Article

Character

Creed

Sport

6 August 2024

6 min read

Letter to the Olympians

A veteran sports chaplain writes a letter to Christian Olympians, on how they can find joy amid the 'funerals and weddings' of the games.

Ashley Null

Ashley Null serves as a chaplain to elite athletes and coaches. He is also a priest and an academic.

A swimmer at the end of a race, looks to the result screen.

Adam Peaty after an Olympic race.

BBC.

Dear Friend,

Congratulations on being selected to compete in the Olympics - the greatest games in the world! I’m sure you can’t wait to get out there and show the world what you’ve got - your amazing talent and skill and all the hard work and dedication that has gone into becoming an Olympian.

Now, it has been said that being at the Olympics is like experiencing 10 funerals for every 1 wedding. You know this if you’re in elite sport - every one person’s victory is at the expense of many others’ agony of defeat.

These next few weeks will be full of the strongest emotions and potential challenges to how you think about your faith. What does it look like to integrate your faith and your sport in the midst of such pressure?

First, God has called you to the Olympics to experience true joy.

The first reason God gave the good gift of sport is for it to bring joy.

“In the heavens God has pitched a tent for the sun. It is like a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, like a champion rejoicing to run his course,” writes the Psalmist.

God compares our sport to a honeymoon - both physically and emotionally satisfying - what high praise for the joy of sport!

Every race, every match, every competition, is an opportunity to experience this God-given joy.

This joy will help you in the ups and especially in the downs over the next few weeks. The Bible makes this clear again and again, that it is joy that helps us endure the difficulties in life.

These next few weeks, make a conscious effort to count every blessing, thanking God for the joy of sport and the amazing experience he has given you.

As you compete you can witness to many the wonderful joy of sport... By not torturing yourself in defeat with self-loathing and shame, instead rejoicing with those who win and weeping with those who don’t.

Second, but Elite Competition isn’t only about joy. It includes uncertainty, fear, and even loss. God can use all aspects of sport, both the highs and the lows, to draw you closer to Himself.

The second reason God give gifts to his people is to use them as a school of discipleship.

St Paul writing to Christians in Ephesus said: “So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ."

God has given you this vocation as a ‘school of discipleship’ to learn what it looks like to love God and love others.

As you compete and lean on the promises of God, you have endless opportunities to grow in living out your faith.

To remember your identity is based on the cross and not your success and failures
To remember the power you have to compete does not come from your own strength but from Christ who is at work in you
To remember your standing before God does not change because of God’s grace, whether you win or lose, fail or succeed
To remember that if you do lose, God will be there with you and use your pain, but that the pain will not have the last word in your life - God will work all things for good

Third, you can serve others as you compete.

As you compete you can witness to many the wonderful joy of sport:

By competing drug-free and within the rules you can show an alternative to the winner-takes-all attitude so prevalent in all sport.
By not treating your opponent as the enemy but valuing them as a ‘co-worker’ you can push each other on to excellence.
By showing humility and thankfulness in victory, recognising that other Christian athletes have worked just as hard and prayed just as much, but that God has set aside gifts other than Olympic success for them.
By not torturing yourself in defeat with self-loathing and shame, instead rejoicing with those who win and weeping with those who don’t.

In all this you can show the wonderful, transforming news of the gospel at work in your life as you experience joy in the midst of the funerals and weddings seen at the Olympic Games.

But what if things don’t work out as you hoped? God will be there for you and with you in the midst of the pain. As you grieve, look for Jesus.

He will give you the comfort you long for.

He will remind you that his love for you is stronger and will last much longer than your present pain.
He will assure you that he still has good things for you.

Ask his help to hold on to this truth. Because when you are hurting, it is so easy to listen to lies. You see, it’s a real danger to view God as your ultimate coach.

The lie says that if you make good spiritual choices then you will be on God’s winning team and blessed with success. But when success doesn’t happen, the lie says it’s because you have made bad choices and don’t deserve to be on the team, at least not until you can prove yourself spiritually good enough again.

In all of your sporting career you’ve probably been taught to only feel good about yourself when you’re winning, that if you lose, you’re nothing. Your coaches may have told you to use the shame of losing to motivate you to success.

Friend, you need to separate your sense of worth, your identity, from your performance. Equating significance and achievement will always leave your self-esteem at the mercy of the natural ups and downs of being a top-level sportsperson. But only love has the power to make humans feel significant, performance never will.

The good news of the gospel is that in God, you have unconditional love, not based on any of your performance. You are valued and loved not because of the talents you have or the way you compete. Your worth and value is seen in the love God proved he had for you when he died for you on the cross.

St Paul tells us:

“God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

Now, as people reconciled to God there is no condemnation, nothing can separate us from God’s love and we are adopted as God’s children - this is who you are. This is where you identity alone can be found. This is where you can find peace, even in the midst of a major loss.

Friends, enjoy these next few weeks and the amazing opportunity it is. If you feel the pain of loss, know that with Jesus pain never has the last word. His love always does. If you win, know that it is a wonderful gift of God to be thankful for, and he will make good use of it, long after you have retired, giving you decades of joy.

Solo Deo Gloria!

