Article

Belief

Community

Creed

Football

Sport

29 April 2025

7 min read

Liverpool's title win shows us that we’re built for community

Answering the question of who do we belong to.

Jonathan Rowlands

Jonathan is a theology lecturer and Liverpool FC fan.

Amid celebrating football fans, one stands on top of a kiosk with outstretched arms.

Liverpool fans celebrate outside their stadium.

Jonathan Rowlands.

“A Liverbird upon my chest

We are men of Shankly’s best

A team that plays the Liverpool way

And wins the Championship in May”

This is the song that has thundered around Anfield this season. A prophecy willed into existence amidst the departure of Jürgen Klopp, Liverpool’s Shankly for the twenty-first century. Surely not?

But then.

Arsenal drop points and Manchester City drop points and Liverpool don’t drop points. Again and again and again, until Liverpool needs just one more point to make the song a reality. The next game? Spurs at Anfield. At Anfield. As fate would have it, my wife and I had front-row tickets, thanks to my father- and mother-in-law booking a fortunately timed (for us, anyway) holiday and not being able to use their season ticket. (Thanks, Jeff and Janet).

As we got to the stadium the place thrummed with anticipation. Liverpool is a city that loves to sing, and to dance, and to cuddle; a city built for joy and for love. And here is Liverpool in all its splendour, drenched in glorious, league-winning sunshine, as people sing and dance and cuddle. Most people here won’t have a ticket; Anfield only holds 60,000. People are here just to be here, to be present; around for when it happens.

The game kicks off and the noise is deafening. Liverpool only needs to avoid defeat in the next ninety minutes and the league is theirs. Spurs, inconsistent all season, surely haven’t got the mettle to get anything from the game. Have they?

But then.

Spurs score. An unmarked header from a corner. As simple as it gets. Former Liverpool player Dom Solanke, no less. It was never going to be easy. 2025 marks the twentieth anniversary of the Miracle of Istanbul; if any club knows how to make a game of football difficult for themselves, it’s Liverpool. The ground turns from jubilant to tense.

But then.

Salah passes to Szoboszlai who passes to Diaz who scores. Three short passes and Spurs are carved open and all our wildest dreams have come true.

But then.

Flag’s up. Offside. No goal. Doesn’t count. Was it Szoboszlai or Diaz offside? Was it close? Doesn’t matter. The ground turns from jubilant to tense.

But then.

VAR – which I’ve always said was really good, actually, I promise – overturns the flag. Goal. Liverpool are level. The ground erupts. But there’s still work to do. While a draw would see Liverpool over the line, there’s a lot of football left to go before the ninety minutes is up

And so Liverpool press and press and press and press. They hound Spurs, hassle them, harass them. Ryan Gravenberch has the ball on the edge of their box and is almost certainly fouled. The ref – who, to his credit, did his utmost to try and ensure a game of football didn’t break out because we wouldn’t possibly want that – decides otherwise. Nothing to see here. Play on.

But then.

Alexis Mac Allister picks up the loose ball, takes a touch, and thumps it – properly wallops it – right into the top corner. Anfield shakes and I’m being hugged by someone from somewhere unseen. Now is the time when it happens, when we win the thing we’ve waited so long to win. Being a football fan doesn’t get better than this.

But then.

It does. Liverpool have a corner. The ball comes in, Cody Gakpo collects, wriggles, turns, shoots, scores. No coming back for Spurs now. Bedlam. Pandemonium. Carnage. He runs to the corner nearest us, top off, a message on his vest underneath. Daylight.

“What does his shirt say?” my wife asks. I strain, trying to see, but I can barely remember my own name at this point so I can hardly be expected to read now, can I?

But then.

There he is, just meters from us, walking back with his top still off, the message clear:

I belong to Jesus

There are two more goals in the second half and the game finishes 5-1 and Liverpool are champions. But honestly, it was all over bar the singing at half-time. And there was a lot of singing still to do. Each player worthy of their own song, the club’s past eulogised over in verse and chorus. And Liverpool’s past means they are no stranger to success. This league title means they are now indisputably, by any metric going, England’s most successful football club. (Hiya, Sir Alex, if you’re reading this).

But the Premier League has remained oddly elusive: this is only the second time the club has won the competition since it formed in 1992 (although they had won eighteen top-flight titles prior to this; there was, I’m told, still football before the early 90s). And the last league win came at the start of lockdown.

