NCMO – Skateboard Church
How does a church start start? When does the heart begin to hear the beckoning that there is a group of people not being reached? Then, how does it begin to sink in that you are the one that God wants to reach them? For Seth Barkley, the Skateboard Church began with an offhand suggestion from his father who is a pastor.
“I remember, quite vividly, sitting in my driveway. And I was just sitting on a bike, I ride BMX as well, and I was having a phone conversation with my Dad. He was down in South Carolina at camp with some youth and he said ‘Seth, what do you think about donating your half pipe to the church, and letting some kids come over and skate it?’ And, you know, it was just kind of a passing thought, with the liability and different things. We weren’t going to do that. It didn’t really make sense. But, in thinking it over, the Lord really just sort of burdened us about it. And the thought was ‘why not bring the kids to us?’ So things started out in our driveway. In 2005, we started with just a Bible study, just in the driveway. Bringing kids over and they would come over and just chill out. And the first night I remember we just had four people there, including myself. So, it had humble beginnings. That next summer, we resumed with the Friday night sessions, having a Bible study and different things. Then we also started building ramps and bringing them over to the church. We had kids from over at the church on Wednesday nights, and we’d skate there. All of this was based around Bible studies and different things.”
As their outreach began to expand and as the weather turned colder, the skateboarders needed to find a new place, an indoor facility, to meet. A local businessman approached them about moving into a warehouse he owned.
“So we came down, and man, God just opened up plenty of doors and just blessed us tremendously. And we are where we are at now, and we have been here about a year and a half. We’ve been growing, expanding, building ramps. We started out, like I said, with four guys coming through, and now we have roughly fifty or sixty kids coming through every week and, man, God’s blessing us tremendously – just the way He keeps moving and the way He’s working. It’s awesome for sure.”
This new skateboard church is reaching a whole segment of the population that might have never stepped inside a church under different circumstances.
“Skaters generally have a stereotype that comes with us. You know, the rough crowd, the punks that don’t really fit in. That tends to be the stereotype, and in some cases that’s true, some not. But definitely a lot of kids that wouldn’t set foot in a normal church and kind of fall through the cultural cracks of society, they feel comfortable here. We have the opportunity to reach out to them with the Word of God. And part of coming and skating here, we simply ask that you allow us to speak to you. And definitely we have a lot of relationships building. When we’re up on the ramps we get to talk to the kids for a couple of hours and just hang out and really get to know them. And then in presenting the Gospel, they know who it is coming from. They know who’s talking to them. It’s not just some random person that they’ve walked into a building and heard. It’s someone they’ve been skating with. And definitely with skateboarding, all skaters, whoever you meet, right off the bat there’s that connection just because we skate. There’s something in common. So there’s a grounds by which we’re all connected. So it’s just coming from one skater to another. You know, the Word of God is powerful. We have the opportunity to share that on every Tuesday and Thursday night, every night we are open, every time the doors are open we present the Gospel.”
And, as you might suspect, the skateboard church teaching is not timid but bold and “in your face”.
“There’s several verses that have been very instrumental of course. The name of our skate ministry is The Way Skate Ministry. That comes from John 14:6. He said ‘I am the way, the truth and the life. No man comes to the Father except through Me.’ That verse is super meaningful in so many ways. It so much attacks the pluralism of today’s society. You can be a good person, or you can do this or that and have your ‘goods’ outweigh your ‘bads’ and all these different ideas and concepts of how to have a right relationship with God, and Jesus confronts that and says ‘No. There’s no way outside of Me that people can reach the Father. I’m the only way. I’m the door. I’m the way, the truth and the life. No man comes to the Father except through Me.’ So it’s a very confrontational verse I suppose as far as Christ isn’t backing down. He outwardly says ‘It’s through Me, or there is no way.’ That’s probably the verse that echoes throughout everything we do because we are very much in confrontation with the world, especially here we have a lot of people coming in and kids who have been through a lot. A lot of things have been incorporated into their thought process, and in their minds and different things have been filtered in. To hear that Christ is the only way, that’s definitely confrontational in itself, just to hear that. But we stick to our guns. Christ is who He says He is.”
All this in a church that doesn’t look like any church most of us have ever been inside before.
“Here especially, I guess, it is very nontraditional. We have graffiti on the walls and ramps that go to the ceiling and different things, and we crank loud music when we are skating. But we present the word and we stick by the truth, and what God’s given us in the Bible, we hold to that. We’re given the opportunity to speak to individuals that otherwise don’t get to hear the Gospel.”
North Carolina Baptists can feel a sense of ownership for this new and innovative endeavor. Your giving to the North Carolina Missions Offering helped seed this new church as 22% of NCMO giving goes to Church Planting and Evangelism.
