Former Detroit Lions chaplain Dave Wilson helped players through team's difficult years

Thirty-two years ago, on the eve of the last time the Detroit Lions played in the NFC championship game, Pastor Dave Wilson was in a hotel room in Washington D.C. with Lions players delivering a sermon for a chapel service he usually held the evening before games.

As chaplain for the Lions at the time and co-founder of one of metro Detroit largest non-denominational churches, Kensington, Wilson was trying to inspire the team as players prepared to square off against Washington.

"The goal is ... to win tomorrow, to get to the Super Bowl," Wilson, 66, of Rochester Hills, recalled he told the team that day in 1992. Chris Spielman, the former Lions linebacker who today works for the team as an executive, stood up and challenged Wilson's remarks.

"He said: 'You're wrong. That's not the goal. Because the goal is not to get to the Super Bowl, the goal is to win the Super Bowl.' ... And he sat down," Wilson said.

Wilson appreciated Spielman's interjection, saying it reminded him of the importance that athletes place on winning, which he sought to incorporate into his teachings from the Bible and Christianity. For 33 seasons from 1985 to 2018, Wilson was team chaplain during a stretch when the Lions won only one playoff game, against the Cowboys the week before their losing effort in Washington. Wilson forged close ties with the team and had many high points, both on and off the field, helping Lions with everything from their marriages to alcohol problems, but the losing seasons were not easy.

Wilson said that a few years ago, someone who had researched NFL chaplains told him: "You are officially the losingest chaplain in the history of the NFL." A decade ago, one of his sons, Cody Wilson, became a wide receiver for the Lions after serving as a youth pastor.

In 2018, Wilson was let go by the Lions as chaplain after new head coach, Matt Patricia, said he wanted to "do it the Patriots way," Wilson said. "And the Patriots didn't have a chaplain, the Patriots had a character coach, which was a full-time coach who took care of player development, player education, and part of his responsibility is to take care of the spiritual side of things."

As the Lions prepare to play in the NFC championship game for the second time, Wilson will still be supporting the team, but this time as just a fan.

"I couldn't be more excited to see them finish this thing," Wilson told the Free Press. "And I think they're going to. I really think they've got all the pieces."

Other churches across Michigan have also been getting revved up in recent weeks, with some encouraging congregants to wear Lions gear to church. At Grace Community Church in Detroit, a 125-year-old congregation, churchgoers last Sunday wore T-shirts and jerseys of their favorite players and were treated to Lions-themed bagels, which they will do again this Sunday. The Baptist church's lead pastor, Doug Kempton, said the Lions' success is helping bring a sense of community at a time of polarization.

"There's just such a sense of unity, pulling together ... and that's the way it should be in the faith communities, a sense of unity amidst our differences," Kempton said. "It can inspire us to give us a picture of what it can look like when we rise above our differences."

Football and faith go together from the very origins of football in the 19th century, when it was developed by upper-class Protestant men at elite Ivy League universities.

"Dissatisfied with a Victorian culture focused on domesticity and threatened by physical decline in sedentary office jobs, American men in the late nineteenth century sought masculine company in fraternal lodges and engaged in exercise to invigorate their bodies," wrote Professor Clifford Putney of Bentley University in his book "Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880-1920."

"Protestant leaders promoted competitive sports and physical education to create an ideal of Christian manliness."

Many NFL star players have been open about their Christian faith, including some who will be competing this weekend, such as Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson and 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy. It's unclear how many Lions players attend local churches or participate in team services. Lions kicker Riley Patterson wears a cross during games and is open about his Christian faith, reported the Michigan Catholic. Catholic priests would often hold a separate service with Mass at the same time as the Protestant chapel service the day before games, Wilson said. University of Michigan football coach Jim Harbaugh is a Catholic who is open about his faith and recently attended a rally in Washington D.C. speaking out against abortion and saying that 70 players on his team were baptized this season, reported Church Leaders. There also have been Muslim players on the Lions team over the years.

Other players have at times sought out Asian practices and cultures. Michigan quarterback J.J. McCarthy has drawn national attention for sitting cross-legged and meditating at the goal post before games. Tom Brady kept a small statue of Ganesha, the Hindu deity with an elephant head said to remove life's roadblocks, in his locker room during the Super Bowl.

