What WWF action figures can teach us about forming an authentic faith

LOUISVILLE — The Annual Event of the Association of Partners in Christian Education concluded Saturday with stellar preaching by the Rev. Dr. Lillian H. Lammers, pastor of First Presbyterian Church in downtown Memphis.

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“Thank you for bringing your conference to downtown Memphis,” Lammers told those in attendance at the Peabody Hotel. “I hope you’ve gotten a taste of what I love about this city. It has the thickest overlay of love.”

Raised in Chicagoland, Lammers told the story Saturday of her parents’ decision to move five blocks away when Lammers was 6, which for her meant attending a new elementary school. “I was desperate to make friends” that summer, she said, and she did: a fellow 6-year-old named Matthew lived just across the alley.

That year, 1986, Lammers found out that Matthew was into a toy that many other boys were playing with that summer: WWF Wrestling figures. “They were made of the thickest, densest rubber you have ever seen,” Lammers said. “Mostly you just bammed them against each other, or flung them against the ropes.”

The day she was invited over, “I pretended to know who Junkyard Dog and Andre the Giant were,” she said. “Matthew decided I should be ‘Macho Man’ Randy Savage” because “none of his friends wanted to play with that doll. His outfit looked like a Speedo with stars on it.”

“I started to get into the whole thing,” she said. She got her mother to buy her a deck of trading cards so she could memorize facts on the wrestlers. One day, Matthew played a “greatest hits” video featuring Andre the Giant, who was finishing off an opponent by administering a bear hug. “Matthew’s dad came in, shook his head, and said, ‘It’s all so fake,’” Lammers said.

“What?” she thought. “I had studied WWF for weeks to solidify my friendship. I asked Matthew and my parents, and it turns out they all knew it was fake and choreographed.”

Fast-forward nearly four decades later. “Here we are in 2025 at a conference talking about wrestling with God and the church,” Lammers said. “Knowing that vital lesson I learned all those years ago, how do we know when our wrestling is fake, choreographed theatrics?”

“I have learned this in 15 years of ministry: There’s some fake wrestling going on in Christian communities,” Lammers said. “Some of us wear our faith on the outside without letting it in on the inside.” But “Scripture tells us faith is a struggle, something to be wrestled with.”

Wrestling with faith includes at least two requirements, she said:

• A willingness “to be really uncomfortable.” Just seven blocks north of the Peabody Hotel, First Presbyterian Church is surrounded by “a heck of a lot” of bail bonds companies, she said. “What keeps us going [as a church] is a ministry to the unhoused” and others “who find themselves at the margins. It is a beautiful and holy flurry of activity.” The “kind of wrestling we are called to do [at First Presbyterian Church] looks the way it does and our guests look the way they do.” Church members and friends “are called to do this wrestling in a state that has made it a criminal act to teach divisive topics in public schools.” We must “mine our faith for meaning, poke at our presuppositions, and shine daylight on the doubt and fear that lurk inside all of us,” Lammers said. “Some of the answers we think we have are flawed and incomplete.”
• We must engage our theological imaginations. “Back in 1986, those WWF products were fake. But in Matthew’s living room, what we were doing was very real. We were engaging our imaginations,” Lammers said. As we get older, “we lose that ability we had as children to engage our imaginations.”

Lammers spent a year as a chaplain helping to open a palliative care unit. When a question would arise about what happens when we die — “and it happened frequently,” she said — “I invited them to use their imaginations and said, ‘honestly, none of us knows. The Bible doesn’t explain that part. How do you want it to go? What do you think might happen?’”

“I heard so many beautiful visions of what that experience might be like — how God might greet us and who might be there,” she said. “I don’t know if they were right or wrong, but for these folks, it seemed to make God’s presence feel closer. It brought them comfort, and sometimes joy and laughter.”

“I’ll bet my wife will be there with that yappy puppy I hate,” one man told her.

“Those accounts were so sacred to me,” Lammers said. “They inspired my own theological imagination.”

“I suspect as educators you already know that if we dare to wrestle with our fake faith and use our imagination, God shows up. We may not recognize it right away, but God shows up in the middle of our wrestling,” Lammers said. “God helps us if we are willing to do that uncomfortable, sometimes scary work of wrestling with our faith.”

“Friends, there is plenty of fake wrestling out there,” she said. “It looks like it’s doing something, but it’s all for show, and no one gets their hair messed up.”

She urged worshipers to “be willing to get real and really uncomfortable and a little tussled up, maybe even a little bit injured. The moment we find ourselves in offers up no shortage of opportunities for some real wrestling, and guess what? God will meet us there. God will show up when we wrestle with our faith together.”