IN THE cathedral city of Lincoln, the Promised Land was finally in sight. Hot on the heels of Good Friday’s three-hour devotion, our beloved football club — fondly often known as the Red Imps — kicked off against AFC Wimbledon. A win would put us on the very brink of promotion to the EFL Championship and will even, if other results went our way, “land us protected on Canaan’s side” by suppertime.
The last time that Lincoln City played within the second tier of English football, within the 1960-61 season, Tottenham Hotspur did the double, winning the league and the FA Cup. The Berlin Wall had not quite been built, the American nightmare was Cuba reasonably than Iran, and Yuri Gagarin was about to turn out to be the primary human in space — for Lincoln City, 65 years within the wilderness has been far too long.
Not many followers have kept the religion throughout that downtime. A wall of remembrance at Sincil Bank, the club’s home stadium, lists the names of those loved and lost — not least Bill Stacey and Jim West, the 2 Imps killed within the Bradford City fire of 1985.
Despite temporary, vivid interludes under the management of Graham Taylor (later the England manager), Colin Murphy, and Keith Alexander, relegation — and, before that, re-election (whereby clubs that finished at the underside of the league weren’t relegated mechanically, but needed to apply to maintain their place) — were long the order of the day. The club has been twice banished into the outer darkness of non-league, that hapless place of wailing and gnashing of teeth.
For my part, I jumped aboard the Lincoln loco within the late Nineteen Seventies. Murphy soon had us on the up and up, and, by March 1982, we topped the third tier. A hidden gem and now Lincoln institution, Crust Restaurant, opened the identical month on the very site of the old Monson Arms, the general public house through which Lincoln City Football Club had been founded in 1884.
The players soon got here to wine and dine, but, alas, there was to be no heavenly banquet. The promotion push that season hit the buffers at Craven Cottage (home to Fulham FC) and petered out again 12 months later. Then got here the drop through the divisions — and with the autumn got here financial peril, fractious infighting, administration, and a marked malaise in the whole lot.
IN THE past decade, nevertheless, with good governance and progressive leadership ultimately taking root, growing numbers of us “Yellow-Bellies” began daring to imagine that our entire lives may not, in reality, be spent in football’s basement.
Cue Danny Cowley, who became manager in May 2016 — if not the Messiah, then definitely a Moses pointing us in the fitting direction. Like John the Baptist, he was a forerunner — engaging the community, prophesying salvation. We were FA Cup quarter-finalists in 2017, title-winners the identical yr and again in 2019, with EFL Trophy success at Wembley sandwiched in between.
After Cowley dragged us up into League One, in 2019, he disembarked for Huddersfield Town. Michael Appleton, an acolyte of Sir Alex Ferguson, assumed the reins, and took the Imps to a play-off final in 2021, but no further.
We were getting closer, and so, this season, the sensation grew that — given modest foreign investment and with an elite futsal coach, “Professor” Michael Skubala (“Football is an invasion game”), on the helm — the celebrities might at some point align.
In the event they didn’t, not less than not on Good Friday, when Lincoln played AFC Wimbledon. Ironically, Nathan Bishop within the Wimbledon goal — booked for time-wasting, no less — kept City’s forwards at bay; and, although super-sub Ryan Oné broke the deadlock late on (“There’s just one Ryan Oné!”), Lincoln’s closest rivals for promotion also triumphed, and so the Promised Land remained a gnat’s whisker away. A single point at Reading on Easter Monday would, nevertheless, suffice.
This seemed fitting. In the cathedral, the Dean had warned us to not hasten the resurrection. In their anxiety, human beings much prefer resolution to uncertainty, he said. But Good Friday can’t be hurried. It is a day for empathy, for recognising the griefs and grievances that so often shape our short stint on this planet. It is a day not for looking ahead but for looking around.
Wise words. At Sincil Bank, I scanned the fraught, friendly faces of 10,000 souls, whose hopes and dreams I actually have for therefore long shared. What I, aged 16, had hoped would come to pass has taken me until 60 to behold. But perhaps the long wait makes it sweeter still, as does its realisation at Easter, when, “healed, restored, forgiven”, we will all benefit from the promise of promotion to dizzyingly latest heights of humanity.
And so it proved. At Reading, the Red Imps picked up greater than some extent: gloriously, we took all three, with a last-gasp winner scored right in front of the travelling faithful. Mission completed. The Promised Land reached!
THREE weeks on, the “Impvasion” shows no sign of letting up. Unbeaten (as I write) for 27 games, crowned last week as runaway champions of League One, open-top bus parade within the offing: these are heady days indeed. Quite improbably, Lincoln City have turn out to be darlings of the national press, and we’re proclaimed on social media and podcasts to be England’s model club.
Run on a (relatively) shoestring budget and counting on enlightened recruitment; the patient, humane development of talent; myriad community partnerships; and newly-conceived, closely-guarded metrics for on-field success — there may be indeed much to admire. It may not be the body of Christ, but neither is the club’s “It takes a village” philosophy at odds with the gospel that I do know and love. To paraphrase Jesus, “If they aren’t against you, then they’re definitely onside.” This Imp, for one, cannot help swelling with pride at every mention of the club within the media.
In stark contrast, one other LCFC, Leicester City, have now been “humbled for a season” twice in a row. Julian Barnes — very possibly Leicester City’s most high-profile fan — won the 2011 Booker Prize for The Sense of an Ending; but he cannot possibly have foreseen successive relegations for a team that picked up the Premier League title as recently as 2016. I love his stoicism: he says that past glories don’t make the club’s present predicament more painful, but more bearable.
In much the identical vein, I do know that, by instinct and personality, I’m well-disposed to be a supporter — and never only on the football. It makes service within the church and thru chaplaincy a great fit, too. Ultimately, it’s a calling.
In a recent address, considered one of our postgrads at Jesus College, Oxford, Shelby Knighten, helped to border faith’s interplay with vocation. He put it like this: “In the synagogue, 30-year-old Jesus in the beginning of his ministry puts forward a transparent vision of what He known as to do: bringing ‘excellent news to the poor’, ‘proclaiming release to the captives’, setting the oppressed free. He doesn’t say, ‘The Lord has called me to be a rabbi, teacher, doctor, political revolutionary. . .’
“Jesus doesn’t profess a profession. Instead, he speaks of his vocation. And, within the words of the Old Testament scholar, Walter Brueggemann, the wait between the dream and its disclosure is the time to discern it.”
The Revd Philip Harbridge is Chaplain of Jesus College, Oxford.
Source: https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2026/1-may/faith/faith-features/faith-and-football-bumpy-route-to-resurrection
