Games offer chance to minister to all
Jews and Christians make Athens second home for Games
 | Success is relative to religious outreach workers in town for the Olympics. It is less about tangible results than it is about educating people and hoping that it sparks at another point in their life. |
Rachel Elbaum / MSNBC.com |
ATHENS, Greece - In ancient Olympia, the Games were as much about worshiping Zeus, king of the gods, as they were about celebrating athletic skill. The connection between God and sports is less obvious in today’s Olympic stadiums, but take a walk in downtown Athens and there’s a good chance that you’ll run into a religious outreach worker – or better yet, that they will run into you.
These outreach workers – Jewish and Christian -- have made parts of downtown Athens a second home. Few places in the city offer as many open ears as the shopping area between the centrally located Syntagma and Monastiraki Squares, though Christian missionaries particularly like to hang out in the area near the Acropolis -- tradition holds that this is the place that the Apostle Paul preached.
“We talk to young people and tell them that they don’t need to find comfort in drugs and sex,” said Kelly, 19, who came to Athens with the international evangelical organization, Youth With a Mission. Surrounded by teens and twenty-somethings from around the world, Kelly can stand in the crowded Monastiraki Square until dawn, telling anyone who will listen that “there is something worth fighting for.”
“I understand what they are going through because until two years ago I was into sex and drugs,” said the Australian.
For religious outreach workers, the Olympics offers an unparalleled opportunity to speak with people from around the world. There are about 1,500 Christian missionaries in Greece for the Games, according to Jonathan Macris, who helps run Hellenic Ministries, a local evangelical organization that helped foreign evangelists come to the Olympics. That number is about half of what Christian organizations were expecting.
“The Western Christian world owes its spiritual heritage to this land,” said Macris. “Sydney doesn’t have the same tie to spirituality. We thought they would come here and give something back.”
Outreach work can be a bit tougher for Mendy Hecht and Leibel Krinsky, two yeshiva students in Athens with the Jewish movement and organization Chabad Lubavitch. The young men speak only with other Jews.
“We learned the first day that this isn’t New York -- you can’t just go up to people and assume they are Jewish,” said Hecht, 19, from Orange, Connecticut.
The young men are in Greece with four other students and walk the streets and areas outside the stadiums telling Jewish and Israeli travelers about the kosher restaurant which opened for the Olympics and the other places of Jewish interest in Athens.
“This can be a lot like whale watching – some days you see them and some days you don’t,” said Krinsky, 19, a relative of the local rabbi who opened the kosher restaurant. “Our goal is to give Jewish travelers here the feeling that there is someplace they can go to see other Jews.”
They also give men the opportunity to wear tefillin – phylacteries worn around the arm and head during morning prayers.
Success is relative to the outreach workers in town for the Olympics. It is less about tangible results than it is about educating people and hoping that it will create a spark at another point in their life.
“We never know what the effects of our work are,” said Krinsky, whose comes from long line of outreach workers. “Our goal is to talk to as many people as we can.”
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