A revival of sorts has broken out in American sports in the past few years, with an uptick in attention around athletes sharing their testimonies, getting baptized, and speaking out about their faith.
From Billy Sunday to Branch Rickey to Jackie Robinson, Christianity has long had a place within America’s pastime, which continues through contemporary players like Clayton Kershaw, Tommy Edman, and Jackson Holliday. But as baseball’s cultural prominence and popularity declines, Christians in Major League Baseball don’t carry as much cultural impact as those in other leagues.
Sports ministry leaders believe that could be a good thing. More than the acclaim of a viral testimonial, Christian athletes need spaces for the slow work of spiritual formation and growth. Few people are more equipped to speak about this than Josh Lindblom, a graduate of Indiana Wesleyan and Grace School of Theology who spent parts of seven seasons pitching in the big leagues.
“Faith was always a part of my journey in baseball, but for a long time it was kind of like the shiny add-on that helped me do the thing that I needed to do in sports. If I wanted to win, if I wanted to do well, if I needed to get through a struggle, it was there for me to apply it to those situations,” said Lindblom.
“Dallas Willard has this quote, ‘Everyone receives spiritual formation, the only question is whether it is a good one or a bad one.’ As I think back over the course of my career, there were some things I had to unlearn as a Christian athlete in professional sports.”
A second-round draft pick, Lindblom got called up to the majors in 2011, but after a few seasons and some success, hit a rough patch and left the MLB to play in South Korea. After five seasons overseas, and two pitcher-of-the-year honors, he finished his career with the Milwaukee Brewers in 2022.
Paul Putz, director for the Faith & Sports Institute at Baylor University’s Truett Seminary, spoke with Lindblom about his baseball career, his current work in sports ministry, and the everyday ways that Christianity is shaping the lives of baseball players and other pro athletes.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Over the course of your professional baseball career, when did you find yourself leaning on your faith—and when did it seem to be coming up short?
I think back to when I first made my debut in the majors. I accomplished the thing that I always wanted to accomplish from the time that I was five years old throwing a sock into a couch. I remember coming off the mound that day and thinking, “All right, now what? Is that it?” I entered into this protective mode where it’s like I’ve got to play king of the hill, I’ve got to protect this thing because it’s mine. It was tiring. It was really, really tiring.
And then there’s all the stuff happening outside the white lines. I’m newly married. I’m trying to navigate how to be a good husband. My wife and I are talking about having kids, and then we have kids and I’ve got to navigate being a father. Then I’m traded four times. Then I go to Asia and play. And then we have a daughter with a congenital heart defect.
And this is where, for me, the rubber met the road. … I’m a professional athlete. But I’m more tired. I’m more frustrated. I’m more anxious. The thing that was supposed to bring me peace and joy and comfort did the exact opposite.
Was there a specific turning point or event that shifted your perspective?
I remember when I was playing in Korea, I was also finishing my undergraduate degree in biblical studies. And for some reason for my final thesis paper, I choose the book of Job. There’s a verse in Job 1:9 where the accuser asks, “Does Job fear God for nothing?”
So here I am as a baseball player. I have a daughter in the hospital, and she’s just come out of her first heart surgery. Reading that verse, I put my name in the passage. I asked, “Does Josh fear God for nothing?” If all of this were taken away, if I didn’t have the baseball career and the family and the support that I had, would I still love God? If Jesus wasn’t an add-on to help me accomplish what I wanted to in sports, would I still love him?
In that moment, I realized that the most important thing about me can’t be my sport or even my faith in a general sense. As a Christian, the most important thing about me has to be what God has done for me through his son on the cross.
Viewing faith as an add-on, like I had done in the past, causes you to miss the gospel and fall into a performance-based identity. It becomes about what you do and how well you apply faith to your life. The gospel does not start with what we can do for God. The gospel starts with what God has already done for us.
That truth needs to become deeply embedded in everything that I do: my relationships with my teammates, my relationships with my coaches, my relationship with the fans, how I go about my day and my work, everything. And that’s really where I would say that my career and my understanding of faith and sports started to change, where the focus became different.
In a certain sense, being willing to let go of your baseball career actually brought new life to it.
That’s right. The only known in sport, the only definitive thing, is that your career is going to end. But it’s the least talked about thing. We think that if we talk about the end, it’s going to take away from the present.
But it really has the reverse effect. Because if I know that every day that I show up to the field I’m one day closer to the end of my career, that should do something inside of me and transform the work that I do. Now every day is a gift and every day has a purpose.
And then I go back to the fact that Jesus is at the center, and he’s given me the gifts, talents, and abilities that I use in sports. Each and every day that I get to play baseball has new energy and excitement, and it’s divorced from the pressure to perform and the anxiousness.
This seems to connect with the practice of reflecting on our own mortality as a way to live more fully in the present. I hear you saying that for athletes, reflecting on the death of their athletic career can deepen how they engage in their sport.
Kevin DeYoung has this quote, and I’m paraphrasing, that the people who end up accomplishing nothing on this planet are the people who never realize they can’t do everything. Knowing our limits can free us to focus on what’s important, on the work that God has given me to do.
And this is where I think with sports, we’ve missed the boat. You know this better than anybody, studying the history, that in the past sports ministry has been viewed primarily as an evangelistic tool when really sport is a school of discipleship and a context of formation.
