Player Intro
Brad Wos is the Director of Multi-Cultural Ministries for the Evangelical Free Church of America; he has worked in 37 countries, across 5 continents in community development and coaching. He has worked across 4 World Cups and 1 Olympics, serving the invisible people in cities who are often passed by, even in one of the most visible times of that city's life.
I had the privilege of seeing Brad at work leading sport ministry in South Africa in the weeks leading up to the 2010 World Cup hosted in Cape Town. His heart for people, especially those who are marginalized, and sincere care and love for those around him, have led to strong relationships and connection with those who get to interact with him.
The full audio of our interview is below. If you prefer to read through Brad's thoughts, keep scrolling to follow along as Brad explores the intersection of sport and character growth.
Gameplan
pD: So Brad, if you would, please tell me a little bit about how you got into sports ministry, and some of the background on why would we use sports to try to connect with people in ministry?
BW: Well, good morning, Isaiah, it's great to be with you, and as I was just discussing, I have great memories from ten years ago when you were in South Africa with us, 2010 World Cup; can you believe that? What an exciting time that was, and hosting the World Cup Soccer Tournament in Cape Town, South Africa. It was great to have you with us, it's great to be with you today.
Isaiah, my background is that I was born and raised in the Twin Cities, Minneapolis, Minnesota. My dad was an All-State basketball, baseball, football player who was my coach. So I did the same thing, I grew up playing traditional sports, baseball, basketball, football. I did well in them, but when I was about ten years old, I guess it was younger than that, eight or nine, growing up in Minnesota, hockey became the sport, my sport, and so my dad kind of battle with that a little bit, like "Why are you playing hockey?" But we went on and won the 10th grade city championship. And I loved hockey, but I also began to hear a lot of people in high school living out their glory days, like Bruce Springsteen sings about; they live out their glory days of what they did in high school in baseball, football, basketball.
So I began to go a little bit more independent, and I began playing tennis and skiing; I was on the cross country ski team, and I started doing a lot of endurance. I started biking and started skiing long distances and running long distances, and I loved it. I really enjoyed endurance, and so I began doing a lot more of that. But I also came to faith in Christ in college, and even though I played competitive tennis in high school, and began playing competitive tennis in college, I really wanted to make disciples.
I caught the vision of 2 Timothy 2:1-2. And so, Paul trains Timothy, who trains faithful men, who teaches others to be strong in grace. So I began investing in the lives of people and seeing disciple-making become really my passion and heartbeat. So I've been a coach some, but it wasn't until South Africa that I really began to see that priority of sport ministry.
So in 2008, I was asked to be the global sport director to help organize and work with World Cup Soccer. Before that, I had been serving as a chaplain in sport with cricket, rugby, and coming alongside and discipling other athletes, but it really was in 2008 when I was asked to be the global sport director to help organize and work with the World Cup in Cape Town when it really took off, and I got involved with a ministry called International Sport Coalition, which is now called Ready Set Go, and the whole thing is about disciple-making.
We coach the whole person
The real theme, Isaiah, is about whole-life coaching, so we don't just coach the player, we coach the whole person. So we want to see that whole person develop as a leader; we want to see them develop as a holistic person, as a whole person. So often what we do is: we value somebody because they have strong abilities in golf or football or rugby or cricket, and we don't value them as a person, as a whole person. So how do we help coach that whole person?
That whole life coaching was called Ubabalo; Ubabalo is the isiXhosa word for "grace." So it's a grace-based coaching; so I became a master coach, and I started coaching others, and we saw a movement. I worked with the national team and the national coach, and we saw a movement of being able to coach, to train coaches, so that Ubabalo coaching became a key theme for us. I also worked in chaplaincy; as I mentioned before, I had been a chaplain coming alongside of players, and I had done that for many years in university ministry; we had been university ministers at University of Cape Town and Cape Peninsula University of Technology in South Africa.
My wife and I have five kids, and we raised them in South Africa for thirteen years, from 1998 to 2012, and so that whole theme of sport ministry really began to take off in my life in 2008. So sports has always been part of my identity, Isaiah, but learning to live out sonship in my identity as a whole-life coach really took off learning how to live that out in South Africa.
