When I was hired for my church’s city ministry, my boss’s first words to me were, “You should be in the church office as little as possible.” His second words? “You need to be with the sports teams as much as possible.”
Here was (and is) our church’s strategy for inner-city ministry: Go coach a sports team.
It’s actually the same strategy my dad used to plant churches when I was growing up — and it seems to work. In fact, weeks ago, Shades Mountain Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, was able to celebrate its hundredth inner-city baptism in the last three years. One hundred lives, one hundred stories, one hundred souls — transformed by Jesus Christ.
So, I decided to ask my former boss, Myles McKee, if he could walk me through how God inspired him, as a recently born-again college student, to start using sports as a means for gospel unity in “the most segregated city in America.” He gave me four steps that anyone can take.
1. Be willing to go.
The first time I really met Myles, I was piled in his truck with two other interns, all of us winding down dark streets in downtown Birmingham. Myles rattled off facts as we toured. Here are a few of them.
If you didn’t know, Martin Luther King, Jr., called Birmingham America’s “most segregated city.” Even now, the Birmingham City School District has a 99 percent minority rate (94 percent black) with over 85 percent on free or reduced-price lunch. Yet less than five miles away (“over the mountain,” as we say), some school systems have a 6 percent minority rate (0.2 percent black), with just 2 percent of students on free or reduced-price lunch. Even after the Civil Rights Movement, Birmingham is still one of the most segregated cities in America. It’s also the sixth most dangerous city and comes second in single-parent homes.
If Birmingham is famous, it’s often famous for all the wrong stuff — except for one thing: sports.
Willie Mays, Bo Jackson, Charles Barkley, Carl Lewis, Bobby Bowden, Dabo Swinney — all from Birmingham. Even Paul Finebaum started there. But more than any other sport, this city is really, really good at football — which is probably the most important thing in the South.
“We saw the need,” Myles told me when I interviewed him for this article, “and we opened our imaginations for God to move. That’s the first step. Not being prepared, or ready, or even equipped. Being willing.”
“So, what did you do?”
“I started going to the park. And I started playing pickup football.”
2. Move into the neighborhood.
After the drive, Myles parked the truck at his house on Kappa Street in Titusville, a Birmingham neighborhood. It’s the same street where his wife, Shila, saw someone get shot in the front yard, the same street where bullets have riddled their car and house, and the same street where they started raising their three kids.
“But what made you decide to move here?” I asked in the interview.
“In a city like Birmingham, you can’t just parachute in and pretend to care for people,” he said. “You prove you care by being with them. Nothing but actually moving into the neighborhood would work.”
The story of the Gospels starts when God took on flesh to walk among us (John 1:14). Perhaps the first step of bringing the gospel is just that: taking a step toward another human being. In the age of big tech, it’s wise for us to remember this. Revival starts with coming close and simply walking with people. In other words, “You need to know every grandmama and mama and kid on the street.”
So, the McKees moved in, went to the park, and started coaching. After all, could there be a better environment than sports to step toward the community?
3. Don’t try to fix everything.
“What did you do to keep from just being the ‘new folks’ on the street?” I ask later in the interview. I live on Kappa Street now too, and it’s not easy to enter into communities that have history — or baggage.
“You join the old folks,” he said simply. “We found a youth sports organization and started building with the community. Because it’s not about fixing all the things; it’s about joining the people.”
A Christian doesn’t need to take control or clean everything up right away. It’s a deep act of faith to be okay with the mess. And it’s here — right in the messiness — that the Holy Spirit begins to work.
Rec football coaching leads to rides home. Rides home lead to relationships with the community. Relationships help you start an athletic training facility. The athletic training facility gives you a place for an after-school program. And before you know it, you get asked to sit on the youth sports board and become a coach for the high school that was the center of the Civil Rights Movement — where black students were once mowed down by firehoses and attacked by police dogs during the children’s marches. Somehow, by prayer and (surprisingly) sports, the love of Jesus gives a house key for reconciliation (2 Corinthians 5:18).
That’s Myles’s story. Turns out, a decade of blowing whistles and wearing purple tells people you love your community. And that kind of love is often the prerequisite for revival.
4. Bring home to them to bring them home.
It’s Sunday at Shades Mountain Baptist Church. Post-service, dozens of young football players from inner-city schools are packed around a whiteboard. Beside them sit some twenty older men who have committed to be their mentors. You wouldn’t believe how much sixty-year-old suburban men with white skin have in common with sixteen-year-old city kids with black skin. They all love Jesus, football, and food.
(Y’all, that’s plenty to go off.)
Up on the whiteboard, someone has written, “Revival is coming” — but then has crossed out the word coming and written HERE.
Three years ago, after the McKees had labored so long with few partners, one church member who had a long-standing passion for the inner city decided that Myles and Shila weren’t meant to do their work alone. His name was Jordy Henson. A few months ago, ALS escorted him to be with Christ forever — just before the hundredth city ministry baptism.
Jordy was the champion who rallied a church body not historically affiliated with downtown Birmingham to nail themselves to the joys and pains of the inner city. He started leveraging all he had for these students. He pulled for their high school teams, prayed for their traumatic stories, celebrated their awards ceremonies, and wept at their funerals. Jordy showed that the church brings the stability, safety, and love of home to the needy — and that invites the unstable, the unsafe, and the unloved into the church.
Now dozens of men from the church have begun following in Jordy’s and Myles’s footsteps. They’re nothing special (I can say that because I know a bunch of ’em); they just go to football games, bring young men and women to church, and stay available. Several of them describe it like this: “I just show up” — practice after practice, game after game, service after service, not growing weary of doing good (Galatians 6:9).
The best part? Most of us learn every bit as much about God, others, and ourselves as the students do. In fact, anyone at Shades can tell you that Amari Carr, Demetrius Robinson, Darryl Sanders, and Jacob Miller lead our whole church in worship each Sunday — hands upraised in the front row.
I remember asking Myles what he’s learned from his time playing football in the park, coaching at the high school, and living on Kappa Street. Here’s what he said: “I learned that the Bible doesn’t become real until you invite its words into your home.”
What if we let the words of the Bible come into our families? Into our churches? This could cost more than we bargain (Luke 9:23). It will require us to open up our homes (1 Peter 4:9). It may require us to leave the comfort of our neighborhoods (Matthew 28:18–20). Or, as I witnessed today, it will require us to stain our Sunday best with tears, because when you know and love someone, you feel their pain — and holding the pain of the downcast is weightier than we like to bear. But I know One who was willing to bear all my weighty sins and cast them as far as the east is from the west (Psalm 103:12).
If we want to see revival, we will be willing to lose games, or homes, or time, or money. Indeed, we will be willing to lose everything for the sake of winning just one soul — let alone a hundred.
Desiring God