The bright present — and future — of the church
NASHVILLE, TENN. — Twenty-two years ago, my young family loaded…
Bible Bowl’s real competition: youth sports
Increasingly, Leadership Training for Christ and Lads to Leaders conventions conflict with travel teams and tournaments. How should parents respond?
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DALLAS — All that time I spent pounding Pi Hahiroth into the kids’ heads was for naught.
There wasn’t a single question about the location where the Israelites stopped just before they crossed the Red Sea. But our kids knew it. Some of them even turned it into a team chant: “One, two, three — PI HAHIROTH!”
@christianchronicle DALLAS — Bible Bowlers from the Memorial Road Church of Christ in Oklahoma City got their team chant from an obscure locale in Exodus 14. #pihahiroth #ntltc #leadershiptrainingforchrist #biblebowl ♬ original sound – The Christian Chronicle
My wife, Jeanie, and I coordinate Bible Bowl for our congregation, the Memorial Road Church of Christ in Oklahoma City. This year our team of dedicated adults had more than 50 kids to coach for the North Texas Leadership Training for Christ convention. The subject — the life of Moses, taken from Exodus, Numbers and Deuteronomy — was tough! There were so many names to remember, including my favorite, Og king of Bashan.
(Do you know the names of Moses’ parents? There’s a genealogy in Exodus 6 that lists them — Amram and Jochebed. Evidently, Jachebed was Amram’s aunt. So … yeah.)
Bible Bowlers answer questions during the 2023 North Texas Leadership Training for Christ convention.
This was my eighth LTC. I started helping when our daughter Maggie was in third grade. Jeanie did LTC in high school.
The massive ballroom in the Hilton Anatole never fails to amaze me. Hundreds of kids filled the tables and stayed up late on Good Friday to answer four rounds of 25 questions each. I was a scorekeeper, seated between fellow scorekeepers from the Greenville Avenue Church of Christ in Richardson, Texas, and the Faith Village Church of Christ in Wichita Falls, Texas.
These days, I’m amazed that kids are able to show up at all for LTC conventions — or for Lads to Leaders, the program of my youth. But thousands do, packing hotels and spending their Easter weekend doing puppet shows, Scripture reading, song leading and signing for the deaf. On Easter Sunday, we gather in large banquet rooms to worship alongside our brothers and sisters from across the nation.
Students from the Memorial Road Church of Christ in Oklahoma City do some last-minute prep before Bible Bowl at the 2024 North Texas Leadership Training for Christ conference.
Why Easter? It traditionally hasn’t been a big travel holiday, so it’s easy to get group discounts on hotel rooms. And Churches of Christ, at least in the past, haven’t made as big a deal of Easter as other faith groups. We recognize the death, burial and resurrection of Christ every Sunday.
All of that is changing. More of our congregations are scheduling special activities on Easter. A couple of ministers have grumbled to me about having their most devout members out of town on a weekend when we should be doing our best to impress visitors. Several of our folks forsook the Easter assembly at our hotel and hurried home Saturday night so they could be with the rest of our church for Sunday worship.
Church members sing during an Easter morning worship service at the 2022 North Texas Leadership Training for Christ convention in Dallas.
But the bigger threat, in my opinion, is that Easter is becoming less sacred. This year LTC happened during March Madness. At the same time our kids were deeply immersed in God’s Word, just a few blocks away the University of Houston’s men’s team was battling Duke — that’s right, the Blue Devils. Last year, LTC coincided with a massive volleyball tournament in Dallas.
As more and more stuff happens on Easter weekend, hotel discounts disappear. Sporting events tend to be more lucrative as well, with patrons more likely to frequent hotel bars and restaurants while our church groups prefer to be sustained by the Gospel of John’s — Jimmy and Papa.
Blake McAnally, an elder of the Beltline Church of Christ in Decatur, Ala., directs the Lads to Leaders convention in Nashville, Tenn.
Bobby Ross Jr., our editor-in-chief, spent Easter weekend in Nashville, Tenn., at the big Lads to Leaders convention. He talked to Blake McAnally, convention director and elder of the Beltline Church of Christ in Decatur, Ala.
Related: The bright present — and future — of the church
Parents and grandparents get so excited when they see their kids excel at sports, McAnnally said, and they spend so much money on travel teams to help their kids excel. That’s why it’s so gratifying for him to watch kids walk across the Opryland Hotel stage to get their Lads to Leaders awards, “to be excited because they’re doing something spiritual.”
Travel teams — youth leagues that take kids long distances to compete at a high level — are a growing competitor for Lads to Leaders.
“If they’re playing baseball, they’re probably on a travel team right now,” McAnnally said, “and they’re, unfortunately, playing somewhere on Easter weekend, which to me is just dumbfounding.”
A chorus practices in the atrium of the Hilton Anatole during the 2024 North Texas Leadership Training for Christ convention.
He understands that Christians on travel teams can influence non-Christians on those teams. But the games also take them away from Sunday worship.
It’s a problem in my family. Both of my girls are in a dance company. The competitions require them to perform as early as 8 a.m. Sunday. My wife and I try to trade off so at least one of us can be at worship.
I was glad to see Shelton Gibbs IV at LTC. He’s a district judge in Kaufman County, Texas, and a minister for the Greenville Avenue church. His son, Shelton V, gave a speech on this year’s theme, “Sanctuary,” and the conference organizers selected him to deliver it during the Easter morning service.
I heard the elder Gibbs speak last September at the EQUIP Workshop at the Brown Street Church of Christ in Waxahachie, Texas. As a judge, he’s presided over cases involving murder and all sorts of horrific deeds.
But the thing that keeps him up at night is youth soccer. His daughter plays, and that means a lot of weekend trips to tournaments, some of which include early Sunday matches.
Shelton Gibbs IV speaks on “Parents Saving the Family” during the 2023 EQUIP workshop at the sponsored by the Brown Street Church of Christ in Waxahachie, Texas.
“How can we sacrifice to soccer before we sacrifice to God?” he said. “What kind of message am I sending to my kids?”
During a recent tournament, he asked the staff of his hotel to let him use a conference room. He put together a worship service that included songs, a sermon and the Lord’s Supper — all at 6 a.m. so they would be on time for warmups.
In his speech at LTC, the younger Gibbs talked about how the devil tries to deceive us into thinking that sin is not sin, and that we can overcome sin only through the sanctuary that God provides.
@christianchronicle DALLAS — Shelton Gibbs V gives a speech during Sunday morning worship at the conclusion of the Nort Texas Leadership Training for Christ convention in Dallas as Victoria Myers interprets for the deaf. Both worship with the Greenville Avenue Church of Christ in Richardson, Texas. #ntltc #leadershiptrainingforchrist #sundaysermon #youthsermon #churchofchrist ♬ original sound – The Christian Chronicle
I think that his father is sending the right kind of message.
The Gibbs family inspired me to do better for my kids. We try to at least have communion devotionals before Sunday dance events. I hope that my girls see that faith matters more than sports.
And I pray that all of the kids we train for Bible Bowl understand how memorizing seemingly trivial facts about Moses helps them in the long run.
Earlier this year we interviewed some of our kids for a video promoting LTC to our church. One of our Bible Bowlers, Wesley LaRue, said something that really got to me: Prepping for the event forced him to dig deep into Scripture and helped “get into the rhythms of reading the Bible” on a regular basis.
Wow. Maybe all that time I spent on Pi Hahiroth wasn’t for naught.
ERIK TRYGGESTAD is president and CEO of The Christian Chronicle. Contact [email protected], and follow him on X @eriktryggestad.
