LAMAR – January marked the start of Grace Place’s 14th Upward Basketball and Cheerleading season, and so far every year has been a huge success.
“Before a season starts, we always pray for one soul and that’s it,” said Ray Ramage, Grace Place’s Upward League director. “Of course, the Lord has blessed us with more than that, but we’ve always said that if we could reach one soul for Christ every season, then it’s all worth it.”
Grace Place is one of approximately 2,400 churches across the country that hosts and organizes an Upward Sports league, a program that uses sports to share the message of Jesus Christ and gives special emphasis on teaching players to always do their best, to have good sportsmanship and the importance of having a Christ-like attitude.
“We keep it Christ-centered,” Ramage said. “There is a Barna Group study that says nearly half of all Americans who accept Jesus Christ as their Savior do so before the age of 13 and after that the likelihood that they will come to Christ drops dramatically. We take our mission very seriously. It’s all a matter of a church coming together for a common purpose. If the Lord’s hand wasn’t in it and we felt like it isn’t something God wants us to do, we wouldn’t do it.”
Ramage said 225 children from Lamar and other nearby Barton County towns are participating in the 2012 season, a large volume for a small country church located 8 miles outside of Lamar in the middle of a cornfield.
In fact, the league is so well-liked that the city’s youth sports basketball league has been inactive the last several years. Instead, the city refers its youngsters to Grace Place.
“Our intention was never to interfere with the city league, even though I think the amount of traveling teams that are around now has also taken away from it,” Ramage said.
Though the league is quite popular in Barton County, it has not had a significant impact on church membership. However, Ramage said that filling the pews is not the primary purpose of Upward.
“We have the privilege of planting a seed and watering it,” he said. “That doesn’t mean we necessarily get to see the harvest, though we feel privileged to harvest some and that we get to teach Christ as a result of a silly little game where you try to put a ball in a basket.”
KAYLA RINKER/contributing writer