The Athletic Department as a Monastery: Building Communities of Worship, Work, and Formation

Imagine walking into an athletic department and discovering a monastery.

Not stone walls, stained glass, or monks dressed in robes with questionable hair choices. Instead, you find coaches preparing practice plans, administrators building schedules, athletes lifting weights, and teams preparing for their next competition.

There are clipboards, whistles, scoreboards, uniforms, and championship banners. There are also frustrations, disappointments, difficult conversations, and exhausted people.

It doesn't look much like a monastery.

But what if it could function like one?

For centuries, monastic communities have organized their lives around a simple conviction: every part of life can be ordered toward loving, serving, and worshiping God.

Prayer wasn't separated from work. Community wasn't separated from spiritual formation. Ordinary responsibilities weren't distractions from devotion. They were opportunities to practice it.

I've begun wondering whether we should approach our Christian school athletic departments the same way.

What if the goal wasn't simply to operate a successful athletic department that also provides opportunities for spiritual growth?

What if the athletic department itself became a community of spiritual formation?

Establish a Rule of Life

What orders your athletic community?

Ancient monastic communities didn't leave their spiritual formation to chance. They established intentional patterns for living together.

An athletic department needs its own rule of life: shared commitments that shape how people behave when circumstances get difficult in the cauldron of competition.

A couple of years ago, we experienced a season of significant unrest within our athletic community. We were winning at historic levels, but I began to realize that winning wasn't producing the kind of community we hoped to become. Our competitive success was outpacing our spiritual and relational health. Athletes were frustrated. Trust with portions of our parent community had deteriorated. Coach turnover had hit an all-time high. We needed to restore a shared sense of purpose, trust, and accountability.

We established our Athletic Commitments and a Code of Conduct. We reestablished our Athletic Handbook as a shared expression of those commitments. Recognizing that rules and regulations could only take us so far, we renewed our commitment to Sport as Worship, our approach to integrating faith and athletics. The pursuit of Biblical Excellence became central to how we defined success.

We weren't simply trying to establish better rules. We were trying to establish a better way of life together, one where our shared commitments would shape our hearts and relationships as much as our behavior.

Our mission, vision, core values, and commitments cannot simply describe what we believe. They must govern how we live. Those commitments must become visible in what people experience throughout our athletic department each day.

We began establishing a rule of life—not simply to regulate behavior, but to cultivate a community.

Practice Sacred Rhythms

What do we repeatedly practice?

Monastic life is shaped by repetition: prayer, reflection, study, worship, and work.

An athletic department is no different. It is also built around rhythms: meetings, practices, competitions, team meals, postseason evaluations, and countless conversations.

We should seek to integrate more sacred rhythms into the daily work of athletics. But how?

Intentionality.

Spiritual formation happens, in part, because we embed sacred rhythms into our work within our teams. This past year, we’ve incorporated a role on every team we’re calling a Spiritual Advisor. They’re trained and responsible for bringing prayer, Scripture, and spiritual practices into the daily work of the team. They help our teams recognize the sacred opportunities already present within the ordinary rhythms of athletics. Their calling extends beyond leading devotionals or serving as traditional chaplains. They help cultivate a team environment where spiritual formation becomes part of everyday life.

What we repeatedly practice eventually shapes what we instinctively value. If our daily rhythms are dominated by performance, comparison, and results, we shouldn't be surprised when those things become the center of our identity.

Spiritual formation is not another activity we schedule. It is the way we approach the activities already on our schedule.

Make Work an Act of Worship

For whom are we working?

Monastic traditions have long emphasized the dignity of ordinary labor as an expression of devotion.

This is the core idea of what we see in Colossians 3.

"And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him." — Colossians 3:17 (NIV)

"Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters." — Colossians 3:23 (NIV)

Life isn’t divided into sacred and secular activities. We are called to bring every activity under the lordship of Jesus and that includes athletics. While monastic communities have often been marked by a disciplined separation from ordinary society, our athletic departments must cultivate spiritual devotion while operating directly within those distractions: competition, ambition, pressure, comparison, expectations, and the relentless pursuit of achievement. We are seeking to live intentionally devoted lives in the middle of a highly competitive world.

