How We Leveraged the Platform of the Superbowl in our Church

Churches have always had a love/hate relationship with the Superbowl. Inarguably the biggest sports date in the American calendar, the Superbowl has been the bane of Discipleship Training and Sunday night church for congregations across the country. What do you do with the Superbowl? It obviously has no overt spiritual nature, but for at least one Sunday night in the year, the vast majority of Christians wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.

Now, some churches pride themselves in rejecting the cultural phenomenon of the Superbowl and defiantly hold the lowest attended Sunday night services of the year. (Now, many of these same churches will also unashamedly hold a service dedicated to worshipping a nation-state every July 4, but that’s neither here nor there). Over the past two years, our church has participated in something called Football Sunday, an opportunity created by the good folks at Life.Church that uses the greatest sports event of the year as a powerful platform for the gospel.

For the past few years, this incredible church has been providing (for free) a high quality video to be shown as a sermon supplement or replacement featuring testimonies and God stories from former and current NFL players, including several from the teams that actually played in this year’s Superbowl. (It was a cool kind of surreal to hear one of the Patriots player’s testimony that morning then watch him as team captain call the coin toss on tv that night). In fact, we made the entire morning about football, really leaning into this cultural phenomenon that overtakes our nation once a year. You can watch the video and find out more how to get involved with it next year by visiting: www.footballsunday.com.

Some would argue that this was a defiling of the sanctuary by taking the focus off of God (once again, hold your arguments until after July 4th please). I would argue that this was leveraging an already existing platform to boldly share the gospel. Go and watch the video. The gospel is shared more clearly and more powerfully than most preachers (myself included) do on any given Sunday. Rather than worship sports, yesterday at our church was about sharing testimonies from the sports personalities we idolize to realize that God and the gospel transcends all of us, including our love of sports.

Some things in culture should be rejected, but that shouldn’t be our default approach. When we find ways to leverage culture as a platform to share the gospel, we’ll find ourselves building powerful bridges to the world around us. I look forward to participating in Football Sunday for years to come. Thank you Life.Church for providing these resources to churches across the country!