Introduction: Then Jesus came to them and said, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age." Welcome to Exploring Missions, connecting mission needs with those equipped by God to meet those needs across the world or across town. And now, the host of Exploring Missions, Bert Harper.
Bert Harper: On Exploring Missions each week end, we are really encouraged to hear what God is doing with different ministries, with different groups, individuals. And let me just share with you, He desires to use you, and just be open to what God would have you to do in your local church, in your home, in your work, in your community. The opportunities are there; we're still living in a place where Godly influence really makes a difference.
And there is a ministry that we're going to interview concerning the influence that they have in our schools all over the United States—but not just all over the United States, in our world. It's called Fellowship of Christian Athletes.
And Nathan, one of the areas that they really come to—I think—empower and look at us to say what we're to do is, they're looking for individuals and groups and engaging them in becoming greater and better disciples of Jesus Christ. Fellowship of Christian Athletes really does that, and that's not just a principle of FCA; that's a principle in the Word of God.
Nathan Harper: Yeah, that's right. And the cool thing with FCA, I was a part of FCA to a limited degree when I was in high school, but you didn't actually have to be an athlete officially to be a part of Fellowship of Christian Athletes. So, I was not the most athletic, but the good news was that that didn't have to qualify me to be a part of that group.
Bert Harper: You didn't have to go through drills, right?
Nathan Harper: That's right, no practice necessary, no running lines and all that. So, but seriously, the biblical principle is, when you're wanting to engage people with the gospel, maybe there's a people group, or maybe there is a community, or maybe there's an area geographically that you have focus, but there's people who live there in that area that are potentially unengaged, or they're under-evangelized, we'll say.
So, what you want to do is, biblically speaking, you want to reach the group. God is interested in saving groups of people, not just individuals out of the group. There are individuals inside of every group, and the individual is the first step of that process, but you don't stop with the one individual, and you dare not do what many times happens is, you reach someone for Jesus and then the next thing you know, you've extracted that person from the group that they are already a part of. And you tell them, "You can't belong to that group anymore, you have to come over here to our little church, our little group, and start acting like us."
I mean, that's gone to many different degrees we don't have time to discuss, but even to the point of like saying, "You can't speak your native language anymore, you have to learn English or this other language. You have to start dressing a certain way," and you get the picture. And that's how we extract people from their group, and guess what happens? We can't reach the group that way.
So, the biblical principle is that God wants to save groups of people. He wants to save whole families; He wants to save large numbers of people within a group. So, I'm thinking of John chapter 4, where Jesus was talking to the Samaritan woman. The second part of that story is, once He's talked to her—this is John 4:39—it says, "Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in Him because of the woman's testimony." So, she stayed in the town and had an influence there. "He told me everything I ever did," she said.
So, when the Samaritans came to Him, they urged Him to stay with them, and He stayed two days. And because of His words, many more became believers. Jesus is interested in the whole town; He's interested in the whole group.
So, as we engage people with the gospel, as we engage an individual with the gospel and we're evangelizing, and we're sharing the good news, and we're wanting to disciple that person, always, always keep in mind, that person belongs to a group. They're already a part of a group. It might be a small group, it might be just a family, could be a neighborhood, it could be a workplace, it could be anything, it could expand further out. God wants to reach that whole group and use that person's testimony of how He's transformed their lives to see community transformation, to see the whole group discipled to follow Jesus.
So, that's an element of what FCA does well. Other groups do that well, but the good news with FCA, you don't have to be an athlete to be engaged with the gospel through their ministry.
Bert Harper: And they're able to go into our schools, and because of it being student-led, but yet equipped by great guys and women that influence them, they're able to do all these things for the glory of God. Well, here on Exploring Missions, we want you to be aware of what God is doing, and one of the people, and one of the groups of people that He's working with is FCA. We hope you'll enjoy this interview as you hear what God is doing.
Bert Harper: Our guest is Grant Smallwood. Grant, thank you for joining us on this program.
Grant Smallwood: Oh, thank you so much for having me. We're so excited to be here, so it's exciting to get to talk about what we're talking about today.
Bert Harper: Yeah, we're having a reunion! It's been a while since we've been together and talked together, so it's a joy to be with you. Well, in place of me telling everybody what this ministry is that's local, national, and international, tell us what it is.
Grant Smallwood: Well, I get to serve as the Multi-Area Director for the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, and I'm so excited to get to be a part of this ministry and all that it does. And so, we're here to lead every coach and athlete into a growing relationship with Jesus Christ and the church. And so, that's our desire and our mission.
Bert Harper: And you do it well. I'm connected with several of the county reps, college reps, and just have so much confidence in them. And let's start first with your journey with FCA.
Grant Smallwood: Yeah, so I got to be part of FCA as a high school student back home in Selmer, Tennessee, and got to be part of that. And then as I went to college to play ball, I got to be connected with FCA in college. And then, as I got connected in college, I began to meet and know several FCA staff members in the state of Mississippi.
And ironically enough, got to be a coach, and FCA impacted me as a coach. And then as a coach, FCA was a big part of that, and I started volunteering with FCA and all the things that it involved and all the things that it provided for me as a coach, but I wanted to give back. And so, was grateful for the opportunity I got as an athlete to be a part of FCA, so I wanted to continue to help give back in that. And then when my coaching journey ended, I was able to join FCA as staff. We've been on staff for seven years now, on our eighth year, and God has just been so good through that journey.
Bert Harper: You know, as a player, student, coach, and now director—all those levels. The one that I think that people might be, "Okay, we understand the student, we understand that. But what about coaches? You mean FCA is helping coaches?"
