When I was hired for my church’s city ministry, my boss’s first words to me were, “You should be in the church office as little as possible.” His second words? “You need to be with the sports teams as much as possible.”
Here was (and is) our church’s strategy for inner-city ministry: Go coach a sports team.
It’s actually the same strategy my dad used to plant churches when I was growing up — and it seems to work. In fact, weeks ago, Shades Mountain Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, was able to celebrate its hundredth inner-city baptism in the last three years. One hundred lives, one hundred stories, one hundred souls — transformed by Jesus Christ.
So, I decided to ask my former boss, Myles McKee, if he could walk me through how God inspired him, as a recently born-again college student, to start using sports as a means for gospel unity in “the most segregated city in America.” He gave me four steps that anyone can take.
