On Sunday, New Year’s Eve at about 7 p.m, I was driving on a main street in our city and I passed by a fairly well-known church that occupies what once was a Sizzler restaurant. I spied perhaps twenty vehicles parked out front and I imagined the folks inside doing their Sunday-night thing. It then dawned on me that I have become one of the generation of Jesus Movement, baby-boomer Christians who no longer “attends” church on Sunday. I have become one of “them”. I have become one of those Christians one hears Sunday preachers preach about getting back into those pews on Sunday mornings. Good luck. Sunday, for me, is now actually a day of rest.

What I need to share is an update to the article found in the January, 1999 inaugural issue of Next-Wave by Charles Wear entitled, ‘If You Build It, They Will Come”. You see, Charlie was the pastor of the church in Moreno Valley. I was an itinerant worship leader returning from a year in New Zealand. Charlie invited me to come off the road for a few months and coordinate the worship function. God told Charlie to take the church “from point ‘A’ to point ‘B’”. (God never told Charlie in advance what point ‘B’ actually was.) Charlie's vision was to reach teens and twenty-somethings and their parents… in that order. Charlie pastored the church from 120 to 200, and then when the Lord started heading us toward point ‘B’, we eventually dropped to about ten adults. I guess we could justify such tremendous church “growth” to the verse referring to “many are called but few are chosen”, or how about “many are called but most are frozen”. Actually, it just wasn’t most of our people’s call to go where God was leading us.

Since the clientele we were trying to reach were not awake on Sunday mornings, we changed to Sunday night. My worship team, average age of sixteen and male, were willing to play my mix of Elvis/ Doobie Bros. praise and Vineyard intimacy, but their hearts longed for Nirvana and punk. So they wrote a few songs, the drummer talked his little brother into screaming the lyrics, and they invited some skaters to come on opening night where they played in the parking lot while the skaters skated. We had 30 to 40 Christians on the inside of the building and over 60 unsaved skaters outside. (See the January 1999 issue for details). Each successive week we had less Christians inside and more skaters out front. One lady came up to the pastor and exclaimed, “Why do we have to run a skateboard park? I just want to worship!” (as if the two are mutually exclusive!)

Over that summer, we took the punk band on a New Zealand skate outreach tour. Back at home we lost our building. We could no longer afford the lease with so few remaining ‘tithers’. Charlie lost his house lease. Marv and Karen Schuler took the skaters we had amassed back to their horse ranch and we poured some concrete for them to skate on. Marv is a master woodworker so skate ramps were no problem for him. We few adults met on Sunday night. On one hand things looked really dark, on another they began to look really free. No staff salaries. Sleep in on weekends. One dollar-a-year lease for the land at the Ranch. And an expectation that God would do something.

Since that first article, we have had a desire to update you on what has happened in these last two years. We outgrew our 40 by 60 foot pad of concrete. We are now 80 by 85 feet in a bigger field. We had 5 ramps, now we have 10 to 15. We ‘prayed in’ a pro-skater in his twenties to bridge the gap between us boomers and the teens that are at our gates every time we are open. God brought us some folks who are from other denominational backgrounds. 

He brought us an evangelist who basically has one very effective sermon on heaven and hell and death and life. He brought us a Bible teacher who is a biker, 6’6” and looks like the WWF wrestler Stone Cold Steve Austin. We have lively debates on cessation theology and the gifts of the Spirit, eternal security, demonic activity vs. human flesh, and other sorts of issues that cause Christians to form separate churches. We have chosen to mesh in spite of our differences because Christ and His Gospel is our common goal, and these are the people God brought us after we prayed them in. And God is slowly changing all of us and our many ‘opinions’.

Matt, the Bible teacher is a biker, 6’6” and looks like a WWF wrestler.

We have seen perhaps 1,400 kids profess faith in Christ. We don’t count the ones coming forward as many seem to “get saved’ multiple times. We count the number of bibles given out after altar calls. We also know we are not just “fishers of men” but we seem to be running a “catch and release” program. Sunday church-going Christians come by, observe, and then often announce, “Who is discipling these kids?” We just smile on the outside and invite them to pull up their tent and disciple a few themselves. Rarely do we get takers. (We do have a discipleship group running on Monday nights, a youth group on Tuesday nights…)

Jesus had no problem with the harvest. He did tell us to pray for WORKERS to go into the harvest. So we have. And he has sent us some wonderful folks. Folks who don’t exactly fit into their own Sunday churches. Folks who have faced elder boards. Folks who have been run out of town on a rail. Folks who know the meaning of mercy.