Grant Smallwood: FCA is very much helping coaches for sure, you know. We want to lead every coach, you know that was the mission of it, is we want to lead every coach. And we hopefully work to and through the coach. Billy Graham gives the famous quote that we like to quote so many times, is that a coach will impact one student more in a year than most people will in a lifetime. So, a coach has such a great influence on our athletes, on our players, on our students, on our campuses. And so, we want to make sure that we invest in the coach because they're the ones that are the influencers on the campus.
Bert Harper: Well, when we think about that, FCA's been around a while, made an impact, and a little bit about the history.
Grant Smallwood: Yeah, so FCA's been around for over 70 years. In 1954, a basketball coach named Don McClanen said, "You know what? If athletes can endorse automobiles and other things that they're endorsing, can they not endorse the mission of Christ?" And so, he had a vision, and that's what it was. And so, he met with Branch Rickey, who was an executive for the baseball community in the upper levels, and he began FCA.
And then in 1956, FCA had their first ever FCA camp at Estes Park, Colorado.
Bert Harper: Oh, wow!
Grant Smallwood: And so, I'll tell you a neat story about that is, our state director got to take several of our staff over a couple of years ago to that room where they had the very first camp at the YMCA there in Estes Park, and it was so amazing to just think back on the history of where FCA has come from and to know what it is now, where there's over 3,500 staff members and we're all over the world. And it's just really neat to see, but 1956 was the first camp, and we haven't stopped since.
Bert Harper: Estes Park, Colorado. That's amazing.
Grant Smallwood: It's a beautiful scenery, I can tell you. Those mountains are gorgeous in Estes Park.
Bert Harper: It is. Well, you said international, over 3,500 employees, but how many countries?
Grant Smallwood: Yeah, so we're in 115 countries and 3,500 employees. So, we are all over the globe. We've gotten to really stretch and broaden ourselves from a global impact side of things. Obviously, FCA started here domestically, but as we know, we want to reach the uttermost, and so that's what God's called us to do, and so that's what we've done. And we partner with different areas within those communities all around the world, and so we partner with different missions across the globe to help share the gospel.
Bert Harper: I guess soccer, or football as they say, the ministry that Nathan works with, the Vapor Ministries, they go into third-world countries and they do two things: provide water, clean water, and build a soccer field. Because it's kind of like, "Build it and they will come."
Grant Smallwood: It's the universal language.
Bert Harper: It really is. Just after we've gone through the World Cup here, and it's amazing how it is. And so, sports and athletics is an awesome way to reach especially young men and women, isn't it?
Grant Smallwood: It is, it's amazing. And we are—and you talked about Nathan and the soccer piece of that—you know, we were able to go a couple of years ago over to help one village where we were able to help build a soccer field. And so, they had an unlevel field, we were able to go level it, put some posts up—just a couple of metal posts—so that they could go kick a soccer ball in the middle of it. And that one village, that one village led to 18 other small communities feeding into that soccer field. And it's just amazing to see the number. You roll one ball out, and kids come from everywhere.
Bert Harper: Yeah, when our three sons played soccer a little bit in their first start, I would have loved to have had a drone. It was like a ball was here, and all ten of the kids around it were all around, going where... They had not learned the technique of playing position, they were just following the ball. So, you can imagine that ball going out there, and they're just—they're going after it.
Grant Smallwood: Just a herd of people.
Bert Harper: Oh man, that's it. Well, this is amazing. Fellowship of Christian Athletes, they're in Christian schools, they're in Christian colleges, but they're also in public schools. We said this earlier, going where no man has gone before! But FCA can go where a lot of others are not able to get there.
Grant Smallwood: That's right. We are the number one public school ministry in the world. And so, we're able to go onto a campus, a college campus, an elementary school, whatever it may be, and be able to lead young people who are passionate about their faith and who want to lead and share their faith with other students on their campus, and so to impact those.
So, that's exciting for us to be able to be a part of that and to be just a small part of helping push the ministry ahead, and being able to provide opportunities for students who do want to share their faith and who want to be a part of that to be able to share it with their peers in the school. So, it's really neat. We're not just in a private school, we're not just in a public school, but we're all over, so it's pretty neat.
Bert Harper: And I remember when I was a youth minister—years ago, Grant, okay!—the kids that were in FCA, they'd talk about it, they'd come to me and, "Okay, we're meeting, got any suggestions for this, that, and the other?" And it was amazing. It's a discipleship program as well.
Grant Smallwood: It's exactly what it is. It's an opportunity for those kids to grow in the Lord and be able to be led and shown how to do those things. You know, there's a study from Barna—and I know you guys know all these stats, I'm sure—but there's a really neat study from Barna that used to be it was the age of 18 where if you knew Christ before the age of 18, you know, that was great, but if you didn't know Christ before the age of 18, the likelihood of you coming to know Him in faith was a really small number.
And that number now has changed from 18 to 13. And so, we—we have a job to do. And we've got to get on those campuses and got to be able to share the gospel and got to continue to be able to find those who don't know Christ and who may be struggling in those situations.
And so, we have a great mission ahead of us, and that's our goal. You know, a lot of people understand FCA as the middle school, high school ministry, you know, donuts on Friday morning and come and hear a speaker, and that's what it is, but it's much more than that. We're now developing leadership teams so those students who want to lead, so that it's not me going in and just preaching away, it's me leading these students, and they're the ones that are going out and sharing, they're the ones that are leading their peers to Christ, and they're the ones that are making the biggest impact.
