Cultivating Sports Culture // Social Change and Life Development

If you are just tuning in, I began a series of posts with an Introduction to Cultivating Sports Culture, and then followed up with Defining Reality.

Another element that is relevant in cultivating sports culture is in generating social change.
By social change, I am referring to, tackling the needs of education, leadership, poverty, health issues, and family support, to name a few, in our society.

After all the glory is achieved on the ball courts, and looking at the big picture of life’s journey, is not athletics just one part of our human experience?

This is not to say that athletics are not important and should be dismissed for the more serious things in life. Every area of culture, whether if that is athletics or needs in society, is not detached, but interconnected with all of life.

Could we not use sports as a medium to create community and to ultimately generate social change?

Consider Austin Gutwein, a resident of Phoenix, Arizona, as an example, who I have written about before.

Austin created a non-profit organization that operates free-throw shooting events to raise money for building schools, medical centers, and thousands of caregiver kits for children in Zambia. The inspiring and humbling thought is that Austin is only fourteen years old (as of 2008), nine years old when his quest for change through sport began.

Lastly, a final element needed in cultivating sports culture is observed through life development. By life development, I suggest, that the whole person of an athlete and those involved in a system need to be encouraged and developed.

Previously, it has been recommended that the athletic, educational, and humanitarian aspects of a person’s life be cultivated, but I humbly suggest, even in the midst of the taboo and controversy of it’s content, that to fully encourage and unify life development is to also encourage spiritual development.

If there is a spiritual element within the human life, then how can we ignore or exclude this aspect from its influence on our activities in athletic systems and in the public square? Is there not something that battles within that drives the human life to do great things and also to do bad things?

In reference to spiritual development, I propose, that all who are involved in the sports culture can counter that which disdains and be empowered to truly cultivate our best sports culture now through a renewal within.

Could it be that a renewal of the spiritual element within is underpinning of that which in turn will transform the interrelated components: a ball player, an athletic system, and the culture?

Objections to the need for cultivating a spiritual element are raised to the extent that an aspect of “spiritual,” at best, belongs in the private / value sector and not in the public / fact realm, if not in the category of myth / irrelevance all together.

Nancy Pearcey, writing on this spilt mentality, states that, “The mistake lies in thinking there is such a thing as theories that are unbiased or neutral, unaffected by any religious and philosophical assumptions. But in the secular realm, it is often thought that we all have access to neutral knowledge where religious and philosophical values are not supposed to interfere. The irony is that this ideal is itself a product of a particular philosophical tradition” (Total Truth, 38-39).

Wherever one may fall in the divide, the fundamental guide in our thinking and action in life is a worldview. A worldview is a set of ultimate principles that guide our view of the world, that answer essential questions about origins, problems, solutions of life, and a frame work that best explains all of reality (Notes taken from Total Truth).

In other words, every philosophical or spiritual system has ultimate principles that instruct how they are to function, that determine what has value, what is fact, what is transcendent, what is real, and what is true. Is it not a worthy endeavor to seek out a worldview that best meets this criteria and then live and cultivate accordingly?

Cultivating Sports Culture consists of creating environments that allows athletics to thrive in the cities of the world, for all people, regardless of their status.

It involves producing and celebrating our best sports culture through athletic excellence, redeeming competition, overcoming social needs, and developing the whole person.

Cultivating Sports Culture is about actively leading and engaging in a movement, a movement that flows out of love for athletics, out of love for people, and out of love for God.

C.Harv