From player to coach
Putting sports to work for the gospel
Story by Nicole Adams, Photos by Nicole Adams & Stephanie Ross
Tigist loved to play football (soccer) with her friends. Nearly every day after school she worked hard to develop her foot skills by playing pick-up games in the streets around her home in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
One day she was invited to play in a tournament at an evangelical church in the area. Her parents were hesitant about letting her attend a church other than their own, but they agreed to let her play.
During the course of the competition, she met a man by the name of Alebachu. A trained sports minister, he coached football teams as an evangelistic outreach. Alebachu invited Tigist to join his team. After a while, she started attending the evangelical church and began wrestling with the conflict between its teachings about grace and salvation and those of the church in which she’d grown up. When her family started to put pressure on her about attending, she left the evangelical church. Though she continued to play football on Alebachu’s team, she focused on the family religion.
One day Tigist became seriously ill, and her family took her to church for a healing ritual. But Tigist’s health deteriorated. She remembers overhearing her parents say, “Surely, this is the day she will die.” Then one of her neighbors, a woman with a strong Christian faith, came to visit Tigist. She asked if she and her pastors could pray for her. Feeling hopeless, and on the edge of death, Tigist accepted the offer.
Tigist was healed, and knowing it was God who healed her, she committed her life to him. She returned to the evangelical church, kept playing football, started studying the Bible with Alebachu and began proclaiming the gospel.
Building relationships takes time
Her family did not believe that the Christian woman’s prayer had healed their daughter. When Tigist refused to stop attending her new church and speaking about spiritual truths, they told her to move out. During this time her coach helped build the church community around her.
After awhile, Tigist’s mother invited her to return home. Her parents tried to control her behavior by forbidding her to attend the new church and the football training. But Tigist’s zeal for the Lord would not be thwarted, and she continued to attend both in secret.
In the last year, with the help of Alebachu and the local church, Tigist made the transition from player to coach. She selected 16 girls, aged 13 to 16, to play on her team, and then decided to give them a test. Tigist gave each member a piece of equipment to be responsible for bringing to training sessions. To her surprise, the girls arrived at the next session with all of the equipment.
Tigist enjoys leading her team and teaching them about integrity, discipline, responsibility, trustworthiness and stewardship. Asked why she chooses to coach, she responds, “When we were created, God made us for a purpose and right now I am fulfilling my purpose.”
Building relationships takes time: it requires patience, perseverance and diligence. Tigist played on Alebachu’s team for more than four years before she became a believer. Since then, he has spent three years discipling her and equipping her to use sports to share the good news of Jesus Christ with her team.
Thank God for men and women like Alebachu and Tigist who are impacting lives for eternity with the help of a football!