Bert Harper: Let me see, I think Jesus used that method, training 12, don't you?
Grant Smallwood: That's pretty—yeah, I think we got that from a good source.
Bert Harper: I agree with you. Let's talk about the organization. We've talked about it being international, national, and local. So you have a national board, international, and again, it's people that have been in leadership. But then you have state, and then in your area, as you say, multi-area director for Northeast Mississippi. And then you have local ones that maybe to a district or a county, and then you have the huddles. Go through that organization a little bit, give us a little bit of meat to the skeleton here.
Grant Smallwood: Yeah, that's good. Actually, you're not far off right there, so that was pretty good, Brother Byrt. You know, we have our headquarters in Kansas City. That's where our HQ is, and our president and the executive team all operate out of that, and then we have our Board of Trustees, and those are—that's kind of our top executive levels. And then under that, we have all of our VPs, our regional VPs. So we have 12 regions within our country. And then they're sectioned out into the states. So then we have our state-level leadership, and then, of course, it moves down to where like I am right now. I'm the regional director, so it's a—the multi-area director, technically. And then we have directors under us and reps that serve within the schools. And so it kind of works that way. It goes national, and it kind of separates into regions, and then down to state, and then local.
And so it's really just a neat way to go ahead and help serve all the communities that we can reach. And so where the rubber meets the road are those directors and reps who are in the schools, who are in the field, and who are doing it every single day. And so those regional areas—so like our region is Region 8. We connect with Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama. And our region connects to East Africa, so we serve those countries over in East Africa. That's our international connection within the framework of FCA. And so that helps us somewhat stay organized a little bit to know where we're going and what we're doing. But that's a neat kind of overview of where everybody is and how we serve.
Bert Harper: In each school, the group is called a huddle?
Grant Smallwood: That's right.
Bert Harper: You just love that, you know? Whether you play football—and basketball even. Now, I don't know if baseballs can huddle or not, but anyway... In basketball, you know, they huddle around the coach at, you know, different times. But the huddle's where the action is, isn't it?
Grant Smallwood: That's it. And we're so blessed. We have so many teachers, administrators, coaches within the school system that serve as kind of a liaison, a sponsor, that we—you know, they said, "Hey, you know what? I'll unlock the gym on Friday mornings so that you guys can come in and have your huddle." And so it's just those students, and those coaches, and those teachers, and anybody that wants to come and be a part of that, to be able to come in and hear the Gospel, hear the Word, fellowship... You know, we have a thing with FCA—we call it the E3 method. It's our method to do things. It'll be familiar to you, but Engage, Equip, Empower. Kind of the discipleship model, right? So it's amazing how that works.
Bert Harper: Nothing new under the sun!
Grant Smallwood: That's right, that's it! And so we—you know, we want to engage those students. We want to make sure that we've built fellowship and they know the Lord, and then we want to be able to equip them with God's Word and what that looks like, and then we want to empower them to go out and do the same thing. And so that's the cool part about the huddles, is that that's what we're trying to do. It's not a chapel; it's a huddle. We break out into small groups, ask questions, start building on that, and be able to open God's Word and read it for ourselves.
Bert Harper: Okay, with that in mind, they have to have resources. Go online FCA and you'll see some things, and it'll get to what is called "Resources." And they're even daily devotion or daily Bible reading? I mean, it's pretty in-depth.
Grant Smallwood: It's—we have—I don't know about many other organizations and their resources, but I know about FCA's resources, and they're vast. We have a resource for just about everything you can ask for. And, you know, one of our biggest resources is that we do provide Bibles for our students. And so we are the second-leading free Bible distributors in the nation...
Bert Harper: See if I can guess above—Gideons?
Grant Smallwood: That's it! That's it! We're number two behind the Gideons, and...
Bert Harper: That's a good number to be with right there. It really is, yeah.
Grant Smallwood: But we handed out over 240,000 Bibles in 2025 last year—245,000 Bibles got distributed. And so that's one of our resources. In the back of those Bibles, 365 days of devotions. We have other Bibles that provide the E3 resources, the discipleship resources. We have other Bibles that provide just topical things that students are going through, that coaches are going through, that athletes are going through, so we have those.
And then we have other resources, such as—one of the resources that we use is called The Core. It's an eight-week study for the core principles that the Gospel teaches, so that when there's a new believer that comes in, we get to share that. I'm going to sidebar and give you a quick story about The Core.
Bert Harper: Yeah, I want to hear that. We love the stories, yeah.
Grant Smallwood: Oh man. And so I got a call one Wednesday night, and I got it from an athletic director—and that's unusual to get a call on a Wednesday night from an athletic director, so I thought I was in trouble at first. And so he called and he said, "You're not going to believe what happened at school today." I said, "Well, let's hear it." And he said, "I was at football practice and watching, and there's a young man that came over after football practice, and as boldly as someone can say, he said, 'I need to be saved.'" At football practice! And he said he was just shocked; he didn't know what to do. So he said, "Well, maybe we can talk..." "No, like, I want to be saved now. I want to know how to do this."
And so right there, an athletic director got to pray with a football player and lead him to Christ. And then immediately after the prayer, he said, "I want to be baptized." And he's like, "Well, how do we..." He's like, "Whatever we've got to do, like, I want to be baptized now." So they dumped the ice cooler, the ice bath that the football players jump in—they dumped it out, they filled it back with water, and they baptized him in the ice bath water right there on campus that night. And so as the athletic director is telling me this, I've just got chills. I'm just thinking about how amazing this is.
