AMATEUR HOUR: ON CHURCH FOR THE LOVE OF GOD

Amateur Hour: On church for the love of God

I recently watched Carson Lund’s 2025 film Eephus. (1) It’s a beautiful and sad movie. Its beauty comes from its deep love for baseball. In its slow pace, crude humor, and colorful visuals, Eephus brims with the eccentricities that make the sport America’s pastime. There’s the obsessive scorekeeper Franny, the compulsive tobacco chewing, and the quasi-mystical aura that surrounds the titular pitch — which tricks batters by appearing to float in the air. These combine to make Eephus’ depiction of baseball feel so real.  

Eephus’ sadness arises from this deep love, too. The film depicts the last game between the Riverdogs and Adler’s Paint, two beer-league teams in the 1990s in small-town Massachusetts. Their beloved Soldier’s Field will soon be paved over, not for a strip mall or fancy subdivision, but a middle school. It’s hardly an objectionable tradeoff for a community. The sorrow shot through Eephus is that of time passing, of one era giving way to another. It’s a mournful yet contented sadness, but sadness nonetheless.

At the end of Eephus, I was struck with my own, slightly different kind of sorrow. When I was younger, I loved baseball. Around fifth or sixth grade, I, like Franny, was obsessed with the sport. I spent my springs playing baseball, not well, but with delight. I chomped on sunflower seeds and relished the retro peculiarities of wooden bats and stirrup socks. Summers were for playing lazy games of Wiffle Ball with neighborhood friends and winters for reading up on baseball lore. Baseball was a deep well, and one into which I dove headfirst. 

My sorrow, then, was not at the loss of my enthusiasm for baseball, but at that lost feeling of being caught up in, lost within baseball’s depths. Watching Eephus, I was moved by this depiction of mostly middle-aged men actually playing baseball. They are far from professional. Their athletic endeavors, for instance, are aided by many a Narragansett Lager. Their game is a slow-going affair, stretching into the cool autumn twilight. But, Eephus makes clear, baseball is real and meaningful to these guys because they have invested their precious time and energy and put their very bodies into the game. For me, however, reviving my interest in baseball would likely be more about consumption — following a professional team and watching games — than participation. There is something sad in that realization. 

In the introduction to his book In Good Company: The Church as Polis, the American theologian Stanley Hauerwas compares the church to the game of baseball. An apt and provocative comparison, it stems from C. L. R. James’ observation that “The aesthetics of cricket demand first that you master the game, and, preferably, have played it, if not well, at least in good company.” (2) The same is true, says Hauerwas, for his preferred sport, baseball, and his primary community, the church. 

But there is a problem. Baseball, he writes, often “seems more ‘real’ than church” to us, since “baseball asks more of us and is accordingly more fun.” (3) The church, I think, can become more “real,” challenging, and “fun” by resisting the trend toward professionalism and the consumerism to which this trend confines non-professionals. To do this, we, as the Body of Christ, should embrace two deeply countercultural dimensions of our liturgical and communal life: its necessary inefficiency and seeming uselessness.

The professionalizing trend referenced above is not isolated to sports. As my church music professor, Dr. Mark Ardrey-Graves, often reminds us, music has witnessed much the same shift. Before the rise of recording technology, the way to listen to music was to make music. Friends and family would gather around. Perhaps they would have instruments. At the very least, they’d have their voices. They would play and sing and create something together. This was a fundamentally human endeavor. 

Today, churches are one of the few places where people gather to be people, to share space with others in worship and community life. In the pews and in parish halls, Christians pray, sing, work, play, cook, eat, study, share, grieve, and cry, together. Like the slow-moving game at the center of Eephus, this Christian life is an amateur endeavor. To be amateur in this sense is not to be amateurish, but to do something for the love of it. Some may be better at, say, cooking or singing. Some, like pastors and priests or music directors, may even get paid. But all do well to remember this life is primarily for amateurs. It’s not to be made a means to gain anything but God alone. 