Umunt, Ngumuntu, Ngabantu
So let me just close with your question with a summary statement that we learned in South Africa. If you go to downtown Cape Town or the waterfront of Cape Town, you'll see the Nobel Square where the four statues of the Nobel Prize winners are; at the foot of that Nobel Square is a saying: Umuntu, Ngumuntu, Ngabantu, which means that "a person is a person because of people." In isiXhosa, the language of Nelson Mandela, the language he spoke: a person is a person because of people; and so there's that idea of "we instead of me:" how do we work together in community? And so that's really a key theme of sport ministry, is team-building.
I've seen that carry on as we've come back from South Africa, working in ministry here: how do we build teams in such a way where you're helping that whole person to develop and be the best that they can be? That's the theme of disciple-making: how do I pour into the lives of others so that they in turn will invest in others who will invest in others? So I currently serve as the multi-cultural director of the Evangelical Free Church, which means I plant churches among the African, the Asian, Hispanic, African-American communities, and we seek church-planting movements; so I invest in leaders, I train leaders, who in turn will plant churches and make disciples amongst all people. So that gives a summary, hopefully that answered your question.
pD: Yeah, absolutely. As you're talking about disciple-making and investing in the whole person instead of just the sport aspect of their lives, how did you yourself have to change, or what habits did you have to learn in order to become this master coach who can invest in others who return on that investment?
BW: You know what, I think one of the core aspects of what God did in my life, Isaiah, before I left for Africa, was to understand identity. It's so easy for us, in our culture today, to find your identity in how well we perform, or what you've done lately, and that treadmill just gets tiring.
So how do we really find our identity? Well, for me, what I found my identity in was being rooted in a relationship with Jesus Christ. And that relationship of identity is really summarized in the word "sonship." So if I look at Galatians 4, the first seven verses, it speaks of: at the appointed time, Christ came, and he came to help me understand that I am a son of the living God. What an amazing thing that a sinner like me, who was once enslaved to sin, is now free to obey and be called a son of the living God.
What are you thinking about?
So I think number one is identity in sonship, and then, number two, one of the key things that we know in sport, 90% of most sports are all mental. So when I'm coaching or serving as a chaplain and working with people, coming alongside, one of the key things that we go back to is meditation: "What are you thinking about?" And that discipline of meditation, it goes back to identity, but identity will help flow out of you that idea of: regardless of your performance, you're loved, you're accepted, you're welcomed into the family of God. And that can't be removed. Yes, you've been adopted as His son, but it's not like if you don't perform well, you're out. You're still welcomed as part of his family.
So meditating and understanding, concentrating on what you're thinking about. It's like what Tiger Woods talks about grooving your swing; how do we groove our thought life as well? And so often, there's a lot of negativity that will come into a lot of athlete's lives, where they have to block and put off the old to renew their mind and put on the new. And that's a key theme from Ephesians 4:22-24 that we talk about; what are some struggles that you're working through in your thinking that is blocking you from being the best that you can be?
We instead of me
So I would say number one is identity, number two is meditation and what you're thinking about, but then number three is that sense of "we instead of me." You see, a lot of players that will perform well, it all becomes about "me," about them, instead of being a team player. So I would say those three habits for me, in my life... I can run hard, and I can do that well individually, but how do I bring people with... how do I get myself to such a point where we work together as a team? So I would say those three characteristics of identity, meditation, what you're thinking about, grooving your thought life, grooving your swing, and then number three is teamwork, and working out of "we" instead of "me."
pD: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for that response. I have a bit of a corollary to what you were talking about. In a lot of your coaching philosophy and mindset, it does seem like it's very grounded in your identity as being a Christian. I don't know if you did end up working with non-Christian athletes, but how does that end up applying when someone does not necessarily share the same beliefs as you?
