to our selfish needs whether in the church or in a bike race. That’s the true Christian life: it’s not ascending a throne yourself; instead, it is showing that God is on the throne, even if it means you get trampled in the muck. But what of it? You’ve already been given a promise. You don’t need it again and again. Instead, you need to promote it and share it, dying to yourself for the sake of the one who died for you.

Excuse me, the race is about to end, and the victory will go to a single rider, yes, but the celebration will be for a team that did its work faithfully.