In today’s USA Today “Opinion” section, Tom Krattenmaker, who describes himself as a “non-evangelical progressive religion writer from the People’s Republic of Portland,” talks about how his recent visit to the home office of Athletes in Action, the athletic outreach program of Campus Crusade for Christ, changed his perception of evangelicals. He expected the people he encountered in Xenia, Ohio, to be “insular and arrogant.” Instead he found “Hospitality. Curiosity. Respect. And surprising amounts of incipient change in the air.”

Krattenmaker goes on to report:

Several AIA staffers I met voiced a desire to change the way Christians are perceived. “Many Christians are uncomfortable with where our culture is going, so they retreat from it,” said Doug Pollock, AIA’s evangelism director. “Instead of being ‘in the world but not of it,’ as the Bible stresses, they lob truth grenades over the walls of the fortresses they’ve created.”

Some spoke of their hopes for broadening the mission of sports ministry such that it might bring a voice of Christian conscience to the moral issues in and around the game — bring “salvation” to sports, as Pollock put it. The idea: Go beyond evangelistic outreach to athletes and those who watch them (the clear focus of sports ministry the past half-century), and help save the soul of sports itself, so to speak. What a constructive and astonishing development it would be if AIA and similar ministries took up this mantel and devoted themselves more seriously to such issues as doping, cheating and race issues in and around sports.

Although Krattenmaker makes excellent points about the changing attitudes of evangelicals, he needs to understand that while evangelicals strive for better balance in how to approach cultural and political issues, there is no compromise when it comes to following God’s will for our lives, which is revealed to us through the Bible.

Krattenmaker concludes his piece by offering this advice for his fellow progressives: “For those of us in blue states or blue states of mind, it might be useful to journey to places such as Xenia, Ohio, if only metaphorically. We’ll probably return home with a less black-and-white idea about those crazy evangelicals.”