Their videos have been viewed 11 billion times. Their YouTube channel has 51 million subscribers, making it one of the top ten channels on YouTube

Who are they? Sports stars? Hollywood celebrities? Social media influencers?

They’re five former roommates at Texas A&M who hung out together for Christian fellowship.

About ten years ago they put up a basketball hoop in their backyard and started filming each other making trick shots. Within days, their first video had been seen 200,000 times. They had a dream of taking their newfound passion to a wider online audience, but doing so would mean leaving promising jobs and require an enormous leap of faith. Parents and friends helped them write a business plan and create a professional website. They asked friends to help with their goal of creating a video with a million views, and their friends were happy to help, subscribing to their channel and sharing the video with others.

Did I mention they are followers of Jesus Christ?

Even if you’ve never heard of “Dude Perfect” (In their first video, one of them lined up the camera for a shot and said, “Dude, perfect.”) you’ve likely seen clips of them shooting hoops off skyscrapers. I discovered them this week watching TV with my granddaughters. There’s nothing cerebral about their videos, but they are completely clean.

And their passion, creativity, joy, and love for each other are contagious. 

Many Christians bemoan the media age; some still refuse to go online. No doubt, there is a lot of dark content out there.

This week we mark the Ascension, the day when the risen Jesus returned to God in heaven. If the birth of Jesus was God’s greatest act of God reaching out to humanity, the Ascension was humanity’s greatest act of reaching back to God. In Jesus, humanity was joined to God, and Jesus was no longer limited by time and space. Because of the Ascension, Jesus would now be everywhere in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Because of the Ascension, the infinite passion, joy, creativity, and love of God are available to Christians in every aspect of life, and in every time and place.

There are an infinite number of ways to bring glory to God.

Why should five guys making trick shots have all the fun?