When
Performance
Matters
By Joshua Cooley
Growing up in a Catholic family in
California’s Bay Area, Zach Ertz was
baptized as an infant, went to weekly
Mass, attended CCD classes, and
received First Communion. He used
to wonder how saying four Hail Marys
and three Our Fathers could pro¬vide
forgiveness. “That’s how I remember
it,” he says. “I could be wrong. I
don’t know how closely I was paying
attention. I was a seven-year-old kid,
and I probably had two Mountain Dews
before CCD.”
Memory-fogging sugar rush aside,
many of the religious concepts taught
to children in all kinds of churches
have been nothing more than a
52 • Solutions
spiritual attempt at “practice makes
perfect”—a flawed salvation-by-works
mentality in which a certain kind of
ritual, performed piously enough over
the course of one’s life, can earn favor
with God. For Ertz, grace was absent
from the equation. It wasn’t the life-
changing gospel of Jesus Christ.
When the Eagles drafted Ertz out of
Stanford in 2013, he was struck by
the authenticity of his new Christian
teammates, their vibrant faith, and
their commitment to God’s Word. He
marveled at their emotional consistency
amidst the capricious, often cutthroat
nature of their profession. They
weren’t perfect, but they were clearly