Adapted by Jonny Reid, for Christians in Sport, from Pastoral Care in the Olympic Village by Ashley Null in Sports Chaplaincy: Trends, Issues and Debates.

Article

Church and state

Creed

Leading

Politics

Weirdness

1 October 2025

5 min read

The one thing the new Archbishop can offer the world

How an unlikely argument between the Pope and Madonna points the way for the new Archbishop of Canterbury

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

The archbishop crowns the king.

The Catholic News Agency is a news outlet whose Instagram account posts warm pictures of the Pope, Catholic saints and so on, with heart-warming, if a little anodyne, quotations. A week or so ago, it sparked one of the most unlikely social media spats in recent times - an argument between Madonna (no, not the Virgin Mary) and Pope Leo himself.

With the announcement of Sarah Mullally as the 106^th Archbishop of Canterbury, this debate may have something to say to her as she moves from London (where I knew her well and worked with her as a fellow bishop) to Lambeth.

The CNA had posted a picture of a smiling, waving Pope Leo with the caption: “My priority is the Gospel, not solving the world’s problems.” It referred to an interview in which the Pope had said: “I don’t see my primary role as trying to be the solver of the world’s problems… although I think that the Church has a voice, a message that needs to continue to be preached, to be spoken and spoken loudly.”

The comments below were predictable, ranging from “This is a God-inspired pope!” to “The pope is irrelevant’ – and much worse. But among the 2000 or so comments was one by Madonna herself: “The whole point of teaching and learning the Gospel is to inspire people to love one another and make the world a better place. Not just with words but with actions, which is exactly what Jesus did. I am truly disappointed by this.”

Madonna has always had an odd relationship with the Catholic Church, and this was not the first time she has engaged with Pope Leo (or his predecessor Francis for that matter) online. But the story still went viral.

So - back to soon-to-be Archbishop Sarah.

She certainly faces a challenging inbox - divisions among Anglicans over sexuality that threaten to tear the Anglican Communion apart; safeguarding scandals; the ructions that being a female Archbishop will raise for traditionalists within the Church of England and with the Catholics and the Orthodox; the rise of Christian Nationalism, criticism of the Church’s commitment of £100m for reparations for slavery, not to mention the continue decline of Anglican congregations around the country.

So what should her priorities be as she starts her role?

I must confess I’m on Pope Leo’s side in this one. Unsurprisingly, the scholarly Augustinian Pope is a better theologian than the singer of ‘Like a Prayer’.

Pope Leo went on to say: “The values that the Church will promote in dealing with some of these world crises don’t come out of the blue, they come out of the Gospel. They come from a place that makes very clear how we understand the relationships between God and us, and between one another. Going back to the very basic things of respecting one another, respecting human dignity: where does that human dignity come from and how can we use that as a way of saying the world can be a better place, and we can treat one another better?”

It is the job of politicians – not the Church - to work out the precise policies and mechanisms that will deliver a better society. Yet of course that begs the question: what does ‘better’ mean? And that is where the church does have something to say.

Pope Leo’s point is that if the Church does make political interventions, they have to arise strictly from the very heart of its own faith. Christian leaders shouldn't get too involved in detailed policy recommendations, but they can outline their vision of what a good life together looks like, based on the story of the gospel itself.

The one thing that the church has to offer the world is Jesus - in other words, the remarkable, world-shattering belief that God the Creator entered human history, like an author stepping on to the stage of his own play. Yet he did it in the most unexpected way possible, without fanfare, simply showing a radical, determined, self-giving love, dying an excruciating death at human hands and rising from death as the first sign that death is nothing to be afraid of because it has been beaten once and for all.

To believe that is weird. It changes everything – life is not a search for wealth, friends and success but for holiness and wisdom. It is not a search for self-fulfilment but a radical turn away from self-centredness to a growing love for God our Maker. The poor not the wealthy are the ones who matter. We are held in the hands of a God whose love for us is endless. The universe is not impersonal and silent but pulses with love. Evil is a force trying to undo everything that God has created. Death is just the gateway to something far better for those who believe.

Tom Holland put it like this this: “If you're a Christian, you think that the heart of the entire fabric of the cosmos was ruptured by this strange singularity where someone who is a God and a man set everything on its head.”

And paradoxically, it is by focusing on that extraordinary message, that the Church can play its part in helping unravel some of the other problems, whether in the Church or the world.

Pope Leo was right. And maybe this is the advice for our new Archbishop: don’t start out by trying to change the world. Start with the gospel. It’s all we have to offer. Teach it, remind the church and the world of it. Use imagination, creativity, social media – whatever.

You may end up solving the world’s problems, you may not. The early Christians didn’t march on Rome, petitioning Caesar for new laws on migration across the empire or fairer treatment for slaves. They simply lived out their faith, creating communities that included everyone, worshipped Jesus and excluded idolatry. They taught, learned and lived the gospel. And eventually the world was changed.

So our new Archbishop will and must talk about immigration, assisted dying, poverty and other political issues, but she must make sure it’s always rooted in something Christian. Or as St Paul put it: “Proclaim the message, whether the time is favourable or unfavourable. Always be sober, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, carry out your ministry fully.”

And let the rest of us encourage her in doing that as well as she can.

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