Currents News Staff
Mike Steinkamp is certain of at least two things. One is that he’s a skateboarder. The other is that he’s a Christian. That’s why in 2010, he started MS Skate Ministry, with a simple mission in mind.
“So me being a Christian and a skateboarder my entire life, I instantly felt called to reach skateboarders with the message of Jesus, because these are my friends,” Mike says.
“[They’re] the people that I hang out with on a day-to-day basis, and most of them don’t go to church, don’t know anything about Jesus, don’t know anything about the Gospel. So I feel like this missionary to this culture,” he told Currents News.
On its website and various social media accounts, MS Skate Ministry publishes videos of skateboarders, like Mike, doing what they love. At the same time, they convey messages to help other skateboarders develop a relationship with God.
“I understand the difficulties that they have with believing in Christ,” Mike says. “I understand these things. I understand the culture and the things that they’re hearing from the skateboarding world, because I’m deeply rooted and connected in it.”
To make the Christian message even more accessible to skateboarders, Mike wrote a 14-day devotional for his “Landing Bolts” app, available on the Apple store.
“Basically it’s just my attempt to break down passages of the Bible and make it in a way that skateboarders can understand, especially skateboarders that have not grown up in the Church or that have no history with the Gospel,” he said.
MS Skate Ministry was simply the result of an authentic response to a call. It shows that missionaries aren’t necessarily priests or nuns who travel to remote parts of the world. They can be those guys at the local skate park, just doing what they love, but with a certainty about who they are and who they follow.