And then soon after that, that next day, he's like, "I want you to come meet him." And so I got to meet with him, and then I got, for the next eight weeks, to walk him through The Core. So those eight weeks of principles that the Gospel teaches us as a new believer. And so that's just a neat story of how the resources work. I got to give him a Bible—an Athlete's Bible that's got all the things that athletes want to know in there, and all the resources for that. But it was just really neat to see how, I mean, a random Wednesday at football practice, a young man comes to know Christ and gets saved and gets baptized right there, so it's pretty cool.
Bert Harper: Anytime, anywhere, anyone! That's it! Our God is able, isn't He? When you were saying that, it reminded me of the Ethiopian eunuch: "There's water! What hinders me from being baptized?" Well, at least they got the ice out, so that was good! That would've been tough!
Okay, another—it's not a resource, but it is: camps. Tell us about—sometimes at the end of the year, you'll have area meetings where you give out some awards in different areas. Give us a little bit of a glimpse of that.
Grant Smallwood: Yeah, so our number one ministry with FCA—and we talked about it earlier, in 1956, our first camp was at Estes Park. Well, that's our number one ministry, the first thing that we do. We service camps all over, almost a thousand of those nationally a year across the globe. And we have, I want to say, over 200,000 campers that come to these camps all over the nation, all over the world. And we're able to equip, to empower, engage these athletes through camp ministry. They're all wanting to be part of a sport and be able to be part of these things, and so we're able to bring them in and disciple them through these three-day camps, one-day camps, week-long camps, all that it is, all across the globe.
Specifically here in Mississippi, we have three camps that our state level tries to really engage in and push in. One is our Leadership Camp for high school and middle school students. It's at the end of May, first of June every year down at Mississippi College, and it's been amazing to see the growth in that. It's always been a nice camp. COVID really hit us a little bit with numbers, and then after that, we were tracking at about a 20% growth every year after that. So two years ago, we had 360 total campers at the camp. Well, last year—this past year, this past May—we had over 500. Largest leadership camp we've ever had! I didn't know where we were going to put everybody! It was just amazing.
And so that's one of our main camps that we have here, is Leadership Camp. We have a college camp—so not just for our grade school students from middle school and high school, but we also have a college camp called College Getaway. And this is where one of the biggest impacts in my life happened. At College Getaway, as a college baseball player, I got to go to this, and it just changed my perspective about FCA. I was like, "Oh, this is much bigger than I thought it was. It's not just donuts and a devotion on Friday morning." And so College Getaway is something where all of our colleges around the state come together for a weekend and just fellowship and get to know each other, but get equipped to be able to go back and empower on their campus.
And then the last camp that we really press in on our state level is CTO, which is Coaches Time Out. So we have a coaches retreat for them and their spouse to be able to go away for a weekend, and you know that's rare in the coaching community, to get away for a weekend, because they are all the time, non-stop. And so to be able to just pause, get out on a retreat for a weekend, restore, refresh, renew everything that's going on in their marriage to invest in them, because we talked about it earlier—coaches are one of the biggest influences, if not the biggest influence, in someone's life. So those are three ways that we try to impact through camps locally in our state, and nationally as well.
Bert Harper: When I hear this, I could not help but think about the growth. We saw it on college campuses—people being saved, and I know it happened at Auburn University, University of Georgia, Ohio State, where the football team, man, they really got right with God, even in Ohio State, you know? Is this what we saw with Charlie Kirk and how many college students were gravitating to biblical thought? So if we have 500, it sounds like something's growing. Can you sense that, Grant?
Grant Smallwood: I do. I've been saying this for the last couple of years. There is an undergrowing within our students, within our schools, that I can sense just being on campuses, that there is a faith movement that's happening. And these students—I don't know, my generation, your generation, we were a lot about just coming in, sitting and soaking, and hearing the Word, and we were okay with that. This generation wants to do. They want to get out and be active; their faith is real. They want to be active in it.
Bert Harper: Doers of the Word!
Grant Smallwood: That's it! It's amazing! And so it's fun to see and to see the excitement of these young people and what they're doing, and to see them sharing their faith in difficult situations, and wanting to know more. They're asking difficult questions—sometimes more difficult than I'm even willing to answer, because I'm not sure, but they want to know, and they're not afraid to ask, and there's an excitement to it. And so I do—I see a kind of undergrowing inside the faith community to see students building up in their faith, so it's exciting.
Bert Harper: Our guest today on Exploring Missions is Grant Smallwood, better known as Coach Smalls. But contact—if somebody out there thinks, "Man, that sounds like a great thing," can they contact FCA and find out how they can be a part of it by praying and giving?
Grant Smallwood: Absolutely. Of course, we have a national website that you can contact us and find us and search for us, so there's plenty of ways to get involved and do that. My prayer would be, if FCA sounds like something you would be interested in, reach out to your local FCA wherever you're at, get involved, help volunteer, serve, if you can help financially support, with all the resources that are going on, even just with staff members. We're a faith-funded ministry, and so that's always helpful. For every staff member that we add, 500 coaches and athletes get impacted.
Bert Harper: Amen!
Grant Smallwood: So for one staff member, 500 athletes and coaches get impacted.
Bert Harper: Wow! Grant, thank you for being with us. Appreciate FCA, appreciate you, brother. And we thank you for listening to Exploring Missions, and we're praying that God would open the door for you to be on mission for God, whether it be FCA or whatever God's leading you to, to glorify the Lord Jesus Christ.
Introduction: Then Jesus came to them and said, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age." Welcome to Exploring Missions, connecting mission needs with those equipped by God to meet those needs across the world or across town. And now, the host of Exploring Missions, Bert Harper.
