Article

Change

Character

Sport

30 January 2025

5 min read

Rugby teaches how to live for others

The unseen players, doing unseen work, witness a truth of a content life.

Cameron Wiltshire-Plant

Cameron is training to be a vicar in the city of Leicester.

A muddy rugby player carries equipment off a pitch.

Quino Al on Unsplash.

It’s a Tuesday evening and I’ve got my face in the dirt, as usual.

About two years ago I rejoined a local rugby team for the first time since I was a teenager, and this is the result, a particularly brutal training exercise involving press ups, tackle bags, intricate running patterns, and repetitive sets. The coaches push us hard on a Tuesday so that by Saturday we can perform the same tasks at a slower speed than we knock them out in training.

Although there are the occasional jokes about the coaches’ sadistic temperaments, there is no complaining or easing off. We’re locked in on the pain of preparation for the real thing.

It’s obvious to list the individual benefits the training brings; remembering I have a body after a long day pastoring people’s spiritual needs, physical fitness, strength and conditioning. Even if these benefits seem outweighed when you get bashed up! But I have noticed that nobody is motivated primarily by these. It is the ability to be there for your mate that motivates the lads to be gluttons for punishment, the need to be fit enough to do the dirty work so the team can succeed.

At almost any time in a game of rugby, half the team are doing things that you don’t see. There is almost no glory in playing in certain positions, you never make highlights reels or win player-of-the-match. Your only success is the team’s success. No perfect bind on a scrum, well timed clear out at a ruck, or perfect positioning in defence ever makes a highlights reel.

Dan Cole is a bit of a local hero in my patch, playing over three hundred times for my team, the Leicester Tigers, and winning well over a hundred caps for England, third on the all-time list. Because of his position, playing prop, and his particular skillset, he is famous for almost never being noticed, he has scored just four international tries and never, as far as I could see, been named man-of-the-match. In fact, he was widely teased by teammates and opponents for daring to score a try for Tigers over the Christmas period. (He shoved the ball over from a yard out- not a glorious finish).

Cole doesn’t trundle around the rugby pitch for his own glory, but understands that the best gift he can give is to prefer the team to himself, doing those quiet, unseen bits of the game he excels at. After all, you don’t win all those caps without being good at something, even if most of us don’t even notice what it is.

Nothing tests my ability to die to self than when I’m flat on my back after tackling or being tackled and I need to spring up.

When I was thinking of getting back into playing, I wondered when I opened the clubhouse door, what I would find. Within half an hour of my first session I had joined the band of brothers, nicknamed ‘Rev’ forever, expected immediately to grasp the objective of working for others just as they worked for me, despite being a newbie who spent most of the time getting in the way.

Because of this, I have found the two parts of my life - trainee priest and distinctly average rugby player - to fit neatly together. What I preach in the pulpit on a Sunday and try to demonstrate throughout the week about the spiritual life is demanded from my physicality on a Saturday afternoon. Jesus called his disciples to die to their own desires so that they could better serve the needs of others: with the kicker being that in this service, true joy, happiness and contentment will be found.

This is perhaps the heart of the Christian message, that loving, genuine, service of others is so close to God’s heart that it is impossible not to find wholeness in living this way. It seems to be a lesson that has been unconsciously heeded in the sport I play; nothing tests my ability to die to self than when I’m flat on my back after tackling or being tackled and I need to spring up quickly for the next phase of the game. Or chasing the play from one end of the field to another at the end of the game to get back into the line to defend. Or a man mountain running at you with the ball, and you’re desperate not to let your end of the bargain down with your teammates by failing to tackle him.

No doubt the language for thinking about these self-sacrifices for the team given to me by my faith is helpful. But I have found the opposite to be true too. Having experienced the joy of this service to my teammates, it strengthens the value of putting my own desires aside for the good of those who need my support. When at inconvenient times family members, friends, or congregants need a meal, a visit, some advocacy, or simply to be listened to, my spirit has been strengthened for this work by the experience of playing rugby and being part of a team.

The spiritual training I undertake; reading the Bible, prayer, and confession, and the physical training; those beastly Tuesday evening sessions, are all preparation for making the choice of sacrifice over selfishness in the moments when it counts, on and off the pitch. My body and soul are learning the same lessons from multiple sources and coming to the same conclusion: serving teammates- on the rugby pitch and in life- is the way to contentment. Even more so if we find some of those teammates hard to love.

