Biker church attracts more than just bikers
WINNIPEG, MB—For six years, Christian biker Chuck Sheridan went to a church where people made him feel more rejected than welcomed.
“My family really loved it, but very few knew my last name,” he says.
“When you go to a church for six years and most people only know you as ‘Chuck the Biker,’ you know you don’t fit in—and I don’t have any tattoos.”
With this experience fresh in his memory—and knowing other bikers who also felt let down by the mainstream Church—Sheridan launched the House of the Risen Son in Winnipeg in 1993. And the contrast could not be greater.
“I’ve got a guy in my church,” says Sheridan. “He’s spent half his life in jail and has tattoos on his face and his arms. He’s big, tall and ugly, and has grey hair. He looks very worn. And he says, ‘This is the first church I’ve ever gone to where they just accept me.’”
It is a familiar complaint within the biker community.
“Very, very few that I’ve met have a problem with God,” says Chuck Pearce, pastor of Freedom Biker Church in Surrey, B.C. “They have a problem big-time with what they call ‘phony Christians’ that let them down, misled them, or that went to church on Sunday and lived a life no different than theirs during the week.”
House of the Risen Son began with 25 to 40 people meeting in a home. Today, 120 people meet in three locations. “And not everybody who comes now are even bikers,” says Sheridan. “Some are just moms and dads and kids that don’t like regular church.”
Yet after accepting Christ in 1978, and despite feeling called to be a pastor, Sheridan felt he could never live up to his mental image of the well-dressed pastor. So instead he founded the Bondslave Motorcycle Club.
“Bondslave is the evangelism team,” he says. “It was designed to be evangelists reaching bikers primarily. But they’ll witness to anybody about Jesus. We have one guy we call ‘William Tell’, because he just tells everybody about Jesus.”
And just like the church, the club today has three chapters. Its activities include going out to biker club rallies and other events where they try to make friends with non-Christians.
Then in 1990, Sheridan met a man who shattered his pastor stereotype. “He’s got a potbelly, a T-shirt on, and a big beard—and he’s a biker,” Sheridan says. “He showed me you can be in the biker lifestyle and be a Christian—and be a pastor.”
But what Christian bikers may lack in outward appearance compared to “regular” church standards, they more than make for in their heart-felt praise and worship.
“They may look intimidating,” says Pearce, “but when they’ve accepted Christ, these 300-, 400-pound, big, tough bikers, all tattooed up, they will hug you, they will love on you. They really and truly have changed, and they just want to share their faith.”
Sheridan agrees. “They just fall deeply in love with the Lord, because they’ve known much different, and have found so much grace and so much acceptance.”
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