Bert Harper: On Exploring Missions each week end, we are really encouraged to hear what God is doing with different ministries, with different groups, individuals. And let me just share with you, He desires to use you, and just be open to what God would have you to do in your local church, in your home, in your work, in your community. The opportunities are there; we're still living in a place where Godly influence really makes a difference.
And there is a ministry that we're going to interview concerning the influence that they have in our schools all over the United States—but not just all over the United States, in our world. It's called Fellowship of Christian Athletes.
And Nathan, one of the areas that they really come to—I think—empower and look at us to say what we're to do is, they're looking for individuals and groups and engaging them in becoming greater and better disciples of Jesus Christ. Fellowship of Christian Athletes really does that, and that's not just a principle of FCA; that's a principle in the Word of God.
Nathan Harper: Yeah, that's right. And the cool thing with FCA, I was a part of FCA to a limited degree when I was in high school, but you didn't actually have to be an athlete officially to be a part of Fellowship of Christian Athletes. So, I was not the most athletic, but the good news was that that didn't have to qualify me to be a part of that group.
Bert Harper: You didn't have to go through drills, right?
Nathan Harper: That's right, no practice necessary, no running lines and all that. So, but seriously, the biblical principle is, when you're wanting to engage people with the gospel, maybe there's a people group, or maybe there is a community, or maybe there's an area geographically that you have focus, but there's people who live there in that area that are potentially unengaged, or they're under-evangelized, we'll say.
So, what you want to do is, biblically speaking, you want to reach the group. God is interested in saving groups of people, not just individuals out of the group. There are individuals inside of every group, and the individual is the first step of that process, but you don't stop with the one individual, and you dare not do what many times happens is, you reach someone for Jesus and then the next thing you know, you've extracted that person from the group that they are already a part of. And you tell them, "You can't belong to that group anymore, you have to come over here to our little church, our little group, and start acting like us."
I mean, that's gone to many different degrees we don't have time to discuss, but even to the point of like saying, "You can't speak your native language anymore, you have to learn English or this other language. You have to start dressing a certain way," and you get the picture. And that's how we extract people from their group, and guess what happens? We can't reach the group that way.
So, the biblical principle is that God wants to save groups of people. He wants to save whole families; He wants to save large numbers of people within a group. So, I'm thinking of John chapter 4, where Jesus was talking to the Samaritan woman. The second part of that story is, once He's talked to her—this is John 4:39—it says, "Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in Him because of the woman's testimony." So, she stayed in the town and had an influence there. "He told me everything I ever did," she said.
So, when the Samaritans came to Him, they urged Him to stay with them, and He stayed two days. And because of His words, many more became believers. Jesus is interested in the whole town; He's interested in the whole group.
So, as we engage people with the gospel, as we engage an individual with the gospel and we're evangelizing, and we're sharing the good news, and we're wanting to disciple that person, always, always keep in mind, that person belongs to a group. They're already a part of a group. It might be a small group, it might be just a family, could be a neighborhood, it could be a workplace, it could be anything, it could expand further out. God wants to reach that whole group and use that person's testimony of how He's transformed their lives to see community transformation, to see the whole group discipled to follow Jesus.
So, that's an element of what FCA does well. Other groups do that well, but the good news with FCA, you don't have to be an athlete to be engaged with the gospel through their ministry.
Bert Harper: And they're able to go into our schools, and because of it being student-led, but yet equipped by great guys and women that influence them, they're able to do all these things for the glory of God. Well, here on Exploring Missions, we want you to be aware of what God is doing, and one of the people, and one of the groups of people that He's working with is FCA. We hope you'll enjoy this interview as you hear what God is doing.
Bert Harper: Our guest is Grant Smallwood. Grant, thank you for joining us on this program.
Grant Smallwood: Oh, thank you so much for having me. We're so excited to be here, so it's exciting to get to talk about what we're talking about today.
Bert Harper: Yeah, we're having a reunion! It's been a while since we've been together and talked together, so it's a joy to be with you. Well, in place of me telling everybody what this ministry is that's local, national, and international, tell us what it is.
Grant Smallwood: Well, I get to serve as the Multi-Area Director for the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, and I'm so excited to get to be a part of this ministry and all that it does. And so, we're here to lead every coach and athlete into a growing relationship with Jesus Christ and the church. And so, that's our desire and our mission.
Bert Harper: And you do it well. I'm connected with several of the county reps, college reps, and just have so much confidence in them. And let's start first with your journey with FCA.
Grant Smallwood: Yeah, so I got to be part of FCA as a high school student back home in Selmer, Tennessee, and got to be part of that. And then as I went to college to play ball, I got to be connected with FCA in college. And then, as I got connected in college, I began to meet and know several FCA staff members in the state of Mississippi.
And ironically enough, got to be a coach, and FCA impacted me as a coach. And then as a coach, FCA was a big part of that, and I started volunteering with FCA and all the things that it involved and all the things that it provided for me as a coach, but I wanted to give back. And so, was grateful for the opportunity I got as an athlete to be a part of FCA, so I wanted to continue to help give back in that. And then when my coaching journey ended, I was able to join FCA as staff. We've been on staff for seven years now, on our eighth year, and God has just been so good through that journey.
Bert Harper: You know, as a player, student, coach, and now director—all those levels. The one that I think that people might be, "Okay, we understand the student, we understand that. But what about coaches? You mean FCA is helping coaches?"