BW: I appreciate that question because I absolutely love working with athletes from other backgrounds, other cultures; that's a key part of my role as a multi-cultural director. So I've worked with a lot of Muslims, a lot of Hindus, a lot of Buddhists, and I coach with them. And so we saw a lot of that in South Africa as well: a lot of cross-cultural sport, relationships, and friendships. I have very good Muslim friends, and I go to the mosques. We have 37 mosques here in St. Louis, and I meet with the imams at a couple different mosques, at least I was before COVID hit, and we would have monthly dinners together, we'd play sport together, we'd have our Cup of Nations, which is a big soccer tournament here in St. Louis, that we've been running for ten years, that has seventy different nations that will come and we build relationships. The Bosnians have won that tournament, we've got 80,000 Bosnians in our city of St. Louis, so we've got one of the largest population of Bosnians here in St. Louis.
The values of the Cup of Nations
One quick story, I've got a friend, Tenimbe, who's from Ivory Coast, and he's Muslim, one of fourteen kids, and he would come alongside with me, I've got an inflatable soccer field I take around to schools, and I coach at schools and areas that don't have a lot of privilege, and so I'll work in different parts of the city, some of the schools, and Tenimbe will come with me and coach with me. And he calls me Baba, he calls me Dad, he calls me Father, he says "there's no one who really understands me like you," and so I coach in Tenimbe's life as a friend, and I love him as a friend, and I'm thankful for many of my Muslim and Hindu friends. I play and coach cricket, obviously from South Africa, cricket is very important, so I coach cricket, work with Hindus here in St. Louis, we have 30,000 South Asian Indians here in St. Louis, so cricket's a big part of it.
Brad's story of his relationship with Tenimbe
So building those relationships, I think are key in sport, Isaiah, becomes a way for us to enter into community, to enter into other worldviews in a way where we learn from one another. Even when you came to South Africa, we talk about these three L's of: listening, learning, and loving other cultures. But I've added two more since you've come to South Africa, and this is how I'm growing since the eight years we've come back from South Africa. The other two I would add would be to "lament" and to "leverage."
So there's a theme of lamenting, especially as we've gone through a lot of racial tension in America this last year, how do we really lament and walk alongside our African-American community that has been grieving for years? How do we really do that? And how do we leverage our relationships in such a way that we build community together? And we really work at that. So intentionally, we're working on a Missouri covenant here in St. Louis where we're figuring out ways we can bring down some of the walls that have been here. I mean, the Dred Scott decision was here in St. Louis, and how can we bring down some of those walls in that history that has divided people, and bring people together? Sport is a strategic way to do that.
pD: That makes a lot of sense. Let me pivot a little bit, and ask you about a significant challenge that you've faced, either in sport specifically or in life in general. How did you end up facing that challenge?
BW: Isaiah, I'm a biker. I love to bike, I bike long distance, I generally bike metric centuries, so I bike a lot of miles. So I was biking in May of 2019, and my kids were passing me. They were like "Dad, what's going on with you? We don't ever pass you." And I went in for a routine physical May of last year, May 2019, and ten days before my daughter got married, I found myself in the hospital, and I was diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia. And my white blood cell count was 644,000, the average white blood cell count is 10,000. And the doctor was like "How are you even biking?" Then you wonder why my kids were passing me.
My strength, I thought I was just tired from a lot of travel, but my spleen was three inches too big, and the doctor said "We're checking you into the hospital." I said "Ah, I've got a big event going on this weekend with sport, I can't do that. I've got a tournament going on; how about next Tuesday?" He said "No, you don't understand. If you had gone off your bike yesterday, you would be dead. You would have ruptured your spleen."
So the reality of that sinking in at the age of 55 was helpful for me to see that I've been running hard most of my life, and never really been in the hospital at all, and all of a sudden I'm faced with chronic lymphocytic leukemia. And in God's providence, I was put on the number one clinical trial in Washington University here in St. Louis, and November 20, I was given word after eighteen months of being on this clinical trial, that I'm in complete remission. I had a four-inch needle put in my back for a bone marrow biopsy, not much fun if anyone's had those.
In everything give thanks
But I think suffering is a key theme that we talked about, that Africa taught our family to suffer well, and to learn to be thankful in the midst of suffering, in the midst of difficulty. In 1 Thessalonians 5, it says to rejoice always, to pray without ceasing, in everything give thanks, for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus. So Africa really taught us that, it taught us a theology of suffering, and learning to be thankful in the midst of suffering. So regardless if I had a positive or negative response in results, learning to be thankful, and learning that in the midst of that suffering, that God has a plan. So he's opened up incredible doors for me to come alongside others who were also suffering with cancer, and I'm in remission right now, but at the same time it gives me the opportunity to be able to walk alongside and understand what it means to suffer.
pD: And just asking you to elaborate a little more, why was it important for you to face that particular challenge?
