Reaching Bikers & Skaters for Jesus

Nakita Kolov, the Russian nightmare.

No, the devil's nightmare here. From it's time to man up. Challenging men to step into their true manhood. Your chosen Truth Network Podcast is starting in just a few seconds. Enjoy it. Share it. But most of all, thank you for listening to the Truth Podcast Network. This is the Truth Network. Why would a church open a major BMX biking and skateboarding track inside of their big warehouse on their property? I don't know.

Maybe this guy has the answer because he did it. Pastor Chris Griggs in Denver, North Carolina. We're in a barbecue joint. Yes we are. How are the ribs? The ribs are unbelievable. We are in the Denver Smokehouse and Grill.

I'm going to take a picture of these ribs and put it on on my Facebook and on my Instagram and everywhere. It's a great place. Unbelievable. I said take me to a local local haunt and you you delivered up brother. I'm telling you. But you took me through your church.

This is unreal. I was at your church with you. We've grown up together. I've known you for years. You've been a great friend. Mentored me. Pastor Chris Griggs, Denver Baptist Church.

And we walk outside. I'm like what's that massive warehouse? Who are your neighbors back there?

Tell me what you told me. Well, I've been pastor just over 15 years. I just crossed the 15 year mark and probably in my second or third year this piece of property across the street from our church campus became available. It was an industrial facility.

They actually manufactured mobile homes. They were consolidating their business and moving to a plant and neighboring town. And so we went over. I talked to the president and said he would be interested. And so we worked out a deal.

We bought 60 acres of land and it included a million thousand squares over there. And one of the first things we did was cleaned out that warehouse and I went and we found an abandoned skate park with ramps. Went off and got us some money.

Bought the ramps. Put it in there. And just started inviting kids to show up in the community. And it just grew from there.

Two dollar Tuesdays? Well, we do that now. Now what's happened is it's expanded. It's gotten much larger. We've built ramps. BMX bikers. Mongoose.

All those. It's a whole subculture. Folks, you don't know what I'm talking about.

Just talk to a young person on a bike. I mean, it's just crazy. It's just the stuff they can do. The theatrics.

The acrobatics on there. Well, I'm in Denver, North Carolina. There's nothing in Denver.

When I moved here, nothing here. Now just to contextualize, people in North Carolina or in the south would know that is what area? It's in the Lake Norman area. Lake Norman. We're on the western side of Lake Norman. It's a bedroom community of Charlotte. Our newest affiliate is here, 98.5 FM. Truth Network carrying this program and other great programs.

In the Lake Norman area. But 15 years ago, nothing here. Literally nothing. And we saw kids skateboarding and parking lots and riding bikes down the street today because they have an opportunity here. And so we had this facility and we bought some skate ramps and we put a guy in there who loves Jesus and loves kids and Charlie got to support his families and all kinds of stuff.

So this is your church. Tell us a little bit about, let's back up. I just, I was blown away. You walked me through there. I hit a three pointer. Not to brag, but I had to drop a bucket, you know, in there. But you got that on video too. But you walked me through. I mean, you got football.

Just go through everything you have in there. I don't want to go back to who is Pastor Chris Griggs, like a little of your testimony, but tell us real quick what all's happening there. Well, we had this, we bought this land. We had these resources. We honestly, very carefully considered how do we, how do we use this for the mission of gospel in our town. And when you're in a town where there's nothing, you know, I can't emphasize that enough.

There's just nothing. The movie theaters, there's no hotels. They built a park several years ago. We didn't have parks.

So we bought this land, 30 acres, which was undeveloped a field. We turned that into bike trails, 19 miles of bike trails for the community. A lot of people ride bikes.

Nice. Anytime they're like just come ride, road bike, dirt bike, or both. And then we took the warehouse and we turned it into more of a sports complex. Cause you had every kind of sport I could think of there.

You had the volleyball, you had the weights, you have the basketball, you have the biking, skating. And so we use, we have turf. And so we allow the high school football teams to come in the winter, which keep going all season to work out baseball teams and we have batting nets, volleyball, we have basketball, we have skate park, all that stuff is there. Basically we use it as a way to say to the community, first of all, we're part of this community too. And we recognize there's a real need in our community for recreation, exercises, and that. So we made this available.

If you want to skate, it's $2, you know, on Tuesdays, $5 on the weekends. We bring food trucks out on the weekends, families come, we have skate competitions that hundreds of people show up on weekends. We're able to share the gospel every single time we gather to use that facility. We take a time out and share the gospel. Your message to the greater church, a few people out there, pastors and others, that maybe their church has a farm.

Maybe their church has a really nice chapel that they can have weddings and everything. Using it for the kingdom. We use it for the kingdom and we recognize that we need it in our community and we say, you know what, maybe we can meet this need.

Also, not just be a physical need, but see the opportunity to really share the gospel. And plus, fascinating is that we have a lot of parents, a lot of older people that show up and they are questioning that. They have questioned it.

