Looking Back: Never on Sunday?

An editorial from 1974

Scottish professional football is not what it was, either as a form of entertainment or as a sport, in the best sense of the term. It has also had to deal with urgent problems of readjustment and with steadily dwindling congregations at its rituals.

Until now, however, those who govern the game have been immune from one criticism, Whatever mistakes they may have made they have always been men of honour.

Can that be said now that an attempt is being made to stave off financial disaster by switching to Sunday football under the pretext of adjusting to emergency conditions?

It would have been honourable and manly, in keeping with the way that the game should be run as well as played, for those who want Sunday football to make it clear that the emergency merely provided a pretext for the change.

Had that not been the case, surely Sunday football should have been abandoned as soon as it was clear that the emergency was not resulting in large-scale Saturday working.

Our Mission

That said, the Church must keep its sense of proportion. We are not all of one mind, even in the Kirk, on how we should keep the most joyful day of the week. But we should all be facing up to the problems which a changing Sunday-life-style creates for the Church, realising that Sunday professional football matters far less in that respect than a wide range of more important but less spectacular changes.

Some of us may disapprove of them; others of us can scarcely do so in good conscience if our own Sunday recreations include tending our gardens, watching secular television, or even reading the Sunday papers. (For that matter even the Monday papers should be barred to the unco strict, since they depend on Sunday work.)

All of us, however, have a mission to those who are growing up in the Sunday life-style which the football clubs did not create but are now trying to exploit.

It is right for the Church to show concern for those whose enjoyment of Sunday is spoiled by commercial sport or who lose a day of rest and leisure. This is an important issue but cannot be the main one.

Our concern must be with the affirmation of the Lord’s life on the Lord’s Day. How sad it is that anyone should associate that term with gloom and repression. We should be able to laugh at the idea that anyone should ever find a football match on a Sunday afternoon more exciting and enjoyable than Christian worship on a Sunday morning. Can we?

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