Grant Smallwood: FCA is very much helping coaches for sure, you know. We want to lead every coach, you know that was the mission of it, is we want to lead every coach. And we hopefully work to and through the coach. Billy Graham gives the famous quote that we like to quote so many times, is that a coach will impact one student more in a year than most people will in a lifetime. So, a coach has such a great influence on our athletes, on our players, on our students, on our campuses. And so, we want to make sure that we invest in the coach because they're the ones that are the influencers on the campus.
Bert Harper: Well, when we think about that, FCA's been around a while, made an impact, and a little bit about the history.
Grant Smallwood: Yeah, so FCA's been around for over 70 years. In 1954, a basketball coach named Don McClanen said, "You know what? If athletes can endorse automobiles and other things that they're endorsing, can they not endorse the mission of Christ?" And so, he had a vision, and that's what it was. And so, he met with Branch Rickey, who was an executive for the baseball community in the upper levels, and he began FCA.
And then in 1956, FCA had their first ever FCA camp at Estes Park, Colorado.
Bert Harper: Oh, wow!
Grant Smallwood: And so, I'll tell you a neat story about that is, our state director got to take several of our staff over a couple of years ago to that room where they had the very first camp at the YMCA there in Estes Park, and it was so amazing to just think back on the history of where FCA has come from and to know what it is now, where there's over 3,500 staff members and we're all over the world. And it's just really neat to see, but 1956 was the first camp, and we haven't stopped since.
Bert Harper: Estes Park, Colorado. That's amazing.
Grant Smallwood: It's a beautiful scenery, I can tell you. Those mountains are gorgeous in Estes Park.
Bert Harper: It is. Well, you said international, over 3,500 employees, but how many countries?
Grant Smallwood: Yeah, so we're in 115 countries and 3,500 employees. So, we are all over the globe. We've gotten to really stretch and broaden ourselves from a global impact side of things. Obviously, FCA started here domestically, but as we know, we want to reach the uttermost, and so that's what God's called us to do, and so that's what we've done. And we partner with different areas within those communities all around the world, and so we partner with different missions across the globe to help share the gospel.
Bert Harper: I guess soccer, or football as they say, the ministry that Nathan works with, the Vapor Ministries, they go into third-world countries and they do two things: provide water, clean water, and build a soccer field. Because it's kind of like, "Build it and they will come."
Grant Smallwood: It's the universal language.
Bert Harper: It really is. Just after we've gone through the World Cup here, and it's amazing how it is. And so, sports and athletics is an awesome way to reach especially young men and women, isn't it?
Grant Smallwood: It is, it's amazing. And we are—and you talked about Nathan and the soccer piece of that—you know, we were able to go a couple of years ago over to help one village where we were able to help build a soccer field. And so, they had an unlevel field, we were able to go level it, put some posts up—just a couple of metal posts—so that they could go kick a soccer ball in the middle of it. And that one village, that one village led to 18 other small communities feeding into that soccer field. And it's just amazing to see the number. You roll one ball out, and kids come from everywhere.
Bert Harper: Yeah, when our three sons played soccer a little bit in their first start, I would have loved to have had a drone. It was like a ball was here, and all ten of the kids around it were all around, going where... They had not learned the technique of playing position, they were just following the ball. So, you can imagine that ball going out there, and they're just—they're going after it.
Grant Smallwood: Just a herd of people.
Bert Harper: Oh man, that's it. Well, this is amazing. Fellowship of Christian Athletes, they're in Christian schools, they're in Christian colleges, but they're also in public schools. We said this earlier, going where no man has gone before! But FCA can go where a lot of others are not able to get there.
Grant Smallwood: That's right. We are the number one public school ministry in the world. And so, we're able to go onto a campus, a college campus, an elementary school, whatever it may be, and be able to lead young people who are passionate about their faith and who want to lead and share their faith with other students on their campus, and so to impact those.
So, that's exciting for us to be able to be a part of that and to be just a small part of helping push the ministry ahead, and being able to provide opportunities for students who do want to share their faith and who want to be a part of that to be able to share it with their peers in the school. So, it's really neat. We're not just in a private school, we're not just in a public school, but we're all over, so it's pretty neat.
Bert Harper: And I remember when I was a youth minister—years ago, Grant, okay!—the kids that were in FCA, they'd talk about it, they'd come to me and, "Okay, we're meeting, got any suggestions for this, that, and the other?" And it was amazing. It's a discipleship program as well.
Grant Smallwood: It's exactly what it is. It's an opportunity for those kids to grow in the Lord and be able to be led and shown how to do those things. You know, there's a study from Barna—and I know you guys know all these stats, I'm sure—but there's a really neat study from Barna that used to be it was the age of 18 where if you knew Christ before the age of 18, you know, that was great, but if you didn't know Christ before the age of 18, the likelihood of you coming to know Him in faith was a really small number.
And that number now has changed from 18 to 13. And so, we—we have a job to do. And we've got to get on those campuses and got to be able to share the gospel and got to continue to be able to find those who don't know Christ and who may be struggling in those situations.
And so, we have a great mission ahead of us, and that's our goal. You know, a lot of people understand FCA as the middle school, high school ministry, you know, donuts on Friday morning and come and hear a speaker, and that's what it is, but it's much more than that. We're now developing leadership teams so those students who want to lead, so that it's not me going in and just preaching away, it's me leading these students, and they're the ones that are going out and sharing, they're the ones that are leading their peers to Christ, and they're the ones that are making the biggest impact.
Bert Harper: Let me see, I think Jesus used that method, training 12, don't you?
Grant Smallwood: That's pretty—yeah, I think we got that from a good source.
