On one hand, Carlos Lara recognizes how random it was that he ended up in a small Tennessee town playing for a summer collegiate league team in 2021.
“I was offered the opportunity to play in what I thought was Nashville and I said ‘yes,'” he told Sports Spectrum. “It wasn’t even something that I searched for or wanted.”
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After playing at Division-II Palm Beach Atlantic University, he was mostly looking to use his summer league experience as a springboard to transfer elsewhere for his extra year of eligibility earned from the COVID-19 pandemic. Ultimately, his goal was to be drafted by a major league team. Anything less than that meant his baseball career — and by extension, his life — was a failure, he thought.
The team he ended up playing for that summer was the Full Count Rhythm, operated under the umbrella of Full Count Ministries in Hendersonville, just north of Nashville. He was loosely aware that it was a “Christian team,” but he didn’t give that much thought nor did he research much about the team.
It didn’t take long for him to realize there was something different about his new surroundings.
“Something about the way everyone at the welcoming barbecue treated us made no sense to me,” he said. “It was a strange kind of care and warmth I had only ever felt around my family. It really did catch me by surprise, so much so that two weeks in I already knew something bigger than baseball was going on. Little did I know that God was working in ways I would never understand.”
Between discipleship from his host family, hearing testimonies from his teammates, and the various community events, his heart was changed. Three weeks after arriving, he gave his life to Christ. It was clear to him then that his summer plans were no accident.
“God placed me at the right place at the right time,” he said.
Baseball 🤝 Discipleship
Psalm 27:4 ESV 🙏🏼
“One thing have I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple.” pic.twitter.com/DAEpgJGPUC— Full Count Rhythm (@fullcountrhythm) June 3, 2024
Stories like Lara’s are why Full Count Ministries was created in 2012 with a mission to make disciples through the game of baseball. The idea originated during a mission trip to Nicaragua when Nathan Davenport, who is now president of the board, was hiking back down a hill and saw some locals playing a pickup-style baseball game.
He quickly learned how popular the sport was in the Central American country and immediately began planning a return trip that would include enough people to play a game against the locals and use it as a way to share the Gospel.
He rounded up a group of former teammates and friends from his church league softball team. Their regular discipleship gatherings doubled as mission trip planning meetings, and whoever signed up first got to go. All of Full Count’s trips are like that — actual skill or experience in baseball is not a requirement.
With 12 guys on board, the group headed to Nicaragua to see their plan through. The team stuck with a straightforward recipe: Play baseball, feed the opposing team, then share the Gospel and testimonies with them. That springboarded into the ministry now known as Full Count.
“It was a really fruitful trip of just engaging local people in Nicaragua,” said Reed Glover, who serves as the director of ministry at Full Count, and has been with the ministry since its inception. “We really started out just doing mission trips to Nicaragua. After a year or two of taking baseball mission trips where we would go and play in Nicaragua, we just felt the Lord convicting us that what we were doing abroad, we needed to do it in our own backyard.”
To be more specific, Full Count has a vision of “every baseball player around the world hearing the Gospel, responding to the message and growing in their relationship with Christ,” Glover said. “We have the vision that every baseball player around the world will get a chance to do that.”
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Stateside, Full Count works through two main avenues of ministry. The first is a couple of fall wood-bat leagues for high schoolers (one in Middle Tennessee and another in Birmingham, Alabama), which have more than 30 teams and 200 total players. Teams play doubleheaders once a week and do a devotional during the games. Once the season is over, many of the players join discipleship groups, Glover said.
The second is Rhythm, the summer collegiate team Lara was a part of. Now in its fourth season, the team brings 40 college players to town for the summer to play a 10-week season. Players are welcome regardless of their faith, but each one is partnered with a Christian host family and a mentor who will disciple them during the summer.
All of the college players, if they want to, have the opportunity to go on one of the baseball mission trips to Nicaragua to share the Gospel through the game of baseball.
“We’re very serious about baseball, but even more serious about discipling those 40 college baseball players while they’re in town,” Glover said. “If they are a believer, our biggest prayer is that we can equip those players to go back to their college campuses and start and lead discipleship groups for their teammates.”
Lara credits his host family, Mike and Kim Hayes, for being an influential part of his journey toward accepting Christ as he stayed with them in both 2021 and 2022. He credits his trips to Nicaragua for equipping him to “face the world” and helping him learn to put his faith in Jesus. This, in turn, has helped bear fruit in his relationships, he said.
“If it wasn’t for the obedience of the people at Full Count to use their love for baseball as a tool to spread the Gospel, I probably wouldn’t be able to share this story with you,” Lara said. “I learned and experienced so many things while I was a player at Full Count that have completely saved my life. … This ministry is truly one of a kind.”
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