For the past ten years, a sports theater that is located just north of Indianapolis has fundamentally altered a small rural town as well as a social attitude in the area.
Our family was living in the area when the Grand Park Sports Campus in Westfield, Indiana, was in its infancy stages with designers. It was referred to as a Field of Dreams by the visitors. If you build it, they will occur. Who had travel? Go sports people. And these people would provide all of their necessities with them. Shops, cafes, beers, shops, hotels, doctors, and clinics. Imagine the region’s monetary benefit!
This remarkable progress was given all the necessary beneficial rewrite by developers and city planners. Some were skeptical. Some were enthusiastic.
Our native priest, nevertheless, felt a sense of impending doom. He was aware that family relocation may result in extracurricular activities like football and tennis. Traveling would leave no room for Sunday worship in a mother’s routine.
Ten years later, the Grand Park Sports Campus has grown into a 400-acre complex that features 26 game diamonds, 31 multi-purpose fields, and a virtually 400, 000-square-foot event centre with three whole interior chemical fields for year-round enjoy. The Indianapolis Colts training facility and the Pacers Athletic Center are then located there, along with practices and a full-service cafe.
And Westfield, a community with a single traffic light, when had? It has exploded with development. Really try to make a weekends hotel reservation in that area. If you are happy to grab a reservation, it will cost you. A significant.
Our remains are the same each time, and we continue to travel to Hamilton County often. Hotels have a slew of uniformed children, sports jerseys carrying duffel bags and other products, and moms sporting Lululemon tights and holding Stanley cups. Every year, 52 weekends of traveling sporting families from all over the Midwest fall on this region.
Changed Temples
Was it a positive for this area’s economy? Truly. Towns became places. Fields became sections. Bridges became bridges. However, the Grand Park Sports Campus ‘ influence had a broader impact. It affected every religion in the Midwest who lost people to the new religion of sports, not just the small village of Westfield long.
Travel sports is now a$ 39 billion industry, with forecasts calling for that total to reach$ 72 billion by 2029. As youth activities continue to increase, temples are seeing a decrease in people and Sunday believers.  ,
Lifeway Research recently conducted a study that looked at go sports while gathering information from pastors as well as families. According to them, 36 percentage of pastors said it was not acceptable to lose church for children’s sports, while 29 percent said it was appropriate once or twice a year, and 26 percent said it was satisfactory only occasionally.
The surveyed families were more willing to convert their religious practices to sports. According to the report, 18 % of families said it was never acceptable to miss church for sports, compared to 22 % who said it was fine only once or twice a year, 39 percent a few times a year, and 13 percent many times a year.
On average, kids are spending more than 16 hours each week in sports. Practices, games, and tournaments are eating up a large portion of a family’s time together. And when stressed out and overworked families are reviewing their weekly schedules, it’s frequently Sunday worship and midweek church services that don’t make the cut.
Trade-Offs
Greg Witto is aware of the difficulty in keeping local congregations connected for families of sports players who travel frequently. He has firsthand experience as the director of family life ministry for a church in Ann Arbor, Michigan, showing how the lure of sports can entice families away from their faith-based community.
” I knew a group of pastors that called sports the modern cathedral”, he said. It dominates your weekend commitments and attention, and your neighborhood has changed. Your commitment transforms into that sport, your community transforms into those who share that same value, and that begins to influence what you value going forward.
Witto understands the appeal. He has spent much of his career trying to instill faith into student life as a self-professed sports fan, finding ways to do so. He previously held the position of the director of alumni and family relations at Concordia University in Wisconsin, where he frequently conversed with players and provided chaplaincy for campus organizations and organizations.
” Sports popularity increased. Sport and athletic notoriety increased. Now all of a sudden, you can make money to play at a good D2]Division II ] school program, so there’s a lot of incentive to excel on the athletic field, and there are a lot more athletics to excel in. It might not be the scholarship to pay for tuition, but rather the admissions process. And now we can see that all these facilities are being constructed to accommodate that.
Witto is concerned that families who substitute worship for sports are filling their calendars with things that are exhausting rather than positive.
You do miss out on the faith community, which focuses on sharing and receiving food rather than food. You never stop giving and never filling up, you just pour out. They don’t come back refreshed from the weekend. They return worn out from their weekend. Whereas when I leave worship, I’m refreshed and filled and ready to hit the week”.
Witto is not ready to throw in the towel in the conflict between church and travel sports at the moment. He sees this as a challenge for congregations to take the lead and train their members as they follow their faith.
” It’s a partnership with parents. We must assist them in getting resources in their hands and help them if they are determined to form faith.
In the interim, Witto advises finding a church in the area to attend, holding a chapel service in the park with a few other families, or reading a devotional as a group.
” God wants them to have the joy of sports. He gave them a gift and he gave them an opportunity. But even in the middle of all of that, He still wants us to give them His word. We can provide tools for them to utilize some devotion time, some conversation time, some prayer time, even if it’s not corporate worship”.
Churches may need to take a cue from the sports playbook by creating a culture that validates, encourages, rewards, and supports the players in their congregational team.  ,
” It’s a wave of the future, and we’re going to have to deal with it. I want to acknowledge the difficulties we face, but I prefer to see them as an opportunity for us to be imaginative about how we continue to live out our faith in the places we still feel called to participate and encourage our children to do so.
Mary Rose Kulczak is a writer for various parent and child publications. She is a wife and mother of three sons and one daughter-in-law, and currently resides in Saline, Michigan.