At the heart of this life is a journey. Psalm 84:4 calls this journey “the pilgrims’ way.” The Roman Catholic monastic Fr. Simeon describes it as the “adventure of the soul’s quest for God and God’s quest for the soul.” (4) This adventure, undertaken with others, is not an efficient one. It is more akin to an arduous yet rewarding hike — climbing “from height to height” — than a quick trip by car or plane. (5)

Kosuke Koyama, a Japanese Protestant theologian, draws on observations of a Buddhist pilgrimage site, to make a similar point. To arrive at Myanmar’s Shwedagon Pagoda, worshipers take a “long slow climb” to the mountaintop temple, dripping, by hike’s end, with “liturgical sweat” from “the hot afternoon sun.” Koyama concludes that, “The holy must be approached slowly, carefully, humbly and even painfully, that is, liturgically (inefficiently).” (6)

In Koyama’s estimation, liturgy is necessarily inefficient. It involves the whole person. To participate, one must hand over their body, with all its aches and pains, sweat and tears, distractions and irritations. All are taken up into God. The same is true of the work of love — which requires sharing heavy burdens and wasting time to comfort another — and is so central to Christian community. The church’s very life, then, stands in contrast to technology’s promises of convenience and efficiency as well as capitalism’s assurances of “return on investment.” 

From the vantage point of these dominant ideologies of American culture, liturgical life has little to no value. At best, it gives overworked people a chance to “recharge” and teaches moral values which make “good citizens.” But, beyond that, the church’s common life and liturgy is “useless.” It’s a waste of time, a poor use of resources, neither producing nor consuming any of the valuable commodities upon which the economy depends. 

Such a hollow view is, of course, misguided. It completely neglects the fullness of the church’s life, which leads us directly into the heart of God, where, in the words of a Lenten collect, “true joys are to be found.” (7) This perspective is a bad fruit of what Thomas Merton calls “the awful frustrated restlessness of our world obsessed with ‘doing.’” But, following Merton, the church also has an opportunity to reclaim this charge of uselessness. As he suggests in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, “We have not yet rediscovered the primary usefulness of the useless.” (8)

The useless, for Merton, is not purposelessness, but the very “sense of being,” the “capacity to live for the sake of living and praising God.” It is the “‘Eucharistic’ spirit.” (9) It encompasses many of the actions — vital to the church’s life of prayer, praise, and service — that connect us to what it means to be truly human. Our common life, in one sense, is useless. And that is delightful. 

I do, however, want to offer some caveats. First, my call to embrace inefficiency should not be read as a call to long-windedness. “When you are praying,” our Lord commands, “do not heap up empty phrases.” (10) We do well to remember that liturgy is neither a spectator sport nor a performance. And, if it is, God alone is its audience. 

Neither am I encouraging sloppiness. Again, to be an amateur is not to do something poorly, but for its own internal ends. As Hauerwas reminds us, for “the worship of God to be appropriately ‘appreciated’ requires mastery that comes from ‘playing’ well.” (11) This does not mean we will never make mistakes. But worship requires attention to detail. This springs not from some desire for personal “optimization,” but from the fitting respect for the things of God in all their variety. And, it must be said, such attentiveness may well reveal that certain aspects of church life benefit from greater efficiency. One thinks of such incidentals as bulletins or snow removal.  

Rather, I am calling us to claim an approach to liturgy and church life which involves the whole of the human person. Such an approach requires comfortability with inefficiency and uselessness, both of which run counter to dominant strains in American culture. But it enlivens a daily life of embodied discipleship, which comprises, in Hauerwas’ words, “the difficult but rewarding task of being church.” (12) Let us rejoice that we are amateurs. That we undertake this common life, not for the love of the game, but for the love of God, our only end in life. 

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(1) Carson Lund, dir., Eephus (Chicago: Music Box Films, 2025), Apple TV.

(2)  Stanley Hauerwas, In Good Company: The Church as Polis (Notre Dame, Indiana: The University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), v.

(3) Hauerwas, In Good Company, 7.

(4) Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, The Way of the Disciple (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003), 27.

(5)  Psalm 84:6 BCP.

(6) Kosuke Koyama, Mount Fuji and Mount Sinai: A Critique of Idols (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1985), 134.

(7) The Book of Common Prayer (New York: Church Publishing Incorporated, 1979), 219.

(8)  Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (New York: Image Books, 1968), 312.

(9)  Merton, Conjectures, 312. 

(10)  Matthew 6:7 NRSV.

(11)  Hauerwas, In Good Company, 7.

(12) Ibid., 8.