Bert Harper: I agree with you. Let's talk about the organization. We've talked about it being international, national, and local. So you have a national board, international, and again, it's people that have been in leadership. But then you have state, and then in your area, as you say, multi-area director for Northeast Mississippi. And then you have local ones that maybe to a district or a county, and then you have the huddles. Go through that organization a little bit, give us a little bit of meat to the skeleton here.
Grant Smallwood: Yeah, that's good. Actually, you're not far off right there, so that was pretty good, Brother Byrt. You know, we have our headquarters in Kansas City. That's where our HQ is, and our president and the executive team all operate out of that, and then we have our Board of Trustees, and those are—that's kind of our top executive levels. And then under that, we have all of our VPs, our regional VPs. So we have 12 regions within our country. And then they're sectioned out into the states. So then we have our state-level leadership, and then, of course, it moves down to where like I am right now. I'm the regional director, so it's a—the multi-area director, technically. And then we have directors under us and reps that serve within the schools. And so it kind of works that way. It goes national, and it kind of separates into regions, and then down to state, and then local.
And so it's really just a neat way to go ahead and help serve all the communities that we can reach. And so where the rubber meets the road are those directors and reps who are in the schools, who are in the field, and who are doing it every single day. And so those regional areas—so like our region is Region 8. We connect with Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama. And our region connects to East Africa, so we serve those countries over in East Africa. That's our international connection within the framework of FCA. And so that helps us somewhat stay organized a little bit to know where we're going and what we're doing. But that's a neat kind of overview of where everybody is and how we serve.
Bert Harper: In each school, the group is called a huddle?
Grant Smallwood: That's right.
Bert Harper: You just love that, you know? Whether you play football—and basketball even. Now, I don't know if baseballs can huddle or not, but anyway... In basketball, you know, they huddle around the coach at, you know, different times. But the huddle's where the action is, isn't it?
Grant Smallwood: That's it. And we're so blessed. We have so many teachers, administrators, coaches within the school system that serve as kind of a liaison, a sponsor, that we—you know, they said, "Hey, you know what? I'll unlock the gym on Friday mornings so that you guys can come in and have your huddle." And so it's just those students, and those coaches, and those teachers, and anybody that wants to come and be a part of that, to be able to come in and hear the Gospel, hear the Word, fellowship... You know, we have a thing with FCA—we call it the E3 method. It's our method to do things. It'll be familiar to you, but Engage, Equip, Empower. Kind of the discipleship model, right? So it's amazing how that works.
Bert Harper: Nothing new under the sun!
Grant Smallwood: That's right, that's it! And so we—you know, we want to engage those students. We want to make sure that we've built fellowship and they know the Lord, and then we want to be able to equip them with God's Word and what that looks like, and then we want to empower them to go out and do the same thing. And so that's the cool part about the huddles, is that that's what we're trying to do. It's not a chapel; it's a huddle. We break out into small groups, ask questions, start building on that, and be able to open God's Word and read it for ourselves.
Bert Harper: Okay, with that in mind, they have to have resources. Go online FCA and you'll see some things, and it'll get to what is called "Resources." And they're even daily devotion or daily Bible reading? I mean, it's pretty in-depth.
Grant Smallwood: It's—we have—I don't know about many other organizations and their resources, but I know about FCA's resources, and they're vast. We have a resource for just about everything you can ask for. And, you know, one of our biggest resources is that we do provide Bibles for our students. And so we are the second-leading free Bible distributors in the nation...
Bert Harper: See if I can guess above—Gideons?
Grant Smallwood: That's it! That's it! We're number two behind the Gideons, and...
Bert Harper: That's a good number to be with right there. It really is, yeah.
Grant Smallwood: But we handed out over 240,000 Bibles in 2025 last year—245,000 Bibles got distributed. And so that's one of our resources. In the back of those Bibles, 365 days of devotions. We have other Bibles that provide the E3 resources, the discipleship resources. We have other Bibles that provide just topical things that students are going through, that coaches are going through, that athletes are going through, so we have those.
And then we have other resources, such as—one of the resources that we use is called The Core. It's an eight-week study for the core principles that the Gospel teaches, so that when there's a new believer that comes in, we get to share that. I'm going to sidebar and give you a quick story about The Core.
Bert Harper: Yeah, I want to hear that. We love the stories, yeah.
Grant Smallwood: Oh man. And so I got a call one Wednesday night, and I got it from an athletic director—and that's unusual to get a call on a Wednesday night from an athletic director, so I thought I was in trouble at first. And so he called and he said, "You're not going to believe what happened at school today." I said, "Well, let's hear it." And he said, "I was at football practice and watching, and there's a young man that came over after football practice, and as boldly as someone can say, he said, 'I need to be saved.'" At football practice! And he said he was just shocked; he didn't know what to do. So he said, "Well, maybe we can talk..." "No, like, I want to be saved now. I want to know how to do this."
And so right there, an athletic director got to pray with a football player and lead him to Christ. And then immediately after the prayer, he said, "I want to be baptized." And he's like, "Well, how do we..." He's like, "Whatever we've got to do, like, I want to be baptized now." So they dumped the ice cooler, the ice bath that the football players jump in—they dumped it out, they filled it back with water, and they baptized him in the ice bath water right there on campus that night. And so as the athletic director is telling me this, I've just got chills. I'm just thinking about how amazing this is.
And then soon after that, that next day, he's like, "I want you to come meet him." And so I got to meet with him, and then I got, for the next eight weeks, to walk him through The Core. So those eight weeks of principles that the Gospel teaches us as a new believer. And so that's just a neat story of how the resources work. I got to give him a Bible—an Athlete's Bible that's got all the things that athletes want to know in there, and all the resources for that. But it was just really neat to see how, I mean, a random Wednesday at football practice, a young man comes to know Christ and gets saved and gets baptized right there, so it's pretty cool.
