Quarterbacking and Discipleship

Source: Wikipedia

How is Christian discipleship like playing quarterback in the National Football League?

There's more overlap than you'd think.

The New England Patriots are led by their QB Tom Brady, who has won three Super Bowl Championships with the team. Most recently, Brady garnered a great deal of attention for the way he led his team to a season-opening victory over the Miami Dolphins. The prolific player threw for over 500 yards and completed 4 touchdown passes in the Patriots' victory. And listening to the postgame analysis, I couldn't help but think about how much Brady's example can offer for everyday Christians as they try to live faithfully.

I draw connections between quarterbacking and faith in my most recent UM Reporter column.

The thing that was most striking about the way that postgame commentators Steve Young and Tedy Bruschi talked about Brady's opening day performance was their sheer giddiness. They were clearly relishing the experience of just having watched one of the all-time great football players demonstrate gridiron excellence at the highest level.

And then one of them made a comment that struck me. He said that Brady had gotten so good that he likely didn't have to think about what he was doing once he was behind center and running the offense. He simply knows football so well - and knows his abilities so well - that he acts on a level where deliberate and self-conscious decision-making is not required.

What the commentators were talking about is a kind of virtue. It is hard work to be excellent, the philosopher Aristotle says in the Nicomachean Ethics. One has to work hard at it, practicing everyday and committing to doing what one does today just a little bit better than yesterday. Over time, the results show both in the actions one performs and in the kind of person one becomes.

The parallels here for our practice of discipleship as Christians are obvious. There are other ways we would want to talk about it: namely, how anything faithful that we do or think or say is enabled by a prior grace. And moreover, how our faith is at its heart a response to a loving God.

The responsive nature of faith does not preclude a lot of hard work, though, and there's a reason so much athletic, agricultural, and martial imagery is used in the New Testament to describe what it means to live faithfully within the body of Christ over the course of a lifetime. As we are molded by what we study and by what we do, we are transformed into a certain kind of person. With the right kind of training, we become the kind of Christian whose life is so conformed to God that we do not always have to consciously think the right thing in order to do the right thing and be the right kind of person -- the kind of person who loves God and neighbor as Jesus Christ calls us to do.

So there are lessons to be learned by comparing quarterbacking and faith. But learning them takes more than bare consideration. It takes, of course, a lot of practice as well.