The Lions and the Lamb

If this were any given Sunday in America, you’d find a professional football coach in his logo attire on the sidelines leading his team. It looks very much the same for for Coach Zach Harrod, but this isn’t America, it’s the Czech Republic. Here they call it “American Football”. The team is the Prague Lions of the recently expanded ELF, European League of Football. And this is not a “Ted Lasso story, either. The uniquely American sport has a rapidly growing European fan base. “American football is is blowing up in Europe. In particular, in Germany, the numbers are crazy to see. The NFL taking interest in doing more and more.” Coach Zach tells us.

Zach is a Creo regular when’s not busy with football, because he’s in Europe for ministry as well as the sport. Zach would tell us that he’s a football coaching church planter. More specifically he would say, “I'm just a guy who loves Jesus. A guy that God's called to Central Europe to do ordinary things, and let God do extraordinary things through it.” We caught up with him while he was in the US both recruiting players and finding support for his ministry.

 

Humble Football Beginnings

Zach grew up in Southeast Wisconsin and, like so many kids in the Midwest, he was drawn to football. Especially because his father was a coach. Also, like many families in his community, they were in church Sunday’s when it was convenient. “Faith wasn't anything that was really serious to me until I went to the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh.” He tells us. An unfortunate accident in High School sidelined his playing days and meant an end to scholarships and offers initially. Zach rehabbed and was able to get back on the field lettering in football.

“One day a guy from CRU knocked on my door. I told him he should talk to my roommate who had a Buddhist statue, because he clearly needed it. I attended church and was confirmed and all that.”  Zach was invited to a Bible Study, which he repeatedly dodged. After Zach’s roommate left, this ambitious CRU member just invaded. “Now I had a single room and he's like, ‘Well, Zach, hey, you have a single. So we could do Bible study in here’.” The rest, as they say, is history. Zach’s faith went from being his family’s to his own.

Although he couldn’t play football he did connect with the local Athletes in Action group and developed a “heart for the nations” as he says. He decided that he needed to go overseas at least for a time. “I went over to Prague for what I thought would be two years. I was thinking maybe about coming back and joining one of my buddies who was planting a church.” Zach says. “Well, a year into this stay in the Czech Republic, and I saw people making the decision which doesn’t happen often.” Seeing lives change and young people transformed from atheists to Christ followers convinced him that missions was for him. He came home to finish his degree and then returned to the Czech Republic for a more permanent position. Zach has spent 18 of the past 20 years in Prague.

 

There Are No Accidents

Of course the Athletes in Action position was football related, and that’s initially where Zach became aware of the football culture that was budding in Europe. That’s also how he connected to the Prague Lions. “When I went back as an intern I played and I coached a bunch of positions with the junior team.” He tells us that the choice really wasn’t his own. The AIA director actually felt Zach would be a good fit with the Lions. “ I joke around with him, you know, like his decision pretty much determined the trajectory of my life. So, he needs to think twice about the decisions he makes.”

What started as a position with the junior team led him on a bumpy road to the top of this growing franchise. One coach left the juniors for a team in Germany and that gave Zach a coaching position. “We went through a really nasty team split in 2009-10 and I decided to stay with the Lions. I ended up hanging up my cleats though because I didn't want to coach and play and do both those things in a mediocre way.” He then became the offensive coordinator for the senior team at the same time. In 2018, he ended up in the head coach position with the senior team and he, along with some other investors, purchased the logo and the franchise.

There have been plenty of ups and down. There was the COVID shutdowns and the team lost some sponsors. The Ukraine invasion by Russia was also a blow. “I had to deal with several Ukrainian players that have family back home and there are several Czech players who are married to Ukrainians who had family there as well.” Through it all the Lions managed to win two of three championships this past summer, but fell short by 4 points of the Central European Football League Cup. This garnered the attention of the ELF, a new league with bigger sponsors. They’ve added the Prague Lions for the 2023 season.

