Skaters Take a New Leap of Faith

One Eighty – Bath Youth for Christ’s highly successful skate project – has launched the world’s first customised Christianity course exclusively for the skateboarding community.

Called Switch, the 12-week course offers an introduction to Christianity for young skateboarders, which references the skate culture. The course covers questions such as ‘Why Was Jesus Murdered?’, ‘Why Does God Let Bad Stuff Happen?’ and ‘Is Church Boring?’, mixing group work and discussion with multimedia and skateboarding itself.

The idea for the course has proved popular with other youth workers across the world. ‘We’ve already seen young people making huge spiritual steps and that was only on week three of the first pilot course. ‘Landing tricks in Switch is much more difficult for skateboarders but much more rewarding, it’s a different way. We want to show young people a different way to live their lives,’ says Joe.