Tennis with a Twist

Have you ever gone to church in a building that also houses tennis courts? 

Or, to turn the question around, have you ever played tennis in a building created to be a church? I’m doing this now, and it has me a little jumbled up.

Ever since becoming a pastor’s wife more than twenty years ago, I’ve grown accustomed to seeing the world of church and the world of sports as separate realms.  A big part of my job, I learned, was to try to balance our kids’ involvement in a range of athletic activities –at locations all over the state and sometimes beyond –with their participation in church activities.  This meant lots of driving, of course, and also making tough decisions about priorities, especially when our daughter played on a travel hockey team with regular Sunday morning games. I wrote about this whole situation several years back, in the Sunday edition of the Boston Globe:   http://www.highbeam.comdoc/1P2-7984050.html  (I’m happy to report, by the way, that this same daughter has taken her hockey bag to college and is continuing to count her blessings as a skater.)

During my time of shepherding the kids around on weekends, I got some comfort from knowing that plenty of other people were dealing with the same nerve-wracking challenge:  this was clear from the number of kids who came to church in their soccer uniforms, all except cleats, and made for the exit early.  The only combining of the religious and the athletic that we could pull off on Sunday morning was fraught with difficulty.  For our particular family, life has shifted now; for the larger culture, however, the issue is still very much there and unresolved. There is a kind of pulling in different directions, to different locations for different purposes, that happens all the time for parents and children.

That’s why this new place where I play tennis is so intriguing to me.  The whole idea behind “Maple Ridge Church and Community Center” is to bring various kinds of activities together under one roof, for various groups of people. The building looks nothing like a church; if the sign were not in front of it, you might think it could be a warehouse or just an indoor athletic facility.  With this completely uninspiring architecture, I can’t imagine that a couple would ever choose to get married here.  I’m probably wrong, however.

 A look at the website shows that the Maple Ridge Church “is part of The Alliance, an evangelical denomination with a major emphasis on world missions.”  Jumping over the another website, I learned that the group – called in full “The Christian and Missionary Alliance” was founded in 1887 by a Canadian named A.B. Simpson who focused on the work of completing Jesus’s Great Commission to “make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:18-20).  He set out to achieve the “worldwide evangelization of lost souls.”  The group has a history of volunteering around the world, starting in the Congo, proclaiming that they “go wherever darkness has a foothold.”  Depending on how you define “darkness,” I guess, that could cover a whole lot of places.  In this country, there are around 2,000 of these churches; now there’s one (which apparently has had to move around quite a bit in recent years) conveniently located a few miles from a bustling college town, where the mainline churches keep their congregations engaged in various kinds of outreach, with a mostly modest reaching out to any “lost souls” on other continents, as far as I know.

Most interesting to me is the section of Maple Ridge’s website called “Our Vision for the Community Center.”  There you can see a long list of features, in no apparent order, that they are hoping to provide.  First on the list are “Indoor basketball and volleyball court” (no mention of tennis, for some reason, although that’s why a certain group of us go) and “Meeting space for local groups” and much further down we see “Welcoming environment for anyone exploring spiritual issues” as well as “Room for worship to bring pleasure to God.”   So there will be no raising of a steeple high in the air here, almost no separation at all between the spiritual and the recreational.  A few weeks ago, on a Saturday night, I went to see a friend’s son perform with a dance organization in the same space where services would occur the next morning.  The big room reminds me of the “All Purpose Room” we had in my elementary school — it was available for just about anything at all.

So far at least, the congregation here is quite small (I just went to observe for a little while) but this whole way of doing church is strikingly similar to “megachurches” that exist in other parts of the country – mostly the South.  Some people think we may be past the height of this trend; it was a whole decade ago that an article describing the then-growing phenomenon of churches spreading out into other areas of life appeared in The Times. Entitled “Megachurches as Minitowns,” this piece by Patricia Leigh Brown portrayed a few places – Southeast Christian in Louisville, KY and the Community Church of Joy in Glendale, AZ were two – that drew in thousands of people presumably by offering all kinds of services beyond religious ones.  Proponents have argued that this is a perfectly fine way to do a booming church business; critics have said that this represents a troubling trend of Christians separating themselves into their own managed worlds.

As for me, wife of a bishop in a whole other denomination, I’m not keen on getting a dose of evangelism, beyond just passing a few posters on my way to the courts, with my tennis.  And so far, at least, that hasn’t happened.   According to the pros who run the clinics (hitting balls on occasional evenings goes well with my daily teaching schedule and keeps me in shape to play matches with my team; I can get our younger son, also an enthusiast, to teenage sessions there too sometimes) it will be an arrangement of co-existing rather than mingling.

I think it will work out just fine so long as I keep my goals clear: keep playing a lifetime sport, grateful for new facility provided by a church, while seeking house to be with husband during those times he’s not at (another kind of) church.  It’s really not so jumbled up, after all.