Skate Church:

Is an outreach ministry of Oakwood Forest Student Ministries. We saw the opportunity for an outreach in our community and decided to take full advantage of it. That opportunity was skateboarding and the amazing growth is has seen in the last several years. Skateboarding not only attracts young men,  but we have seen a large raise in the number of young women at Skate Church as well. The make to female ration is quickly forming to the point of a clean 50-50 split. WE are geared towards those youth who you will not find in a church or Sunday morning or who do not know Christ, as well as youth who know Christ as their personal Lord and Savior. We communicate Christ to them through two means, actions and words. The staff at Skate Church has been hand picked and is among the strongest group of believers in God that we have ever met, and they share Christ each night with the youth through their patience, compassion, love and willingness to just be there to listen. We also have a weekly speaker who comes to share a devotion or testimony. This is where we have seen God working at Skate Church. Several months ago, when we first started Skate Church, as soon as the speaker for the night came on to speak we would see more than half of the youth leave. Now we see almost 95% retention of the youth there. We rarely see more than a couple students leave at message time. The excitement we have seen in theses e youth over the past months has been a absolute miracle.