The rules of the game

I’ve been thinking about rules a lot lately: Robert’s Rules of Order, school board bylaws, Church order, labour codes and so on. But I’ve also been watching a lot of sports (oh, my beloved Oilers! So, so close!). Sports have rules, too.

In the course of a game, sometimes the rules become a matter of great concern and contestation: was that offside? Is the “coaches challenge” a good rule? Are the refs really as biased as they feel to me? And teams can “use” rules to strategic advantage. Remember when Jacques Demers challenged the curve on Marty McSorley’s stick back in 1993? We can get so invested in the rules and using the rules to our advantage that we forget what they are for.

The rules of a game are there to facilitate shared play, to make sure that we can have common expectations of one another without having to constantly bicker about how we play. The point, then, is to allow us to keep playing; to prevent us from getting fed up and taking our ball and going home. Even though we play to win, we do so only within the rules because playing together is an even greater purpose than winning. Games have an agonistic (win-lose) structure (we are competing to overcome our opponents), but their ultimate purpose is not to defeat your opponent but to play with them (win-win).

When people forget that – when they play within the rules of the game but in such a way as to treat winning as a higher goal than playing together – we call that bad sportsmanship. A good sportsman remembers that the point of play is not primarily to defeat his opponent within the scope of the rules, but to play together, and conducts himself accordingly. That means there may be things that are within the rules that he will not do and maybe even violations of the letter of the rules that he will permit his alleged opponents to get away with. Sportsmanship is more than skill, prowess or even playing by the rules – it’s the art of staying in community with one’s opponents.

Victory at all costs

You may have already guessed that my point here isn’t really about sports. It’s about the lives of our educational, ecclesiastical, work and family communities. We are going to differ with one another and we are going to struggle. We’re going to face the question of whether and on what terms we can be in community with one another (whether we can keep “playing together”). When we do, we are going to be profoundly tempted to take the rules by which we’ve tried to order our shared lives and use them to defeat our opponents, since the stakes of the contest seem so high to us; we really, really want to win.

I feel like that’s been happening a lot lately. As Christian Courier has reported, it’s been happening at the Edmonton Society for Christian Education, and I feel it happened at the Christian Reformed Church Synod. One side has decided that they must win and will use the rules to make that happen. But the point of the rules is to keep us playing (worshipping, learning, working) together. When we lose sight of that, we’ve all lost.