Skateboarding ministry celebrates 20 years of mentoring kids
VANCOUVER, BC—When the young people Dean Dahl works with through Skatelife find out the skateboarding ministry is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, they do a double-take.
"Many of the kids we reach are significantly younger than 20 years, so when they hear we've been doing this for 20 years, they just can't believe it," Dahl says with a laugh from Skatelife's head office in Vancouver.
The 43-year-old has been with the ministry since the beginning. What started as a way for Dahl to reach unchurched skateboarders in Kelowna, B.C. when he was working as the interim youth pastor at a church there in 1992 has grown into a Canada-wide ministry with skate clubs in 16 different cities from Yellowknife, Northwest Territory to Kitchener/Waterloo, Ontario.
Three full-time staff, two part-time staff and a team of roughly 45 volunteers connect with more than 1,000 skateboarders each week through skate clubs, day camps, weekend skate trips, winter camps and an annual summer skateboard tour.
Dahl says Skatelife's mission is the same simple mission of Young Life, the organization that oversees it: love young people and encourage them to know Jesus Christ.
The key, he adds, is meeting young people on their own turf. He points to 1 Thessalonians 2:8, which says, "Because we loved you so much, we were delighted to share with you not only the gospel of God but our lives as well."
"We don't want to assume that kids need to come to our [events] before they hang out with us," Dahl says. "Instead, we want to be the people that leave our world and go into their world so that not only can they hear us talk about Jesus to them, but they can also see our [Christian] lives lived in their world."
Most of the youth Skatelife works with are male, and Dahl says many of them come from broken homes where they do not have a positive male role model to look up to.
"We are almost literally the only people who are teaching these boys how to grow up and how to become men in our society," Dahl says. "We teach them about faith in Christ, we teach them about what we believe, but we also teach them things like how to get a job, how to treat a girl, how to drive a car."
"No one's showing these guys how to do this stuff," he continues. "It's kind of sad to see, but at the same time, it's really an amazing privilege and a blessing that we get to speak on so many levels into young boys' lives."
Twenty years after starting the ministry, Dahl is looking forward to the exciting initiatives Skatelife has planned to make sure it's around for another 20 years. By 2014, Skatelife is striving to increase its age demographic from 13 to 18 years of age to 10 to 25 years of age, with clubs in every major region of Canada. Skatelife also hopes to increase the number of campers from 200 to 350 on the RoadRage skateboard tour camp.
Skatelife is also launching an international aspect to its ministry. Skatelife International has ministries that go out to different countries, but also commissions people from other countries to do ministry with Skatelife.
Dahl says the skateboarding community around the world is amazing.
"Because the core of skateboarding is kind of a small group, you get to know people in that group around the world because we all speak the same language," he says. "A kickflip is a kickflip to someone in Brazil, it's a kickflip to someone in London, England and we can all sort of share the same common language of skateboarding no matter where we are."
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