Working for the Lord doesn't mean pursuing excellence without limits. It means pursuing excellence with the right purpose, the right posture, and the right understanding of whom we ultimately serve.

Winning exposes pride. Losing exposes identity. Playing time exposes our understanding of justice. Injuries expose vulnerability. Conflict exposes our capacity to forgive. Success exposes what we worship.

We aren't simply managing those experiences. We are helping people encounter Jesus through them. We don't need to diminish the pursuit of championships to make athletics spiritually meaningful. Excellence and faithfulness belong together, while our identity remains anchored in Christ rather than outcomes.

Our work becomes an expression of worship when both what we do and how we do it are faithfully offered to Jesus.

Become a Community of Formation

Who are we becoming together?

Monasteries aren't collections of individuals pursuing private spiritual growth. They are communities learning to live faithfully together.

Athletic departments have the same opportunity. Coaches, athletes, administrators, and parents experience joy, disappointment, conflict, correction, sacrifice, and reconciliation together.

At the beginning of this school year, our athletic department started a new prayer meeting cadence we call ‘1 on Wednesdays.’ At 1 p.m. every Wednesday, we meet in the gym to connect, pray, and share life together. Some Wednesdays we celebrate answered prayers.

Other Wednesdays we carry burdens that have nothing to do with sports. We pray for our families, our athletes, and one another. For a few minutes, the demands of running an athletic department give way to the simple gift of being brothers and sisters in Christ.

Before we can faithfully participate in the formation of others, we must be willing to be formed ourselves.

We become more like Jesus as we learn to love one another through the ordinary and difficult experiences of sport. We don't make our athletic departments more Christian simply by adding more Christian activities. We do it by ordering our shared life around Jesus Christ.

Whether we recognize it or not, every athletic department is forming people. Our cultures, habits, expectations, and relationships are shaping what athletes and coaches love, value, and pursue. The question isn't whether formation is happening. The question is whether that formation is drawing people toward Jesus.

Faithful Cultivation

We cannot manufacture spiritual transformation. But we can cultivate environments where people repeatedly encounter the truth, grace, and love of Jesus Christ.

Monastic communities often maintained gardens and cultivated land. Their work required patience, discipline, attention, and dependence upon God. Our calling in athletics is remarkably similar.

We establish commitments. We practice sacred rhythms. We pursue excellence in our work. We examine ourselves honestly. We care for one another through victory, failure, conflict, and disappointment.

We plant. We water. We cultivate.

But we cannot make anything grow.

Paul reminds us in 1 Corinthians 3:6–9 that while some plant and others water, it is God who gives the growth.

We've been privileged to witness the fruit of God's work through our Fifth Quarter ministry and throughout our athletic community. Those moments are worth celebrating, but they are also reminders that the fruit belongs to God.

Our responsibility is faithful cultivation. Lasting growth belongs to Him.

And perhaps that is the greatest lesson an athletic department can learn from a monastery: we are not simply trying to produce successful athletes and teams. We are cultivating a community where people can become more like Jesus.

What Are We Actually Building?

Someday, the trophies will collect dust. Records will be broken. Our athletes will graduate, and someone else will occupy our offices.

But the people who shared life in our athletic departments will carry something with them.

They will remember what we celebrated, what we tolerated, how we treated one another, how we responded to difficulty, and whether our devotion to Jesus was something we merely discussed or something we practiced together.

We are building more than athletic programs.

We are cultivating communities where people can learn to live in the presence of God, practice the way of Jesus, and offer their work as worship.

Maybe that's what it means to make an athletic department a monastery.

Not a place where we escape the world, but a community where we learn to live faithfully in it.

Three Reflection Questions

1. What orders our community? Are our daily decisions governed by our stated mission or by the pressure to win?

2. What are our rhythms forming? Do our repeated practices help people become more like Jesus?

3. What will people carry with them? Beyond their athletic experiences, how will our athletes and coaches have been shaped to follow Jesus?

Author:

Keith Wahl Athletic Director Valor Christian High