Wow, is the Bible true? They've never heard the gospel. And so we've got people in our church that go down there and just sit for hours and answer questions and love on people. You know, the goal, of course, is that they will come to faith in Christ and be baptized, discipled. We don't borrow the church and we see some of that, not as much as we want, but we're seeing the missional opportunity. I would say to any local pastors, is there a need, is there a problem that the church can then get behind?

I love it. So a couple questions for everyone listening out there. How are you using your God-given talents to reach people with the gospel? God made you a basketball player, an artist, a chef, whatever, to bring people to Him and to churches out there. How are you using your physical facility, the talent of people in your church, to do a rec league to reach the community for the glory of God?

Let's back up. Who is Pastor Chris Griggs? A lot of people know you as the pastor of Denver Baptist Church, where you are currently in Denver, North Carolina, kind of on the edge of Lake Norman there. But who is Pastor Chris Griggs? Yeah, so I grew up in Winston-Salem.

That's my hometown. Me and you, we lived in the same church growing up. And, you know, I was pretty confident God was calling me to ministry when I was in the 11th grade. And so I set my face towards that and pursued education and preparing for ministry. I served in a local church as an intern to figure out how to do ministry as a mentor by pastors. And with the seminary, I had a couple of degrees serving the staff, and then as time rolled on, the Lord was making clear that my gifting was sort of the elite pastor. Preaching is kind of my thing. I love to preach and teach the Word, disciple men, and lead mission trips.

That's what I love to do. And so I've given myself to that. My mission statement for life is that I want to morph my God by making disciples who advance the gospel. So I've given myself to that. Now, what that means is I can't do everything. I take the pulpit ministry extremely seriously.

It takes a lot of walking out of the study and preaching, and then discipling men with an intentional in that and leading mission trips. And what that means is that when a skate park, for example, that wasn't my idea. You don't just take over a church as pastor and say, okay, I want to do a skate park at my church. I want to get skaters in here. I want to get people shredding in here.

What I did was I'm really trying to preach the gospel and equip people for the mission, and one day a guy comes up and says, you know what I'm passionate about? Skateboard culture. I used to skate. I'll see all these kids, and they have the space, and I think we can do it. And I said, let's do it.

And so it wasn't me. So that's turned into soccer, basketball, football, baseball, volleyball. You've got this 80,000 square foot of kingdom ministry. And I love that you and I took a picture in your lobby of your administration building. Denver Baptist Church exists to glorify God by making disciples that advance the gospel. That's why we're here. And that's my personal mission. You've got that mission on the wall.

It's pretty important for your DNA of your church. And so, you know, my role is we're equippers. We're disciple makers and equippers. I'm to equip people for the ministry that God's calling to. I don't have to do everything. I can't do everything. So when somebody comes and says, pastor, let's just have a real passion for this. My job is to say, first of all, God bless you.

How can I get behind you with resources? Then let's take off. And so that's what's happened. It's been real organic. It's been good. It's been amazing. Really.

It's really incredible the reach that we've had. Just through somebody showing up one day and saying, you know, I was a skater as a kid. I was a rebel. Now I love Jesus.

I still love skating. And I do something. Yeah, let's do it. You're hard for the Great Commission.

Talk about that. Challenge other people, churches, pastors, listening on the need to reach the nations, how God's kind of, you're taking your church, you're discipling. You're trying to be a discipleship factory, really. We talked about that earlier, but you're trying to turn, I'll create this world starting in Lake Norman. This is your Jerusalem, but the ends of the earth.

Yeah. So, you know, you just mentioned acts one, eight, nine, and I kind of flipped that around a little bit. When Jesus said, you'll be my witnesses in Jerusalem. I think he really meant Jerusalem. And when he said Judea, he meant Judea, Samaria. When he said other parts of the earth, he meant them. So I help my people understand you live in the uttermost parts of the earth.

How about that? And God has sovereignly ordained you to live in this community. Your house is a mission outpost. Your neighborhood is a mission field. Your job finds your mission. Everything is about you living on mission for the glory of God in your community. And so we talk that way, which means that we are, you know, one of the untapped tools of mission is hospitality. We encourage people to know your neighbors. Pray for your neighbors. Welcome them in.

Invest in them. And so we have people in our church. Some women stay at home moms.

Their kids are at school. They walk the neighborhood. They invite women in the neighborhood to their home for Bible study. It's all organic. I didn't stand up in a sermon and say, you need to do this.

I didn't come up with the idea. They just thought to themselves, God's called me to mission. My life is to be about the advance of the kingdom. How can I do it when I stay at home long? I know what I can do.

My kids are in school. I can invite other moms and neighbors to come over and read the Bible. We have a lady in our church who's a widow. Her husband died about a year ago out of the blue. So she's alone now in this big house. And one of the neighbors comes over to minister to her. Love her. And she discovers that she's from another nation. She's an immigrant and she's never read the Bible. And so this woman says, what am I going to do? I'm going to sit in this house and look at the four walls and grieve. I'm not going to use the opportunity.