What’s the point of winning if I can’t be there to hug you and you and you and you?

Look: I celebrated that Covid League title; of course I did. But it felt odd, and the oddness has only increased as normality has gradually returned to life since the pandemic. My wife has a picture of me opening a bottle of champagne in our otherwise empty living room. The players life the trophy in an otherwise empty stadium. With hindsight, there’s an unavoidably melancholy tinge to the whole thing. You spend your life imagining what it’ll be like to win the Big Shiny Thing and then it happens when it’s illegal to leave your house (or something; lockdown is just a big blur to me at this point).

But then.

2025 rolls around and we get to do it again. Together. Even the ones who don’t have tickets are there. Everyone is there. Together. And all the while I can’t stop thinking about Cody Gakpo with his top off. I Belong to Jesus.

Gakpo’s a weird footballer, truth be told. He’s unbelievably technically gifted, rapid, and yet somehow enormous, too. He’s scored hugely significant goals for Liverpool. And yet, he’s unlikely to be anyone’s favourite player. He lacks the unflappable brilliance of Rolls-Royce Centre Back Virgil Van Dijk, the sheer inevitability and perfection of Mo Salah, or even the outright gets-you-on-your-feet electricity of Luis Diaz. He's unlikely to be named Player of the Year or to have a statue outside Anfield when he retires. But there he is: 60,000 feral scousers wrapped around his finger, the eyes of the footballing world on him. And what’s his message to them? I belong to Jesus.

I don’t know much about economics, but I’m told often that things are only worth what people are willing to pay for them. This is certainly true of footballers, anyway: one player might be worth significantly more to one club over another. But, in Christ, His infinitely valuable perfect Son, God declares that you and I are of infinite value. The One who’s judgement is perfect and faultless has decided you are worth the incalculable cost of His perfect and faultless Son. And so you are. It’s just a matter of simple economics.

I forget this so often, that I am Jesus’ gift to Himself. I find it so hard to imagine myself as a gift. But there I am. I belong to Jesus. I didn’t know what to expect when we turned up to Anfield, but it certainly wasn’t a reminder of the worth Christ has placed on my very existence. But there I am. I belong to Jesus. And so does Cody Gakpo.

The reason the Covid title feels so melancholy is that we couldn’t celebrate together. What’s the point of winning if I can’t be there to hug you and you and you and you? Liverpool’s League win, the euphoria that came with being able to share that win together with other people, gives us some slight sliver of a glimpse into the value Jesus Himself places in sharing His life with us. I reckon Cody Gakpo knows this, too. Because he knows he belongs to Jesus. He knows that he is the prize Jesus has won for himself. He is Jesus’ Premier League winning win at Anfield. Jesus wants to spend eternity with Cody Gakpo more than 60,000 feral scousers want to win the League. He wants to spend eternity with me and with you and with that person you find deeply annoying.

It’s really easy for this all to sound saccharine and trite. “Ooh I went to a football match and it was like a big party in heaven, isn’t that nice?” But there is some truth to the glibness here. Football is better together because humans are made for togetherness. And this is seen no clearer than in Jesus’ desire to win togetherness with us, through his faithful and obedient life of sacrifice.

As Cody Gakpo would say: I belong to Jesus. Or, as the Kop sang on repeat: Liverpool! Hallelujah, Hallelujah!

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Interview

Care

Change

Community

Masculinity

13 June 2025

5 min read

There’s a simple solution to society’s lost boys

Mentoring the fatherless helps and heals

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

A teenager slumped against a sofa plays a video game

Zach Wear on Unsplash .

What if nearly every major social pathology could be halted upstream? What if there was evidence to suggest that they commonly flow from one singular factor? What would we do – would we sit back and wait for the State to intervene, pointing to where we know the problem is beginning? Or would we wade up that stream ourselves, and start damning up the current?

Richard Kay and Robert Mansel Lewis have chosen the latter option. They are the founders of Chapter2, a charity that offers mentoring for boys aged seven to 16. And they have identified fatherlessness as the factor that is linked to many major social pathologies to be found in Western society today.