As the Six Nations rolls round again this weekend, we will see plenty of skill and flair from the players in certain positions who have certain gifts. But watch closely, and those players whose work you cannot see are the crucial cogs in the machine which the flair players gloss. Those unseen players, doing unseen work, teach the truth of a content life, whether they know it or not.

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Column

Change

Community

9 May 2024

4 min read

Reform votes: what really matters in the end

Two votes, three decades apart.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A grand dinner table set for a meal sits within a large room with paintings on the wall.

The dining room of the Garrick Club.

I was this week one of several hundred members of the Garrick Club, with many more attending online, crammed into a central London conference room to vote on whether women could be admitted as members for the first time since our founding in 1831.

We Garrick members rather fancy ourselves as a secret society – and it was a rich irony that our vote was held in the same block as the Freemasons’ Hall in Great Queen Street.

Actually, I rather like the tradition that what’s said and done in the Garrick stays in the Garrick. So this isn’t about our club’s internal wrangling and politics, beyond the now widespread news that women were voted as eligible for membership by a majority of 60 per cent.

Rather than go further into that, I want to compare it with another well-fought fight for women’s inclusion: The admission of the female gender to the priesthood of the Church of England, more or less exactly 30 years ago in 1994.

Much of what was going on in the Church then was being rehearsed again in London WC2 this week. You might call it long overdue dismantlements of patriarchal institutions, even if neither the Church nor our club would self-identify as such. No case could continue to be sustained for all-male preferment in our Church or in our club.

To their great credit, the vote was won for reform by those who decided to work together, without rancour or resentment, in preference to further division and bitterness.

There are two observations I would make of the Church precedent that may be of some comfort to my fellow club members, who may feel that nothing will ever be quite the same again. The first of these is quite a quick point. After a couple of weeks of women’s priesthood, almost everyone in the Church wondered what all the fuss had been about. Ordained women became a natural part of the priestly fabric of the Church really that quickly.

Yes, provision had to be made for those who in conscience couldn’t accept women’s ordained ministry, so the process was not without its pain. But three decades on, women priests (and subsequently and inevitably bishops) are so much part of the weave of that fabric that most church congregations feel they’ve always been there.

The second point I would make is that I know anecdotally of very many traditionalists opposed to women’s ordination who, at the General Synod, either voted for women or abstained when the result became inevitable. To have fought a last-ditch, hopeless defence could only have lastingly damaged the Church’s reputation and ministry.

To their great credit, the vote was won for reform by those who decided to work together, without rancour or resentment, in preference to further division and bitterness. My feeling is that a tranche of Garrickian votes were cast for similar reasons.

These were women at the top of their game. It’s just taken a couple of millennia for our churches and clubs to catch up.

The comparison of a gentleman’s club and gentleman’s church is an imperfect one. Members of a church could be male or female; only the clergy were strictly male. There were profound theological and ecclesiological arguments (though I don’t share them) made against the prospect of women priests by Anglo-Catholics, which aren’t available to fans of men-only clubs.

But the similarities between the institutions are founded on the principles of patriarchy nevertheless. The idea that men, in private circumstances, can behave and associate in the pretence that they are still in charge of everything, as they were in the nineteenth century, both at church and in clubland.

This doesn’t matter much when it comes to the likes of all-boy or all-girl sports teams – though it’s a delight to see Woodlanders Football Club, Lioness-cubs to a girl, beat the boys to win their cup.

It begins to matter very much indeed when the senior figures of professions and public institutions seek to associate only with their male colleagues. That’s as true of a boss who takes only the boys in the office to a rugby match at Twickenham as it is of gentlemen’s clubs. It may be patriarchy-lite, but it is rooted in the same hegemony that gave the Church its patriarchs.

It’s an irony as rich as the location of this week’s Garrick vote that the gospel is far from patriarchal in its narratives, even though the language of Father and Son so ostensibly is. The Nazarene, scandalously for his day, freely associates with women. The Jesus movement is radical in gender equality in a manner that its Church has failed down the centuries to emulate.

Jesus gives full messianic attention to a despised and shamed Samaritan woman; he saves an adulterous woman (code for prostitute) from stoning; he stops to address a bleeding woman who just wants to touch him; as the risen Christ, he gives a woman, Mary of Magdala, the greatest apostolic mission in history to tell his dispersed disciples what she has witnessed.

Little wonder women appear so prominently in the Acts of the Apostles. These were women at the top of their game. It’s just taken a couple of millennia for our churches and clubs to catch up.