When I was in college I was involved in a large evangelical campus ministry. Each year we would have a fall retreat, where we would go to a church camp in central MN, where we would hear talks on the Bible, do Bible studies, sing, do fun outdoor activities, etc. One of the major selling points to get young college guys to come was that we held a tackle football game. Guys who otherwise had zero interest in Christian things would go with us to this camp just to relive the glory days of high school for a brief moment.
But my senior year, something changed. Many of the girls persuaded the staff that having something that excluded the girls was “unfair” and when they gave us the schedule for the retreat, the place and time where we always had the game was now replaced with some other activity, like ultimate frisbee.
Of course, we just went ahead and played football anyway. The four or five girls moaning about “fairness” threw a frisbee around for a few minutes and gave up. Later we got chewed out, but who cares? We got to engage in simulated war and bleed together. And while most of the people bemoaning how “mean and unChristlike” we were to the girls have now become bitter exvangelicals, the men I blocked, tackled, threw passes to, etc. are almost, to a man, stalwarts of the Christian faith nearly 20 years later. I will leave that to the reader to draw his own conclusions.
Little did I know then, that what seemed like a petty squabble over playing a football game would exemplify the kind of warfare being waged within the greater culture and the church for the rest of my life.
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