St Silas has an excellent football team, which plays in a local church league. The team has been doing very well this season and is currently joint top of their division.
I enjoy hearing in church and reading in blogs like Graham’s and Darren’s about how the team gets on. It’s not only a well-organised league and a seemingly very high standard of play, but it also creates great outreach opportunities as apparently not all players are Christians (something which I believe applies to the other teams too).
However, one thing I’ve always been intrigued about is the league St Silas play in – the Strathclyde Evangelical Churches League. Why is the league strictly limited to evangelicals, to the exclusion of churches that might define themselves as liberal?
Being a raving liberal nutter myself, you’d think I might be offended. But instead, I am quite sure there are very valid reasons why liberals aren’t allowed to complete in organised church football.
101 reasons, in fact…
- Liberals would allow any red-carded player to stay on the field as long as they wanted.
- Liberals would shuffle the goalposts along the line to make it easier for strikers.
- After a defeat, a liberal team would argue they should have a second chance to win the tie.
- Liberals would dispute that there should be such a limited definition of “goal”.
- Liberals would introduce rolling substitutions, saying it enables constant renewal.
- Footballing talent would count for nothing in a liberal team – everyone deserves an equal chance of playing, no matter how awful they are.
- When defending attacks down the wing, liberals don’t focus on the cross as much as evangelicals.
- Liberals would want to keep reinterpreting the offside rule every season.
- Liberals would be at a huge advantage on the field because evangelicals would want to stop to pray for their “misguided” opponents at every tackle.
- Relegation would be abolished, and everyone would get promoted, regardless of results.
Your suggestions welcome…
Thursday November 9 2006 at 10:04 am |
11. Presumeably there could also be liberal referees….
What chaos!!
Friday November 10 2006 at 2:05 am |
12. Liberals would have a huddle to decide if in fact the ‘Ball’ was relevant to the game,
while the Evangelicals had a kick obout awaiting the decision.
Tuesday November 14 2006 at 9:33 am |
13. Strikers charging to shoot at their own goals, because we’re all really going in the same direction anyway…
Tuesday November 14 2006 at 9:33 am |
14. There would be (argh!) women playing
Tuesday November 14 2006 at 9:34 am |
15. The fans on the sidelines would be cheering both sides
Tuesday November 14 2006 at 9:36 am |
16. The goalkeeper would welcome the ball into the goal
Tuesday November 14 2006 at 9:38 am |
17. The evangelicals would keep putting the ball over the goalposts, trying for more conversions.
Tuesday November 14 2006 at 9:39 am |
18. The liberals would want other teams to join in.
Tuesday November 14 2006 at 9:40 am |
19. Wingers would be confused by the relevance of the cross.
Tuesday November 14 2006 at 9:46 am |
(oops. 19 is a rehash. Still, we may struggle with this one, si)
Tuesday November 14 2006 at 4:33 pm |
Nice work Beat! Yeah, on reflection I don’t think this is the easiest 100 Things I could have kicked off (no pun intended). Next one will be nice and simple, perhaps!
Wednesday November 15 2006 at 12:58 am |
A Liberal my claim: “there are many other ways to score a goal”. Even though there is only one written in the rule book
Wednesday November 15 2006 at 4:11 pm |
21. Liberals would seek to evangelize the non-Christian players
by befriending those with similar degrees and interests to themselves.
Friday November 17 2006 at 2:07 pm |
22.Liberal cheer leaders would chant in Latin from the sideline.
This would piss off the Evangelicals, who on their next encounter
would enlist Pentecostals to sing in tongues from the opposite sideline.
23.Liberals having resolved all issues get stuck into the game
and resoundly beat the Evangelicals.
The evangelicals having grossly underestimated
the Liberals tenacity of will to win.
Monday November 20 2006 at 2:22 pm |
Nice work Jimmy! Thanks all for the contributions.