by Fr. Nicholas Beasley

It has been a tough fall for Palmetto State football fans. Your Carolina team is 3–6; hope seems slim for their Saturday matchup against #3 Texas A&M in College Station. Your Clemson team is 3–5 at this writing, with more hope of beating Florida State this weekend—but still. Much of the fun and excitement around college football has been diminished this season in our state. We all enjoy success, naturally preferring winning to losing, and our sense of well-being can be tied to a favorite team.

I hated for my hometown Tennessee Vols to lose when I was a young man, and I had friends who were thrown into dark moods by a loss. I watched my young sons weep when their Georgia Bulldogs suffered a rare defeat to Georgia Tech, and I put them to bed in a stupor of sadness after the infamous 2nd-and-26 Tua Tagovailoa-to-DeVonta Smith game-winning pass in the 2017 national championship. Little hearts were broken.

Older now, the boys and I have much more measured responses to the failures of our teams. Many of us sense the problems of college football—a game so thoroughly monetized and elaborated that the essential athletic competition at its core is sometimes lost. The moving around my life has required doesn’t let me go to games back home in Knoxville, and our Georgia connection has withered with the passing of an older generation. I still attend and watch games on television but feel (thankfully) unbothered by the ups and downs of any team. I would wish the same for any of you still suffering with a team. The Stoics would tell you not to entrust your spirit to twenty-two twenty-year-olds on any Saturday in the fall.

In the same season, St. John’s has experienced wonderful attendance and participation; colleagues in other churches in town tell me the same. I’ve been wondering if there is a connection between tempered hopes for our football teams and higher levels of commitment and connection in the church. Don’t get me wrong—the church can let you down, as your team may have done this season. We are the Body of Christ and a human institution; as the latter, we will fail. But the Gospel will not fail, and the Holy Spirit will not leave us. The church has an eternal purpose, given to it by God, that no athletic department can claim. When our hope in any of the good things of this world is stripped away, we are given the opportunity to grasp the things that matter most—the gifts of God in Christ. This weekend marks the end of our stewardship campaign. We have received 148 pledges totaling $921,222, and more will come this weekend. It is great news that nearly 150 St. John’s households have that much hope in God’s work in the church. We believe that God is doing something here that we want to be part of, even to the point of giving a significant measure of our hard-earned money to that end. We have no lucrative beer concession, no tiers of donors rewarded with better seats and parking, no TV money. And yet people give, come, and share their lives in the ministry of Christ’s church—for mere “spiritual and intangible benefits,” as the IRS requires us to say. I am deeply thankful that God has blessed us with such gifts, which are revealed more and more when other experiences come up short, which they do, even when our teams play better than they have this fall. Join us in keeping the greater feast in the life of the church this season.

Learn more about other important updates in the latest church newsletter: The Epistle – November 27, 2025