You see, we have found out that the harvest field is very ripe. Scriptures are clear. Find a group of neglected, disenfranchised people and love them. Skaters have signs everywhere telling them they are not welcome. So we welcome them. Try this at your church. Build a small skate ramp and leave it in the parking lot. Within hours or a day or two you will find skaters on it (or it will be stolen!) That’s how we started. You work with what you have in your hands.

At the Ranch, we have created a place where the most messed-up skater can come in and have full ownership. The only requirement is that they wear a helmet. And that they listen when we stop the skating to talk about God. We are open Monday night, Tuesday night, Thursday night, Friday night, and most of the day Saturday. We usually have one hundred plus kids, maybe two to three hundred through on a Saturday. Once a month we have “band night” when several unintelligible bands play while kids mosh and skate. Five hundred kids showed up on the last band night and we saw over 200 kids come forward to receive Christ. Every time someone speaks anywhere from ten to forty kids come forward. Good sermon, bad sermon, regular or new person sharing… it doesn’t matter. It is like we have cultivated over time a place where it is safe to come to God. Even on the most “off” night when we don’t think anyone will respond, here they come! It was not like this two years ago. We presented the gospel just about every time we were open. The skaters were “too cool” to respond. But slowly, over time, one would come, and then another, and then another.

Then the evangelist came. Understand…at his church they were doing an outreach night every other Friday. The only problem… unsaved people wouldn’t come. Around the same time he visited the Ranch and spoke and “limited out” (fisherman’s term for ten or more salvations!). He kept coming back and getting limits. So did his sidekick the biker teacher. They got real excited. No pay. No elder boards. No hoops and hurdles to be “qualified” to preach. No license required. A lake full of hungry fish… get the point? They are now regulars.

All of what we are doing has not been without resistance. The next-door neighbor lady, who also happens to be a mainline denomination pastor, frequently calls the police on us and we have been through a lawsuit she filed. Her forty six year old plus son who is also a reported Sunday-school teacher regularly yells obscenities across the fence at us and on one occasion described to Marv and Karen how he looked forward to dragging them down through the “pillars of hell” someday (his tone of voice was other-worldly). You figure it out. The city has not always been happy with skaters and has tried to bring us up on noise charges. We won in court. The police “visit” nearly every band night, though we believe we are legal and completely within the law.

But things are changing. The city is now building a skate park. We were even invited to attend the planning/consultation meetings. Our evangelist is running three Christian clubs in some local junior and senior high schools. Our young pro skater runs an after school skate program at three intermediate schools in a nearby town, the only program of its kind in the nation that we know of, and is preparing to launch a skate ministry for a large church in his local area. So we are getting our little fingers into the community.

Finances? It’s the proverbial “God provides”. Mostly out of our pockets. Electricity alone runs about $500 a month. Some people give small financial donations but most come from our pockets which God seems to be blessing. Marv and Karen have a sandwich business. It has doubled in the last two years. I teach school and have a fledgling import/export business and it has grown. Others contribute talent and building expertise. Charlie, the former pastor, is the staff defense attorney, every skater ministry needs one. A lady whose son skates at the Ranch is an electrician. She rewired the place for lighting. The skateboard factory donates firewood. The concrete company gives us 40% off. Most churches have a bible-bookstore in their lobby. We have a soda machine and provide candy and skateboard parts for basically a donation charge that supplements the running costs. We build at the rate of money. Soon there will be more ramps. A basketball court. A BMX bike racetrack. We’ll rent a big bulldozer and move dirt. It’s real low budget stuff. The more we build, the more kids we get.

We don’t advertise (except flyers on band nights). Every day that we are open you see a vehicle come in and drop off kids every few minutes. I pass skaters a mile away skating down the streets heading for the Ranch. Carloads of girls get dropped off because where the boys are, there the girls are also. Mother and fathers run birthday parties and plan barbecues on our lawns. Little brothers and sisters play on the swings and chase the ranch cats and resident dog, and meander down and look at the goats and cows. We don’t even KNOW half of the folks that come and yet they feel comfortable enough to come. Ninety-five percent of what we do is relational and informal. And yet lives are being changed for the better. The parents tell us so. Not ‘Christian’ parents, just parents. Parents are starting to respond to the Lord because of the changes in their kids’ lives.

