Christianity Today: Blessed Are the Pickleball Players, by David Zahl (Author, The Big Relief: The Urgency of Grace for a Worn-Out World (How to Overcome Burnout, Perfectionism, and Life’s Overwhelming Demands by Embracing Grace, Acceptance, and Peace) (2025)):
On our way to church every weekend, my family and I pass two sets of tennis courts, one municipal and one belonging to the local university. We’ve been taking this route for more than a decade, and for the first two-thirds of that time, the courts were empty on Sunday mornings. During COVID-19, these spots came alive. Now they are crowded with people—old and young, women and men of every shape and size. They’re not playing tennis, though. They’re playing pickleball.
What accounts for the explosion? I have a couple of theories. For starters, the bar to entry is far lower than that of tennis. You can pick up the game in an hour or so, no matter your age. The fact that it’s usually played outdoors is another plus, as is the fact that it gets the body moving. Legs pump and hearts beat—but not too much. The fitness requirements are modest in comparison with tennis, where there is far more ground to cover. It also helps that pickleball is an inherently social game. Singles play is almost nonexistent, which is no small thing considering one in three older adults and one in four adolescents are socially isolated, according to the World Health Organization.
But people don’t take up pickleball primarily to ward off loneliness—or to counterbalance rising levels of “workism,” for that matter. It’s simply fun. There’s something delightful about the ball’s little pops, something faintly ridiculous about the use of words like kitchen and, of course, pickle. The newness of the game means nearly everyone is a novice, so the stakes are low. In a time when the world feels heavy, pickleball feels like a respite. Pickleball has become a thing because we are starved for play. …
The decline of play is lamentable not just for its social consequences; it is also lamentable for what it signals about contemporary spiritual conditions. A life in which play is sparse is one in which joy is sparse. This alone ought to grieve believers who consider joy a fruit of the Spirit and a core aspect of the Christian life and God’s character. More than that, Christians are bold enough to claim that God’s fundamental disposition toward the world he created, as revealed in Christ, is one of grace. …
Play describes a way of being in the world that divine grace makes possible—a way that is dynamic and delight-filled, outward-oriented yet faithful. As such, it represents an urgent if tragically undertapped opportunity for Christian witness to a world drowning in dreariness. Those who champion grace might do well to champion play as a response to it. …
Christians have long had a conflicted relationship with play. On the one hand, a church without a playground is hardly a church. Kids may go to Sunday school to learn, but there’s usually an overlay of fun. Vacation Bible school tends to be light on the “school” part and heavy on Technicolor wackiness.
And then there’s youth group, one of the last bastions of nonperformative fun available to teenagers in the age of the travel-sports industrial complex. The youth group mixer game is the height of this sort of play, a mix of silliness and exuberance pioneered by organizations like Young Life and elevated into big entertainment by Dude Perfect. Shaving a balloon, playing lights-out hide-and-seek, seeing how many marshmallows you can fit in your mouth—these things are proudly and subversively ridiculous. They do not serve the college transcript.
For adults, there are church softball and basketball leagues, watercolor classes, and movie nights. In these ways, churches prioritize play whether they realize it or not.
This unconscious reverence for play makes sense, given the references we find in the Bible. In 2 Samuel, we read of David joyfully dancing before the Lord after the ark of the covenant enters Jerusalem (6:14). Later, when Zechariah prophesies about the building of the second temple, he equates the Lord blessing Zion with “city streets … filled with boys and girls playing there” (8:5). In Proverbs, the portrayal of wisdom as being “filled with delight day after day, rejoicing always in [God’s] presence” suggests a playful disposition lies at the very heart of creation (8:30–31).
On the other hand, we have the stereotype of the Christian killjoy, embodied in Dana Carvey’s “Church Lady” skit on Saturday Night Live and rejuvenated via Angela on The Office. This is the religious person we experience as “the fun police”—serious in the extreme, the opposite of playful toward other Christians or the culture at large. These caricatures, while incomplete, have an undeniable basis in reality. …
[A] a theology of play is built on more than the absence of judgment. It also takes seriously Christ’s exalting of children. In Matthew 18:2–3, we read how Jesus “called a little child to him, and placed the child among them. And he said: ‘Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.’” There are many ways to interpret his words: as an invitation to humility, as a beatitudinal valorization of the least, as a rebuke to the social hierarchies of the day. But certainly an endorsement of childlikeness should make the list. The only thing children do is play. At least, that’s what they do after their immediate needs are provided for—and before extracurriculars get ahold of them. There is no becoming like a child that does not involve play.
Last, a theology of play depends on a robust view of the Holy Spirit. After all, the Christian cannot speak about freedom without speaking of the Holy Spirit as its engine. “The Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom,” writes Paul in 2 Corinthians 3:17. It is no coincidence that the images the Bible gives us for the Spirit—fire, water, wind—are united by their uncontrollability, spontaneity, and dynamism, three attributes that apply to play as well. As Wariboko puts it, “Play is an expression of the freedom of the spirit.”
The Spirit is not our instrument; if anything, we are the Spirit’s instrument. And the way the Spirit works in the world is not formulaic but creative, surprising, and free-flowing. This means that the Spirit-driven Christian life in the key of play looks less like a game of pickleball and more like a game of “Calvinball,” the hilarious recreation improvised by Calvin and his stuffed tiger Hobbes in the legendary comic strip of the same name. It is a made-up game where the same rule can never be used twice. …
Back to those pickleball courts. I visited the other day, paddle in hand, and the vibe had shifted. The skills were stronger, the smiles less abundant. It was clear that certain contestants had invested the game with ranking and identity. Play had taken a back seat to competition. The outing reminded me that while the playful sharing of the gospel in word and deed remains a high and worthy calling, it is also one we will inevitably foul up. But maybe that’s okay. There are no grades at recess, after all.
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