Four years ago, the head of Sports Chaplaincy Australia, Cameron Butler was called into the office of the Victorian Football League (VFL). Wanting to forge relationships with all Australia’s major sports, Cameron bowled up to the League’s head office at the MCG without a hesitation.

It was there, sitting in their boardroom he was told the VFL wanted a chaplain in every country football team in Victoria.

“I was so excited,” says Cameron. “Because our vision in Sports Chaplaincy Australia is to get a chaplain into every sports club of every sport in Australia.”

As Cameron delved deeper, he discovered the reason they wanted so many chaplains: 36 of their players had committed suicide in the past 12 months. As Cameron puts it they had “a lot of issues and… didn’t know how to deal with them.” He asked how many clubs they had: 808.

“And I said, ‘You want a chaplain in every one of them?’ He said, ‘Yeah, that would be our desire.’

“He’s not a Christian man, he’s just a guy who’d seen our chaplains and the impact they have on communities,” says Cameron.

Sports Chaplaincy Australia has had over 4,000 requests for chaplains, but supply can’t keep up with demand. The need for more chaplains is overwhelming, particularly at a time when more and more young people find themselves drinking in the toxic recipe of money, fame and glory—staples of the sports world.

Not long ago, the World Surfing Tour requested a chaplain for the Top 50 board-riders worldwide. During the first 12 months of the chaplain’s tenure, a young surfer took an overdose and died. It was the chaplain who brought the surfing world together for a service on the beach and was able to speak words of God’s grace and mercy into the situation. As a result, the world surfing body has requested a chaplain for every region of the world. So far there have been 15 appointments, but 275 more are required.

“Our clubs in Australia are crying out for help,” says Cameron. “We meet with leagues regularly and they sit us down—they contact us, we don’t contact them, they want it—and say, we need chaplains.”

But why are chaplains so in demand at a time when the irrelevancy of the church is constantly paraded around by the media? Cameron has a theory:

“The church of today is the local sports club. Australians “do church” at their local sports club 40 times more than they do in the local church.

“I’ve stood back and asked the Lord: Lord, why do sports clubs in their thousands want chaplains? And it’s because they’ve got quasi-forms of churches, but what they don’t have are pastors or shepherds, people in there that can bring the words of the Bible near to them.”

Cameron is convinced God is drawing the sports people of Australia to himself, that the harvest is great, but the workers are few.

“God’s moving in a very particular way and impacting our communities in a very particular way and it’s very important for us to bring God’s word into the situation, to bring the hope that we find in the Bible out to a very hungry world.”

http://www.sportschaplaincy.com.au/

Image credit: Flying Cloud (used under a CC Licence via Flickr)