 


Zach the Church Planter

So, what do all of the football trials have to do with ministry? Remember we said that Zach is a church planting football coach. In fact, he considers the football as merely the way God has positioned him to have an effective missionary. “ I look at it as like I'm kind of a hybrid. I am fully a missionary that has a full time job in football. This allows me to be with people on a day to day basis. It helps me to be present in people's lives.” Football is the vocation that helps him be fully immersed in the culture.

Because he is a football coach, he has a chance to see doors opened in unexpected ways. “ I met ambassadors because of football. I've met Czech celebrities and have relationships with them because of American football. That wouldn't have happened if I went over and I tried to do a Bible study.“ It is a unique way of being a missionary.

From a missions standpoint, the Czech Republic is considered very difficult territory. The culture would be considered very post-Christian with less than one third of 1%  identifying as Evangelical Christians. Zach reports that people are skeptical and it takes a long time to see someone come to Christ. That’s why his approach is actually so right for this environment. “It's by thinking outside the box and creating third spaces where people will actually have a conversation.  People ask me, why don't you have a church building? Because most of the people that we interact with will never go into traditional church building. But they're going to a cafe, they’re going into homes and then it can happen.”

Zach has been told that where he is is “hard soil” for a mission.  He thinks it’s actually more than hard soil. It’s like the concrete and asphalt of urban sprawl. “What I do with football and what my wife does, are like pick axes. We swing those pick axes and try to create a hole in that concrete to put an oak tree seed in. It takes a while that I could be tending to those oaks, and hopefully more people come alongside me and are doing the same thing. Once those trees get to a certain size and the roots of those trees start doing what you see in in places in throughout America, where you have the roots next to a parking lot or sidewalk. They start doing the work with you. And then we could start moving bigger pieces and we could see what was a desolate asphalt concrete has turned into a lush, beautiful forest. That's the imagery that I like to use.”

As someone who regularly travels back and forth to the US for 20 years, Zach sees American culture going more and more in the direction of Europe in terms of faith. He thinks adopting the mindset of a missionary is the future for Christianity in the West. “At some point we as Christians got stuck thinking God is in this box, and this is how he functions. He is so much bigger. And I'm so glad that I've been put in this situation where I'm going to live amongst people and allow God to transform me and allow God to transform them. Maybe even in the process. God is going to use them in ways to transform me which helps in their transformation too.” That happens when we open our lives and our homes and have honest conversations with people who are not like us. This is the kind of mission we can all be on. Not necessarily in a foreign county, but as a missionary to our local communities.

Zach also sees a Christianity that has become very polarized, “I think American Christianity has kind of gotten stuck in a very imperialistic mindset over the last 100 years. Where I think, for some reason, we're just stuck there. We lack humility. We lack understanding. We assume it is us versus them.” He says that this is something that we all need to push against in ministry. “At the end of the day, we all have really the same fears, the same longings, the same needs and trying to meet each other. In that is also where we can meet God, right? And point people to Jesus. And so that's kind of how we function and it gets messy man.”

 

Immersed in The Culture

In those 18 years in the Czech Republic, Zach has completely become part of the culture. He married Míša a Czech native, and they have 2 Czech-American boys. Míša has a heart for those who are stuck in various forms of injustice, which can run the gamut in Central Europe. The family is part of a house church and ministry is definitely a family affair for the Harrods.

It is though this ministry that Zach met Mike Jarrell. “Mike and I connected really early on with what we do with missional communities - being present in people's lives, in the mess of just life. We just feel like kindred kindred spirits, so to speak.” He says that Mike has given him some great wisdom during hard stretches. “He said things to me like, if you leave this you need to only leave this because God tells you to leave it. And it needs to be clear because at the end of the day, you have more connection points, more opportunity to influence culture changers in the Czech Republic because of what God has done in you with American football than most missionaries or pastors I know.” This connection has been a great source of ministry strength for Zach.

This church planting football coach might have a dual set of ups and downs but he’s not going to let it sideline him from the game, or the ministry. If you want to keep up with the Harrod’s or help support their ministry, see zachharrod.com. To follow the Prague Lions, check out lions.cz or europeanleague.football.

Article by Jeff Chaves, Pastor of CHRCH Online.

Photos by Jakub Pláteník.