What I am amazed by is that we can see churches across the fields from our lowly ten acres. Million-dollar facilities. Rarely do we see humans at these houses of worship. My amazement is the thought of what a few Christians can do when they share a common vision, and then commit their finances, resources, and destinies to their vision, not waiting for “permission” from some outside group or individual to go ahead with that vision. Van’s has a two million-dollar skate park a few miles away. Ours might have $20,000 invested in it. If one could buy souls into the kingdom, that would make our cost at about $14.29 each. Not a bad kingdom investment from a business point of view.

Speaking about money, I have heard some statistics that I would like to share. I have heard it said that the combined church budgets in North America come out to about half a trillion dollars. The net growth in the number of people converted/saved in those churches is negligible or zero. Please understand that our goal is not just salvations but to make disciples. But conversions are where we start. I've heard it said that 80% of those who come to the Lord do so between twelve and twenty years of age and that 80% of those over twenty years of age never come to the Lord. The church targets most of its spending on Boomer programming and support. I believe God is targeting our current generation of teens and twenty-somethings and that we Boomers had our day long ago. I see each of the churches in our area sitting on large tracts of land and I wonder why they aren’t fishing for this hungry generation as they have so many resources. Are our churches full of people who think that (or have been told that) their main act of worship is to occupy that pew and pay some man to preach? It’s time to rethink what we are doing, why we are doing it, and how we ought to be doing it.

I guess what I am writing this article for is to present a challenge. I have hesitated to use the word ‘postmodern’ because it is one of the current buzzwords that we use as we are trying to do church in a way that actually works. I have some other not-so-politically-correct buzzwords and phrases that seem to work well: ‘widows’, ‘orphans’, “love thy neighbor”, “in so far as you have done for the least of these, you have done for Me”, “sell all you have and follow Me”, “love one another”, and perhaps the most effective for church life… “Follow Me”.

So let me say that point ‘B’ has come and gone for our "former" church. The skaters were God’s idea, not ours. Our church was dying and the Lord put these particular ‘orphans’ on our doorstep. Since then, we have simply put aside most of our church growth, purpose-driven training and notions. We have followed Him through the death of one structure and allowed Him to build a new one for this generation and this particular group of people in this particular place. On the way I laid down my guitar and learned how to load a Pepsi machine. I gave up preaching and learned how to buy and pour concrete. I sold my house, moved into a motorhome for a season, and lived on the ‘commune’. I learned the sixty word vocabulary of most male, adolescent skaters and learned to communicate with kids most people wouldn’t trust or want in their homes or courting their daughters. I wear skater clothes most of the time and I even sport top-of-the-line skater shoes to work where I teach. Yes, I own a skateboard and have the scars to prove it. And I am 45 years old. You see, out there on the itinerant ministry road I preached that “with His Blood, He purchased men for God from every family and tribe and tongue and nation”. And as John Wimber, founder of the Vineyard churches, used to say, “We are loose change in God’s pocket that He can spend any way He chooses.” At church youth summer camp many years ago, some of us made decisions to be this or that and demonstrated it by breaking a stick in half, keeping one half and throwing the other half in the fire. Mine was to be a missionary. One stick burned and who knows where the other stick is… but no matter…God remembered and I find that I am now an urban missionary.

Skaters are a tribe. Young people are a nation. Their tongue is now global. And they are hungry for the God Who loves them. At the Ranch they are at our gates before we open and linger long after we close. We are open five days a week, and on the other two some still try to sneak in. Can you say the same for your church? We are now on our third generation of kid passing through the Ranch. Our goal is to reach 25,000 kids in our valley for the Lord. (A year ago we would have thought 1,400 was crazy.) We know it will take all of the churches and a whole bunch more workers released into the harvest. Remember…five loaves, two fishes, and twelve clueless disciples' fed five thousand people… at Jesus’ direction.

So go ahead. At your church or on your street or driveway build a 4 feet by 8 feet by 8 inch high plywood box and set it out. Or build a slightly sloped wedge-shaped ramp about six foot long and a foot high at one end. Set it out on or near the sidewalk or parking lot in view of the street or where you have seen a skater traverse the church property. Have some full octane Coke or Gatorade ready… maybe candy or chips. I tell you, if you build it, they will come.

Skater Senior "Pastor" Marv (left) discusses the fine points of a skateboard with article author Tom Chapman (right).

Tom Chapman is a worship leader, junior high educator and erstwhile equipper of evangelists and pastors to tribes of all shapes and sizes. He writes from Moreno Valley, California.

Click here for more photos of the Skateboard ministry at Moreno Valley, CA. To contact Marv and Karen at the Skate Ranch email here.