‘A celebration of humanity’

Over the last few weeks, Toronto and Vancouver have been flooded with international fans, World Cup-specific events and, of course, an overwhelming number of soccer-inspired adverts and marketing campaigns. This is the first time the world’s largest sporting event, the men’s FIFA World Cup, is being played on Canadian soil. Eleven cities in the U.S.A and three in Mexico are also hosting matches.

The World Cup is held every four years and, in 2026, forty-eight teams are competing, including Cape Verde, Curaçao, Jordan and Uzbekistan who are making their World Cup debut. In each fan who travels and each high-five from a hometown supporter, there’s proof of how this sporting event has fostered connection and unity.

The opportunity to offer a space for faith during the hype isn’t lost on Knox College, a Presbyterian theological school on the University of Toronto campus. This year, the campus chapel revived a more than one-hundred-year-old tradition: Soccer Sunday.

The service, held at 3 p.m. on June 14, was led by Rev. John Borthwick, the Director of Lifelong Learning. He preached from Philippians 3 and applied the idea of “pressing onward” so often seen in professional sport to ideas of endurance and resiliency in normal life.

“In inviting people to come to this service, we say that you do not have to be a person of faith, you can come as you are,” Rev. Dr. Ernest van Eck, the Principal of Knox College, said of the event. “We don’t really want to celebrate soccer per se – but we want to celebrate this being together to pause and reflect on what it means to be human, to connect, beyond the soccer pitch. For us, it’s a celebration of humanity.”

The background

It was 1878 when Knox College first caught soccer fever. The Dominion Football Association – the Canada soccer governing body that continues today as the Canadian Soccer Association – was formed that year with 10 founding clubs.

Among those was one club of young male athletes from Knox College and, unexpectedly, this Christian crew advanced through all three rounds of Canada’s first-ever national soccer tournament: The Challenge Cup. According to David K. Brown’s Association Football: The Game, and How to Play It from 1879, a slim 1-0 victory over Berlin High School in the final crowned Knox College the first national soccer champions in Canada.

In 1919, the spirit of soccer returned to campus, this time on a Sunday morning. Rev. John Linton crafted a sermon based on Philippians 3, the same passage Borthwick preached on this year, and titled it “Soccer Sunday – working towards the goal.” A few years later, Linton led another Soccer Sunday service, this time in Montreal.

Community building

Sports are unique in their ability to build community – the barrier for connection and inclusion is often as low as expressing the same interest in a team or country. When rooting for a team, what matters is not your class, race, ethnicity or identity; it’s the colour of your jersey, how loud you can cheer and the energy you bring.

Knox College recognizes how sports work to foster connection. As much as the Soccer Sunday event centred around the word of God and Christian teachings, Knox College was diligent about featuring soccer throughout it all – from encouraging worshipers to wear their favourite soccer kits, to singing hymns like “Abide with me” and “You’ll never walk alone” that have been repurposed and sung by today’s football fans in Liverpool, Glasgow and beyond. At the pulpit, Borthwick wore a re-creation of the original jerseys worn by the 1878 Knox College team.

“From a community outreach perspective, I think it’s a great opportunity to engage your local community in something that’s trying to bring people together in a special way,” Borthwick said.

“We just want to, you know, get the message out: Look at this fun thing that we are doing on Sunday. It can be fun to be a Christian,” van Eck said.

At the event, Knox College also received a plaque from Heritage Toronto and the Ontario Soccer Hall of Fame, recognizing the 1878 team and inducting them into the hall of fame.