A free kick.
Hoops, soccer nets, and volleyball courts—they’re not what immediately comes to mind when you think about church unity and evangelism. But, for Seventh-day Adventists in Southern Ecuador, these are precisely the tools that have been successfully used in achieving these important goals.
“This is evangelism,” said Pastor Ricardo Palacios, church youth leader in Guayaquil. Behind him were two soccer teams participating in “church Olympics.”
“We play here every Sunday and the only prerequisite to joining our competition is that each team must bring at least four players who are not Adventist.”
Within two weeks of a competition, the teams begin Bible studies and several players have already joined the church family.
It all started in 2002 when the church’s youth department decided to do something creative to address the problem of lack of involvement of Adventist young people in the church, Palacios said. Knowing that few of these youth will turn down a good soccer game, the idea was born to sponsor the first region-wide Youth Olympics.
“Over the course of two months, the various church districts were hard at play every Sunday determining which teams would make it to the final to be held in Guayaquil.
“The response was overwhelming. Churches pulled together and cheered each other on as the young at heart of all ages participated. It was exciting to see church members who were not attending church services get reconnected with their church family,” Palacios explained.
In the words of Jose Luis Dejada, a youth district director, “It’s great to see youth who had stopped attending church coming back as a result of these Olympics!”
Arnival Malatay, who participated with his son, said, “This is incredible! My son is a gifted basketball player and is so excited to find other Adventist kids who really know how to play. They’ve made plans to keep in touch and play together after the Olympics are over. Every church should have a field for soccer or a basketball court ... for many youth, the only association they have with the church is a boring Sabbath morning sermon. With church activities like sports, it gets more integrated into their lives.”
“It’s been so long since I exercised; I’m so excited to be playing volleyball again!” exclaimed Yeseli de Carbajal, whose husband is a district pastor. Their group of more than 20 people left the town of Chone at 3 a.m. to make it in time for the final games in Guayaquil.
While congregations were blessed by participating, the impact of this event went beyond church membership as teams invited friends to play with them. A basketball team from the city of Quevedo arrived at the final games with three such teammates who requested to be baptized as a result of their experience. This gave the region’s youth director another idea: Why not make it a prerequisite for participation to have at least three people, who are not members of the church, on a team?
Palacios explained that the plan began to work. The basketball team from Quevedo returned and brought their women’s soccer team. Three of these women are preparing for baptism. Reports are still coming in of people who have been baptized or are preparing for baptism as a result of their introduction to Christ and the Adventist Church through these games.
Building on the “ice-breaking” quality of this event, this year’s Youth Olympics were planned as the first of three events targeted at youth. The Olympics prepared the way for a week-long “I Was a Witness” community outreach activities and meetings organized by youth, for youth. Then came a program called “Supermission,” a long weekend during which youth from all over the area congregated in the highland city of Guaranda to do community service. “You should have seen them. They cleaned cemeteries, parks, and painted a mural in the city center, and on Sabbath they visited the elderly, prisons and hospitals,” Palacios said.
The Guaranda experience has given the Adventist community, which has no church building there, to look at a prospect to construct one next year, Palacios added.
The mayor and his team received the Adventist group with open arms, something very significant considering that there is no Adventist presence in this city. “Please come back!” the mayor said in a public address to the group.
Curiosity about the activities in the community led a former mayor to say: “What a wonderful example to the youth of this town and what a shame that someone from the outside is doing what we should be doing!”
Palacios added that the winners of the competition receive prize money, but they don’t keep it for themselves. “It all goes toward their church. This year’s men’s soccer winners, for example, are going to modernize their church’s bathrooms,” he said.
There has also been an amazingly low incidence of problems with competition—the men’s soccer final could have been a disaster when one team lost largely to a referee’s error. Palacios called them together and reiterated why they were doing this. “They were all at peace and it was beautiful to see the two teams side by side, heads bowed during the closing prayer. That’s good religion!” he commented.
The Ecuadorian youth experience expresses a vision shared with the faithful by Jan Paulsen, world church president, who was on a recent visit to South America.
The church in South America bears a testimony to a reality of “meeting people where they are,” Paulsen said, and particularly those experiencing privation and living in very basic circumstances, “where they are given a sense of values, where Christ is being communicated to them.” Paulsen added that “not only [should we] look at numbers, but at the effectiveness of touching the lives of people, bringing them joy, completeness and hope.”
The Guayaquil youth are responding to the foundational principles of Adventist witness and involvement in mission, a church leader remarked.