You can help to make London Games best ever

PAUL BOWTELL, Olympic Adviser for the Barking Episcopal Area, visited South Africa this summer for the World Cup. He urges churches to seize the opportunities that London's 2012 Olympics will present.

SOUTH Africa, the 'rainbow nation,' is divided like no other. We talk of legacy from the London Olympics 2012 but in South Africa the government, let alone the Church, were talking about the vision of seeing the nation healed through this major sporting event.

Yet it had happened before in 1995 with the Rugby World Cup when Nelson Mandela got behind the essentially white sport, and black and white got caught up together in the euphoria of cheering on the South African team to win the cup.

And here again in a country so divided, not just by colour of skin and a rich poor divide but also by razor wire and electric fence and fear, black and white came together to cheer on 'Bafana Bafana' (the South Africa team) and to share the excitement of the whole tournament. The underlying problem in 1995 and today is that in South Africa rugby is the white person's sport and soccer is the black person's sport – and there is little understanding of there being any other sport that mattered!

I joined a team of Church leaders from the UK looking to learn from the churches' response to the World Cup in our preparation for the 2012 Olympics.

We saw how Churches had taken the opportunities offered by Christian sports ministries such as Athletes in Action, Ambassadors in Sport and others coordinated under the South African Sports Coalition. With these organisations the churches fostered what became The Ultimate Goal – much like the UK's response to the 2012 Games, More Than Gold. They set out to train 2,000 churches to run sports-based outreach and to reach 14 million people during the Word Cup.

"Not every goal was reached," says More Than Gold CEO David Willson. "But great things did happen. This included new levels of unity among churches and some fantastic outreach to communities and visitors." The World Cup was seen as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for churches to come together and that in a country which some would say is where we were as Church decades ago.

Another UK delegate, Mark Blythe of Sports Ministry UK working in Newham, said: "It has been impressive seeing how even small churches have done what they can to use sport to link with their community." One of the things I realised as a result of this trip was that sports ministry – a ministry that is hardly recognised in this country – is such a potentially valuable facet of the Church's mission.

One programme I saw in action is called Ubabalo (or 'Grace of God') which combines the teaching of a sound value system within the context of a holistic coaching experience. For every soccer skill there is a related value taught so as to provide life coaching.

With two years to go we need to be planning now for the unique opportunity we have in 2012. Many churches in South Africa only came on board in the last few months before the World Cup but the preparation had been going on for several years. And one thing is certain, as we discovered in South Africa, whether it's the World Cup or the Olympics it will be bigger, and its impact on the nation will be greater, than anyone could imagine.

Love it or hate it I trust that we can be on the ball as Church and grasp the opportunity offered by the Olympics to make this the best Games ever with lasting transformation and legacy in our parishes.