When you put sports within the broader narrative of the story that God is telling through the Scriptures, you realize that salvation is not primarily a story about me going to heaven when I die, but the God of the universe redeeming and restoring all of creation. That includes all of the human institutions, and sport is one of those.
As a Christian athlete, as a coach, as an athletic director, as anybody connected to sports, I now become a part of that story. I become an agent of redemption in the cultural context in which God has placed me. It fires me up just thinking about that.
Does that framing resonate with the athletes you mentor now?
I would say yes and no. Most athletes are not necessarily thinking in those terms, which I think is fine. It’s about meeting people where they are.
But getting excited about theology is not the main thing, discipleship is. When you think about discipleship, it’s really all about learning how to live well—how to follow Jesus. In sports, it’s taking kingdom content and applying it to earthly context.
I think my primary role, and I’m taking this from Eugene Peterson, is to name God where God has not been named before. When I disciple guys I’m trying to find points where God is working but where their eyes aren’t seeing, or their ears aren’t hearing, or their minds aren’t understanding. I want to help open them to this perspective that God is working in your sport, in your career, on your team, in your city. And we just need to be attuned to how he’s working.
What are some of those specific points for athletes, those common areas where you can “name God” for them?
If we’re talking baseball, I’m with a group of individuals every single day for eight months out of the year. The opportunities are all around if you’re willing to look for them.
Is somebody anxious about something? Is somebody falling into a performance-based relationship with their sport, with their coach, with their spouse, with their teammates? Where are they trying to strive and prove their worth apart from Christ?
It’s about slowing down to have conversations, slowing down to listen, slowing down to hear when somebody might be going through something painful, because I think one of the primary places where Jesus meets us is in our pain.
The other thing is that a lot of people think discipleship is about a formal strategic plan. Yes, we do want to move people from one point to the next, deeper into relationship with Jesus. But each individual’s story is unique. It’s about figuring out where somebody is and then helping them along the way.
How does the structure of the baseball season allow for opportunities to encounter Jesus or reflect on one’s faith?
My mind goes to liturgy. The natural rhythms of a baseball season don’t mirror the liturgy of the church, but I think the routine of a season is a great place to start making a connection with how God wants us to live our lives.
In baseball, you’ve got everything from batting practice, to changing your uniform, to the pre-game meal, to the National Anthem, to the seventh-inning stretch. How do we begin to connect those little liturgies of sport with the liturgies of faith? How can they be transformed by God’s grace so that we can meet him in those moments?
My daughter plays volleyball, and I was talking with one of her teammates last week. She has this nervous tick where she grabs her necklace and rubs it because she gets nervous. So I was like, “What do you think about when you’re rubbing your necklace?” She explained that she thinks about what might be next, what could happen—and usually, it was negative stuff. So I gave her a suggestion. I told her that every time she touches her necklace, she should say, “Win the next point.”
I wanted her to take something she was already doing, something that’s already embedded into her sports experience, and to transform that into something that is now a point of hope rather than a point of anxiety.
I think it’s the same thing with the everyday rhythms of baseball. A meal before a game, a plane ride, a bus ride, all of those things. We want to help each other transform them through God’s grace to become places where we can experience his presence.
I like thinking about the liturgies of baseball. What about those liturgies in the sport that are already connected to religion—what opportunities are built into the baseball season to practice one’s faith?
One of the challenges for pro athletes, and honestly, a point of guilt in my life, is that it’s really hard to be rooted in a local church while you’re playing. When you’re in the baseball season, you can’t regularly attend Sunday services. And even in the off-season, where you’re around for four months, it’s hard to feel fully committed.
In the past that could cause me to fall back into a performance-based identity with my faith. As a younger athlete, I’d be thinking, “Since I don’t go to church on Sunday, God might be mad at me, I might have a bad game.”
Does God want me gathering with others in a local church on Sunday? Yes, 100 percent he does. But he’s not going to take away a hit if you aren’t there. That’s not the character of God.
As pro athletes, we need to recognize the season of life that we are in and do our best to figure it out. For me, it was going to team chapel services on Sundays and being a part of a Bible study.
If athletes don’t have a strong spiritual community on their teams, my encouragement is to have the courage to start something. Make it super practical. When I organized a team Bible study, I said, “Look, here’s the deal, we’re gonna do a Bible study. I need you to read one chapter. I need you to write down one question. And I need you to write down one observation.”
It was important to make it super simple. An athlete might say “I don’t know enough about the Bible.” Good, you don’t have to! That’s exactly why we’re here, to learn together.
What opportunities specific to baseball do you see for the Christian sports movement to grow?
When you think about the length of the baseball season, how much time you spend together, the tradition and the inherent relationships that you have, and then all the rhythms and routines of the batting practice, bus rides, flights, and all of those things, you have the ingredients for connection and relationship to happen. It’s just a matter of tapping into that and being intentional with what is already present.
This is where spiritual formation is so important. A lot of athletes are speaking about Jesus, but what you don’t want is a generation that is an inch deep and a mile wide. Is there a solid foundation that this is built upon? Because when failure comes, when life happens, you want to make sure that you’ve built your life on the solid rock.
And that goes back to my own journey and experience. Is faith an optional add-on or is Jesus the most important thing? Because Jesus is the one person who has never let me down, ever.
That’s what I want to help younger players see and experience too.
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