By Editor Bob Terry
You know the television shot of the wife of the coach pensively watching the time clock tick toward zero? Well you did not see that during Sunday’s Super Bowl because the wife of Seattle Seahawks head coach Mike Holmgren was not there. Kathy Holmgren and daughter Calla left three days earlier on a medical missions project to the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
It is not that they did not care about the game. They took a satellite telephone so Mike could call them as soon as the game was over. But the family decided the medical missions project was more important that Super Bowl XL.
Kathy, a nurse, and Calla, an obstetrician, are part of a medical missions team working in a hospital operated by the Evangelical Covenant Church, the denomination to which the Holmgrens belong. In fact, Kathy worked in the Congo for about a year and planned to be a medical missionary, but the decision to marry Mike changed all that.
Last October, Kathy’s birthday present from her husband was a trip back to the Congo as part of the missions team. The conflict with the Super Bowl never dawned on the family, they said. But when the possibility of Seattle playing in the biggest football game of the year became a reality, the family decided to continue with the missions trip plans.
Missions was more important than football.
Given the Holmgren family history, that is not too surprising. Mother and four daughters all graduated from their denomination’s college in Chicago and have been benefactors of the school, helping to fund the Holmgren Athletic Complex.
Holmgren demonstrated the importance of faith to him and the Seattle Seahawks through the team’s chaplaincy program. Karl Payne, an ordained Baptist minister in Seattle, not only conducts home locker-room services for the team but he also travels to away games to provide spiritual counsel. Payne and his wife traveled to Detroit on the Seahawks’ team plane last week. That is how much he is a part of the team.
Seattle’s Shaun Alexander and Matt Hasselbeck are known for their outspoken Christian faith. Payne told other Christian players on the team that they will have a chance to speak about their faith. “I promise, if anybody says something controversial, it will get out, so why shouldn’t God’s Word get out as well?” Payne said.
But Seattle doesn’t have a monopoly on Christian players. Did you see the tape on the shoes of Pittsburg Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger? The tape declares “PFJ” (Play for Jesus) and that added attire provides the second-year star ample opportunity to talk about his relationship with God through faith in Jesus Christ.
Pittsburg coach Bill Cowher, like Holmgren, is a believer in Jesus Christ and a supporter of the team’s chaplaincy program, according to a Baptist Press report.
Jay Wilson, Steelers chaplain for the past 11 years, told the Christian players on the team that “a Super Bowl ring won’t be worth what a testimony to Jesus in public will be.”
Faith in Jesus Christ wasn’t hidden at all during the run up to the Super Bowl. At the annual Super Bowl Gospel Celebration on Friday before the game, players from both teams talked about their relationship with Jesus Christ. At a special luncheon, Pat Summerall, a Fox TV announcer, shared his testimony about accepting Jesus in his late 60s. Athletes in Action, another Christian group, sponsored a breakfast at the NFL headquarters hotel that included the presentation of the Bart Starr Award for Christian character in professional football.
Then there was the one-on-one witnessing. Christian vendors passed out tracts in souvenir bags and used the opportunity to do street witnessing to football fans from across the nation.
Who won the game? The outcome really isn’t that important. After all, the Super Bowl game had been played 39 times before the Feb. 5 game and another will be played next year.
The real winners were the players who really did “play for Jesus.” The real winners were the players who seized the opportunity to tell national press representatives that Jesus Christ was the most important thing in their life, more important than a football game. The real winners were the people who prayed to receive Jesus as Lord and Savior as a result of personal witnessing or reading one of the gospel tracts.
The real winners were the Christians encouraged by the testimony of modern-day culture heroes willing to take a public stand for Jesus Christ.
And the real winners were hundreds of patients in a Congolese hospital who benefited from the healing touch of a nurse and a doctor, a wife and a daughter, who knew missions was more important than a football game — even the Super Bowl.
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