Earlier this year, the Centre for Social Justice brought out a report called Lost Boys. It found that2.5 million children in the UK do not live with a father figure, and that just under half of young Britons grow up with one biological parent, more often than not their mother.;

Back in 2013, the numbers were strikingly higher in low-income areas, with 65 per cent of children aged 12–16 in the bottom 20 per cent of income households not living with both birth parents – this was 26 per cent higher than in better-off households. What’s more, when children were aged three, the chance of them being in the bottom income quintile was 21 per cent if their parents were married, and a massive 81 per cent if they were in lone-parent families.

So, we can already see a clear line drawn between fatherlessness and poverty,. Chapter2 (informed by the work of psychologist, Stephen Baskerville) also point out that fatherlessness is linked to alcohol abuse, drug abuse, truancy in school, incarceration, and mental health difficulties – all among young boys, in particular.

There’s a smorgasbord of factors and influences that are making it increasingly complex to be a ‘healthy’ and ‘happy’ man right now. “You don’t even need to put the word ‘toxic’ in front of ‘masculinity’ anymore, Kay points out. “It’s just assumed. If we need to ask what healthy masculinity is, people really don’t know.”

As I’m writing this, I’m sitting in a coffee shop with ‘boys will be... what we teach them to be’ emblazoned on the side of it. It feels as though multiple destructive forces are making a beeline for young men right now, and we’re panicking. We’re manically trying to halt a fast and violent flow - but what if we waded upstream?

That’s what Kay and his colleagues are trying to do. The charity’s mission is to

bring good men into the lives of young boys who are living without a father. These men – all volunteers (?) - are committed to being there for the long term (two years, minimum) and to build a trusted friendship. That’s it: the beginning, middle, and end of the mission.

I was struck by the radical simplicity of it. Young boys get referred to Chapter2 through social services, schools, and by family members or guardians – they told me that referrals have never been something they’ve had to work hard to gather. Which is pretty heart breaking in itself.

The reality is, the fatherlessness crisis isn’t going to be solved by State-led intervention, and nor should it be. The solution lies in community living as it should do. It can be helped by the smashing down of hyper-individualism and the dismantling of our obsession with the nuclear family. It can be eased by reminding ourselves that it really does take a village to raise a child. Oh, and that we’re the village. When we spoke, Kay talked about his initial reluctance to found a charity that does this work, weary that it somehow relieves us all of our responsibility to live wide-open lives. Chapter2 is working toward a world in which the mentoring of young, fatherless, boys is normal, not a last resort.

I like that.

The longevity of Chapter2’s goal is pretty counter-cultural, isn’t it? We’re a commitment-phobic-culture. That’s pretty anti-love-your-neighbour, right? But the only way to respond to the wound of abandonment is by showing up – relentlessly, consistently, self-sacrificially. It’s the art of staying – come what may.

I was told that this takes the boys a little getting used to; that Kay and Mansel Lewis warn the men they’re training that there will come a point when the boys will try and push them away, assuming they’ll leave sooner or later and feeling more comfortable having that happen on their own terms. It’s a symptom of the abandonment wound, I guess. But the men stay, and the boys begin to trust them.

And here’s the other biggie for Chapter2: there’s no agenda. No goals. No solutions. No fixing. Just presence - consistent presence.

Again, I was struck by how foreign that must feel to the boys. Everybody else in their life needs and wants something from them – better school attendance, better behaviour at home, less trouble with the police – and rightly so. But the Chapter2 mentors are only interested in the boys’ company and trust. They’re not trying to fix them, they’re just trying to know them – if there are no measurable changes, they’ll still show up. Zero conditions.

The poet, rapper, author, and pastor, Joshua Luke Smith, often talks about a father as being someone who will

‘bind up your wounds and catch you when you fall’,

because that that’s what every young man needs – someone to care enough to do those two things. Because hurt people tend to hurt people. So, wounds need to be bound before they become ‘an excuse to wound others’. Again, it’s all very upstream, don’t you think? It’s very Chapter2-esque.

One Chapter2 mentor recently received a Father’s Day card from a boy he’d built up a relationship with. Another young boy who’d been arrested twenty or so times in twelve months eventually realised, thanks to his mentor, that it’s not worth getting into trouble. His mentor, he said, ‘is someone he can trust, he’s consistent and he knows he cares about him’.

This is community living as it ought to. Is this also the solution to the pandemic of fatherlessness?

Find out more

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