Bert Harper: Anytime, anywhere, anyone! That's it! Our God is able, isn't He? When you were saying that, it reminded me of the Ethiopian eunuch: "There's water! What hinders me from being baptized?" Well, at least they got the ice out, so that was good! That would've been tough!
Okay, another—it's not a resource, but it is: camps. Tell us about—sometimes at the end of the year, you'll have area meetings where you give out some awards in different areas. Give us a little bit of a glimpse of that.
Grant Smallwood: Yeah, so our number one ministry with FCA—and we talked about it earlier, in 1956, our first camp was at Estes Park. Well, that's our number one ministry, the first thing that we do. We service camps all over, almost a thousand of those nationally a year across the globe. And we have, I want to say, over 200,000 campers that come to these camps all over the nation, all over the world. And we're able to equip, to empower, engage these athletes through camp ministry. They're all wanting to be part of a sport and be able to be part of these things, and so we're able to bring them in and disciple them through these three-day camps, one-day camps, week-long camps, all that it is, all across the globe.
Specifically here in Mississippi, we have three camps that our state level tries to really engage in and push in. One is our Leadership Camp for high school and middle school students. It's at the end of May, first of June every year down at Mississippi College, and it's been amazing to see the growth in that. It's always been a nice camp. COVID really hit us a little bit with numbers, and then after that, we were tracking at about a 20% growth every year after that. So two years ago, we had 360 total campers at the camp. Well, last year—this past year, this past May—we had over 500. Largest leadership camp we've ever had! I didn't know where we were going to put everybody! It was just amazing.
And so that's one of our main camps that we have here, is Leadership Camp. We have a college camp—so not just for our grade school students from middle school and high school, but we also have a college camp called College Getaway. And this is where one of the biggest impacts in my life happened. At College Getaway, as a college baseball player, I got to go to this, and it just changed my perspective about FCA. I was like, "Oh, this is much bigger than I thought it was. It's not just donuts and a devotion on Friday morning." And so College Getaway is something where all of our colleges around the state come together for a weekend and just fellowship and get to know each other, but get equipped to be able to go back and empower on their campus.
And then the last camp that we really press in on our state level is CTO, which is Coaches Time Out. So we have a coaches retreat for them and their spouse to be able to go away for a weekend, and you know that's rare in the coaching community, to get away for a weekend, because they are all the time, non-stop. And so to be able to just pause, get out on a retreat for a weekend, restore, refresh, renew everything that's going on in their marriage to invest in them, because we talked about it earlier—coaches are one of the biggest influences, if not the biggest influence, in someone's life. So those are three ways that we try to impact through camps locally in our state, and nationally as well.
Bert Harper: When I hear this, I could not help but think about the growth. We saw it on college campuses—people being saved, and I know it happened at Auburn University, University of Georgia, Ohio State, where the football team, man, they really got right with God, even in Ohio State, you know? Is this what we saw with Charlie Kirk and how many college students were gravitating to biblical thought? So if we have 500, it sounds like something's growing. Can you sense that, Grant?
Grant Smallwood: I do. I've been saying this for the last couple of years. There is an undergrowing within our students, within our schools, that I can sense just being on campuses, that there is a faith movement that's happening. And these students—I don't know, my generation, your generation, we were a lot about just coming in, sitting and soaking, and hearing the Word, and we were okay with that. This generation wants to do. They want to get out and be active; their faith is real. They want to be active in it.
Bert Harper: Doers of the Word!
Grant Smallwood: That's it! It's amazing! And so it's fun to see and to see the excitement of these young people and what they're doing, and to see them sharing their faith in difficult situations, and wanting to know more. They're asking difficult questions—sometimes more difficult than I'm even willing to answer, because I'm not sure, but they want to know, and they're not afraid to ask, and there's an excitement to it. And so I do—I see a kind of undergrowing inside the faith community to see students building up in their faith, so it's exciting.
Bert Harper: Our guest today on Exploring Missions is Grant Smallwood, better known as Coach Smalls. But contact—if somebody out there thinks, "Man, that sounds like a great thing," can they contact FCA and find out how they can be a part of it by praying and giving?
Grant Smallwood: Absolutely. Of course, we have a national website that you can contact us and find us and search for us, so there's plenty of ways to get involved and do that. My prayer would be, if FCA sounds like something you would be interested in, reach out to your local FCA wherever you're at, get involved, help volunteer, serve, if you can help financially support, with all the resources that are going on, even just with staff members. We're a faith-funded ministry, and so that's always helpful. For every staff member that we add, 500 coaches and athletes get impacted.
Bert Harper: Amen!
Grant Smallwood: So for one staff member, 500 athletes and coaches get impacted.
Bert Harper: Wow! Grant, thank you for being with us. Appreciate FCA, appreciate you, brother. And we thank you for listening to Exploring Missions, and we're praying that God would open the door for you to be on mission for God, whether it be FCA or whatever God's leading you to, to glorify the Lord Jesus Christ.
In this episode, we explore the powerful impact of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA) with multi-area director Grant Smallwood. Discover how FCA is not just for athletes, but a vital ministry that engages individuals and communities in sharing the gospel. We discuss the importance of reaching entire groups, the transformative power of personal testimonies, and how FCA is making a difference in schools across the globe. Tune in to hear inspiring stories and learn how you can get involved!
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