BW: Yeah, that's a great question. I think recognizing it's God's plan for my life, how can I be obedient to him? So often we try to come up with our solutions and plans, and what he calls me to is to follow him, he says to "follow me, and I will make you fishers of men." And so, to be willing to do that, to follow him, and not run ahead of him, and for me to try to figure that out.
But to learn to follow, I think that's a key part of being a team player. There's times in my life when, as a leader, it's easy to try to figure out a plan and do it myself. But a key thing for me is learning to follow, and modeling suffering well for my family. You know, for the five kids, seeing Dad go through this, the best disciples we can make are the kids the Lord gives to my wife and I. My wife and I celebrated thirty years of marriage this year, and we're thankful for the privilege to be able to raise our kids; we've got one left who's a senior in high school, and it's been a great joy to be able to raise them, but also to model for them what it means to be obedient.
How do I live what I really believe?
Joe Novenson and I were talking recently, and he talked about "dependent weakness," and learning to live out a dependent weakness. My oldest son was recently in a work accident where his fingers were crushed in a large vat, and him and Joe were talking on the phone, and to hear my own son talking about his dependent weakness was a joy for me because it helped me to see that the most important thing in life is not what we teach, but more is often caught than taught. And how do I live that out, how do I live what I really believe? And that's what it comes down to, living what I believe.
pD: Thank you for sharing all that, Brad. That's all the questions I had for you; was there anything you wanted to add or elaborate on?
BW: Well, Isaiah, I wanted to say what you're doing as well as speaking towards player development. What I'd like to say in closing is just, seeing people develop, again, that idea of whole life, of player development, how do you develop as a whole person? And it becomes so easy for us in our American culture to maybe get structured on one specific item, and we become experts on one thing.
There is a bigger story
But looking at life in a big picture and recognizing in that big picture of life, that God has a specific plan for you to enter into his story. And in our American culture, it becomes about us, and me, and my story, but there is a bigger story, there is a bigger picture, and that bigger picture speaks to the fact of what Romans 5:8 says, that God demonstrates his love toward us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
So what I'd like to say is that all of us fail, all of us fall short, all of us miss the mark, but in the midst of us falling short, in the midst of us failing, where do we go with that? Where is our solution for that brokenness and that failure? Especially in sport, it becomes easy to do well and to be a bubble boy, where you see certain athletes, certain quarterbacks, who are having a great year, and next year they're off. It could be the same with golf: one year you're playing extremely well, the next day you're playing terrible. So where do you find that stability, where do you find that hope, where do you find that life of joy in the midst of, not your circumstances, but something outside of you?
And I just want to say that I personally have found that through the person of Jesus Christ, and the power of the Holy Spirit that he gives to us to live out of the Holy Spirit by meditating upon his word; letting the word of God dwell within you richly. So, Psalm 1 speaks of: "his delight is on the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night; he will be like a tree firmly planted by streams of water."
And I remember in high school, just often even battling with playing tennis, I'd be way up ahead on other people, and beating them 6-0, 6-0, and then all of a sudden mentally just giving up, and thinking, "Wow, how did I lose when I was way ahead?" And there's that mental edge that I think, in sport, is so essential, and meditation is a key part of that.
So getting our thinking right is essential in understanding that, in the midst of failure, in the midst of messing up, in the midst of not performing like I'd like, that there is a hope, and that hope, I've found in the person of Jesus Christ, and through his word, it helps me to meditate. So Scripture memory and meditation has been important for me, Isaiah, and I just want to close with that, that that may be a nugget that some people will take away, in learning how to meditate on Scripture while you are performing, playing soccer, biking, or swimming, or whatever it may be, Psalm 1 says that there's a success in that, learning how to meditate well on Scripture while you're playing.
Check out Brad's blog
For more Sports Ministry resources, take a look at ReadySetGo