The other day at lunch, my friend Chris Thomas called me out in the middle of our conversation. I was telling him about how Kanye West’s hamburger restaurant closed. He actually owns his own company called “Kanye West Foods LLC.” I made a joke about how that’s the new status symbol. Forget a clothing line or a cologne, you’re not ballin’ until you’re able to release your own reasonably priced frozen vegetable medley.
As I was saying this, he stopped me and said, “Wait a second, are you doing material right now?”
I was so caught off guard that I lied. (Why lie about something that silly? I’m not sure, but unfortunately after years of dishonest living, sometimes I still catch myself lying about stuff that doesn’t even matter.) But the truth is that I was doing material. I had a tweet in my head and wanted to see if folks thought it was funny before I posted it.
That’s how life is sometimes. I kick around Stuff Christians Like posts or tweets for a few days or weeks before they see the light of day. They bounce and bounce until I finally sit down to write them out. Other times, though, they arrive in my email like delicious digital nougat. (Not to be confused with the Digital Underground, purveyors of the Humpty Dance.)
Such was the case last week when someone sent me an email about their pastor using NCAA brackets as an outreach method to non-Christians. I am not making this up, despite paragraph three in which I admitted a struggle with lying. There are really pastors who use filling out an NCAA March Madness Brackett as a way to build community. Bumping into that, I was struck with a few questions:
1. Is that an outreach method that is also a form of gambling?
Every bracket pool I’ve been part of has involved an entry fee that the winner earns if they score the highest points. I know we give NCAA brackets a free pass, so maybe it’s not gambling.
2. What if we donated the winnings to a non-profit?
Is there a way we could use the prize purse, the bag of cabbage if you will, for social justice? Does that make it extra right? Or extra wrong?
3. What does your approach to filling out the bracket say about your heart?
Is automatically siding with the experts and picking all the safe picks mean you’re not like Gideon and willing to take long shots? Are the number 1 ranked teams like Ohio State automatically “Goliaths” and to pick one of those is to turn your back on the Davids, like Butler?
4. What’s the transition plan from NCAA Bracket to Romans Road?
I’ve heard of weirder outreach methods and with a God who used a talking donkey and a burning bush, I never want to be in a position to say what things God can’t use to reach someone’s heart. But how do you make that transition between a bracket that VCU has clearly wrecked and the undying love of Christ? Do you build a church ministries bracket that pits the youth group against the elders? Maybe the number one seed is “The church van will break down” and the number 16 is “No one will critique the sermon at lunch.”
I’m torn on this issue. Not because of the theological implications, but because I didn’t fill out a bracket this year. Not on purpose, I just got really busy and don’t yet have a core group of guys in Nashville that are doing that. Maybe I need that outreach. Maybe I need some Bracket Baptist to extend the right arm of fellowship or at least the left hand of “Are the Richmond Spiders really still in the tourney?”
How about you, did you fill out a bracket this year?
Is that a form of fellowship your church does?
