On Sunday, June 7, Heather Reddy was at home in Florida and logged into a webinar with 250 people from around the world. For an hour, the group prayed for boldness, courage, unity, and humility. Then they prayed for what was about to kick off four days later: the World Cup.
When the United States last hosted the tournament in 1994, it drew a record 3.6 million spectators. Since then, the competition has all but doubled in size, spreading 104 matches across 39 days starting on June 11. FIFA expects more than 6.5 million total people to attend matches this summer—the majority of which will occur in America.
Reddy, a chaplain for the US women’s national team, is directing Victory Beyond the Cup, a Cru initiative designed to leverage the international moment for sharing the gospel. The project got underway four years ago, when the last World Cup wrapped up in Qatar. Leaders at Cru, a global outreach ministry that advertises with CT, were determined to capitalize on the event coming to “home soil,” Reddy said in an interview.
They set a goal of equipping 10,000 Christians with free host kits—both digital and physical—that included bingo cards and soccer explainers to turn World Cup watch parties into spiritual conversations. By the time Reddy bowed her head in prayer before this year’s first matches, Cru had delivered kits to 75,000 pastors and another 67,000 individuals across 110 countries.
“We’ve watched all the film,” Reddy said, likening their efforts to those of a World Cup club. “We’ve done all the training. Now we get to see what happens on the field.”
The field is packed. Unlike in 2018, when host country Russia threatened deportation for anyone sharing faith outside of government-sanctioned church buildings, this year’s massive crowds mean there is an “unfathomable amount of extra ministry” unfolding on street corners, stadium lots, even walking trails in American host cities, according to Kansas City–area pastor Nic Wilson.
Wilson, who’s directing evangelistic outreach on behalf of the Blue River–Kansas City Baptist Association, anticipates an extra 650,000 visitors to Kansas City over roughly eight weeks. His group aimed to recruit at least 1,000 volunteers from outside the area to assist with game-day outreach, including volunteers from Florida, Georgia, and Texas. “And we’re the small fries compared to Dallas and Houston and Mexico City and New York,” Wilson said.
Still, he wants to see a million gospel conversations in Kansas City during the World Cup. It’s ambitious, he admitted, but “we’re embracing the hand who can do abundantly more.”
Splitting into groups of between five and ten people, his volunteers take shifts from about 2 p.m. to midnight, prioritizing high-traffic areas. This includes streets around the Chiefs’ Arrowhead Stadium, temporarily renamed Kansas City Stadium for FIFA purposes; the sprawling open-air Fan Festival staged throughout the National World War I Museum and Memorial; and bus terminals flooded with visitors from around the world.
These setups are reserved mostly for “tried-and-true cold-turkey evangelism,” Wilson said. Volunteers pull from an inventory of 10,000 gospel tracts, which feature teachings from Yellow Card Initiative, a ministry that uses soccer terminology and literal yellow cards—like the player warnings issued by referees—to provoke spiritual conversations. You can ignore the card, the campaign teaches, or “you can turn to Jesus, who took the red card for you.”
The California Southern Baptist Convention is mirroring this approach for its own efforts in Los Angeles and San Francisco—home to a combined 14 World Cup matches.
Meanwhile, in and around Atlanta, where Mercedes-Benz Stadium is hosting eight games, including one of the semifinals, many of the 3,400 Georgia Baptist churches are partnering with cities and downtown organizers for themed events, according to Beth Ann Williams of Mission Georgia. One of them, a large New Hope Baptist congregation south of Atlanta, is hosting a Mini Cup of Nations—a World Cup–style youth tournament surrounded by food trucks and spearheaded by former Paralympic gold medalist Al Mead.
These clinics and watch parties come in all shapes and sizes. One South Georgia pastor, who also works as a school janitor, invited 12 families to huddle under his carport, where he grills and broadcasts the games. Almost all the gatherings include gospel materials purchased by Mission Georgia, the state’s Baptist mission board—from Hacky Sacks declaring fellowship with Jesus as the “goal of your life” to soccer balls telling the story of salvation in different colors or displaying “Jesus loves you” in different languages. These ensure “it’s not just a fun party,” Williams said, but a chance for people to “talk freely and use soccer as a bridge.”
Thirty-nine different nations set up base camps—their “homes away from home,” as FIFA calls them—in the US for the duration of the tournament, which ends July 19. Four of those teams are in Kansas City—including Argentina, the reigning World Cup champions, whose star player, Lionel Messi, is considered by many to be the best footballer of all time. Wilson, whose day job is pastoring a First Baptist congregation in a Missouri town of 6,500, told his mission teams to be prepared for the Messi masses: “This is like The Beatles back in the day. People camp out and watch their practices.”
That prompted churches in the Raytown area—a suburb and short drive from the city’s sports complex—to institute a near–24/7 ministry on walking trails for out-of-town campers. One North Kansas City congregation, which is serving as a park-and-ride stop for games, is pairing water handouts with around-the-clock Yellow Card Initiative volunteers. Other groups under Wilson’s direction are at campgrounds doing tent-to-tent evangelism.
The impact goes beyond just preaching the gospel. ReHope, a ministry offering safe housing to survivors of sex trafficking, more than doubled its beds in anticipation of higher traffic. The city’s Salvation Army expanded its volunteer base for daily food-delivery rounds to homeless encampments. Larger agencies like the North American Mission Board told regional churches to expect double the typical attendance for any of their concerts or sports camps.
“It really is more comparable to an Olympics than a Super Bowl,” Wilson said. “The problem is most Americans think in terms of a Super Bowl or World Series. But even then, the Olympics is often centered around one city, not three countries for six weeks.”
The Department of State expects the US to welcome up to 7 million international travelers during the World Cup. One challenge US ministries in particular face when trying to engage those visitors is getting Americans to care about soccer in the first place.
“If we were in Spain and we were doing this,” Heather Reddy said, “oh, it’d be no problem.”
This became Cru’s unofficial challenge to believers across America: You might not love the World Cup, but odds are someone around you does. Almost 15 percent of the US population was born in another country.
“That could be your step of faith this summer,” Reddy said, “just inviting people over for the first time.”
As Wilson sees it, the evangelism teams operating in Kansas City are seizing a rare opportunity: Instead of spending thousands of dollars to fly across the world and share the gospel, they can “spend $40 and drive downtown to meet the same people,” Wilson said.