"The remover of obstacles," Brady told a reporter about Ganesha after defeating the Seahawks in the 2015 Super Bowl. Brady later worked with Gotham Chopra, son of Deepak Chopra, on a TV series called the Religion of Sports.

Over the years, the Lions had close ties to Kensington, an evangelical megachurch with six congregations in Michigan. Former Lions team president Tom Lewand spoke in 2015 at Kensington about his alcoholism and religious transformation that helped him recover.

When Wilson was chaplain, the chapel service he held the day before games was just one of several religious events throughout the week. After the Sunday game, some players would attend on Monday a couples' Bible study along with their wives, usually held in a player's home. On Thursdays, his wife, Ann Wilson, led a service for the wives of players, and then on Fridays, Wilson would go the players' facility in Allen Park for a Bible study. In his last decade with the team, there was also Bible study for front office employees and a Bible study for the coaches.

At the chapel service Saturdays, there were usually 25 to 30 players and four to seven coaches, Wilson said. At one point, they had about 50 people coming to the weekly Bible study.

"I've talked to other chaplains around the league, and some of them don't do as much, but almost everybody does the Saturday night or Sunday morning chapel service," Wilson said.

Wilson was a quarterback at Ball State University and then decided to join a seminary; he co-founded in 1990 Kensington, where he was lead pastor for years. After his Lions contract was not renewed when Patricia came in, he was asked a couple of times to come in and speak, but not this season. He now records a podcast with his wife about marriage and faith called FamilyLife Today and has co-written with her a couple of books, Vertical Marriage and No Perfect Parents.

Wilson has become a mentor for players on different teams, including Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Baker Mayfield and his wife. After the Buccaneers won their first playoff game and were headed to Detroit to play the Lions, "Baker called and said 'Can you do chapel in Detroit?' " Wilson said.

"I'm like, 'I can do it, but I don't know if I want to fire you up to win, I want you guys to lose,'" Wilson said jokingly. "I went down to the Detroit Marriott and spoke to the Bucs Saturday night."

Believing in a higher power can help ease the blows of losing, but at times, there were some who worried that emphasizing religion too much could lead to a culture where winning is not a priority, Wilson said. In the 1990s, some were saying "you don't want to make Christians on your team because they care too much about God and not enough about winning," Wilson said.

Years ago, a player once "made a comment after a game that they lost, 'Well, you know, it must have been God's will,' he said. "And the coach went crazy, like, 'I don't want these kinds of guys in my locker room if they think it's God's will to lose.'"

That week, Wilson focused his Saturday evening sermon on responding to criticism of religion in football.

"Let me give you what I believe is God's perspective on this," he said. "If you're a follower of Christ, if ... you want to honor God, you should be the hardest working player in the locker room, you should be there before everybody else, you should be there after everybody leaves. The coach should trust you because he knows you're not just playing for him, you're playing for a God of the universe who's giving you this opportunity. ... Coaches in the NFL should be begging for guys like you to be in their locker room because you understand this is really important what we do."

When Jon Kitna was Lions quarterback from 2006 to 2008, Bible study was sometimes held in the basement of his home, Wilson said. Other players said they were drawn to Kitna's peaceful nature, as well as that of backup quarterback Josh McCown.

"They would say, whatever they got, that's what I want," Wilson said. "I want the marriages they have, they have a peace about them. They have a joy that's not connected to circumstances. So the Bible study just kept growing and growing."

During the 2007 season, when the Lions went 7-9, "we baptized about 20. ... a revival broke out."

But the next year, the Lions went 0-16.

"The losing was just terrible," Wilson said. "But at the same time, people are more open to spiritual things when they're going through adversity. So ministry-wise, it was still a great year, because guys were asking questions. They were sort of realizing, hey, whether you win a Super Bowl or not, it doesn't really fulfill, it doesn't last. So there's got to be something bigger than just winning football games and getting a nice paycheck."

Previous Free Press reporting by James Jahnke and USA Today contributed to this report.

Contact Niraj Warikoo:nwarikoo@freepress.com or X @nwarikoo

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Pastor Dave Wilson was Detroit Lions chaplain for 33 years