So then she invites this woman over to her house every week to just to read the book. So listen, God's called all of us. And if you believe it, and if you will lean into it, and if you will trust Him, and if you just look at who you are and what God's given you and provided you with, He will show you how to be invested in His mission. He's invited us all into it.

Right where we are with whatever we have. I mean, your deal is radio. That's your deal, right? You're a disciple maker, but you have a real passion to get the message out. And you're using the radio thing. And the thing about it is your dad was in radio. It's what you know.

Kind of measured me. It's what you know. I don't know anything about radio. I don't have to turn radio on.

I don't have to turn it off. But see, what God did is God said, alright, Stu, I've provided you with all of this experience. I've given you this opportunity to learn something.

I use it for my glory to make my son love. And so I think what we have to do is we overcomplicate. We think we've got to get on a plane and go somewhere. You live on a mission field. Your house is a mission outpost. Just look around you.

Your salary is the funding for the mission. And all you have to do is just look around you and say to yourself, what do I like? What do I get that I've noticed?

I can use that to interact and relate to other people. So that's the whole deal with the skate park. The skater said I want to reach skaters because I'm a skater. Well, you just took me through that facility. You've got the ramps.

You've got the curls. I mean, they call it shredding. You've got a pole that's probably 50 feet in the air. You're saying people have gotten higher than that pole before and they come right back down and they're doing acrobatics in the air. And so we position ourselves to be used of God in the place where he's got us. And sometimes it looks like hardcore confrontational evangelism. Sometimes it looks like your neighbor calling you up because they know that you love Jesus and that you pray and they're going through a crisis and they say to you, could you just come over and talk to me? And they're not a church person. They're not even a Christian, but they know that you are. And he opens the door for you to share some good news and community like ours. That's really invaluable and important because there's no business here.

Really not much. You're surrounded by people. So we want to leverage hospitality for the sake of the gospel. Pastor, going back to the centrality in our couple minutes left, the centrality of the word of God. We did a Facebook broadcast on Jesus Daily a little bit ago, Wednesday in the Word.

You joined me on that and I'm grateful for that. But you talked about the importance of biblical exposition and how has that become a very big anchor, really, really foundational to your ministry and why should it be to all pastors? Every pastor wants the same thing. They want to see people saved and they want to see people matured. They want to see people use their gifts in the life of the church.

They don't want to see people flame out, drop out. They don't want their church to fight. You know, they want their church to be healthy and all of them want to...every pastor I know has joy in the ministry. And here's what I discovered is that I do not have the intelligence, I don't have the power, I don't have the wisdom to make those things happen. I read in 2nd Corinthians 3 where Paul says that we are transformed from one degree of glory to the next by beholding Christ.

I got to believe that that's true. That if I will simply help hold up before my people Jesus Christ as revealed in His Word, the transforming of what will happen. Either the Word is sufficient and powerful or it's not. And so I've just given myself to preaching as carefully as I can the Bible. So you go through the books of the Bible, verse by verse, line upon line.

I'll do some thematic studies, but mainly go through...I'm going to spend about a year in Ephesians, low and slow. You know, I'm not into microwave preaching. I like barbecue preaching.

Low and slow, you know, it's better than slow and slow. But letting the Word do its work and letting the Holy Spirit be the...you're wondering, well, I got to make these applications with 500,000 people in an audience. How many applications? You don't have...you have 30, 45 minutes to preach to them. You can't come with that many applications, but if you go in the Word, you're saying that will...God's Word will through exegesis.

Yeah, yeah. The Word is powerful to the Word. And my job is to preach in such a way that the Word is central.

Not my opinions, my ideas. The Holy Spirit now will apply that Word to the heart and do the transformative work. My job is to be faithful to the text. A couple of verses, you know, James 3.1 is talking about preachers and teachers.

There's a stricter judgment upon them. The last thing that I want to do is mishandle all of them. So I give myself a careful study and I touch it. We are transformed from one degree of the Word to the next by the Holy Christ, and Christ is revealed to us in the Scripture. And then in 2 Peter, he goes through a whole list in chapter one of these virtues that we're to add to your patience, this, your faith, this. And he says if that's not happening, it's because you have forgotten that you've forgiven of your sins.

And so my job is to remind people every week of the good news of the ghost world. You know, my job is just to hold people down now to Jesus everywhere. And if they can behold Christ, and especially when I tell my people all the time, I don't want you to leave the church service and sit in your car and say, what a great speaker, what a great servant, or even what a great service.

I want you to say, what a great Savior. And if they can say that, if they're able to behold Christ through the gathering of the public servants and are able to say, oh, what a great Savior, then you begin to see the real maturity and the heart chains that every pastor longs for. It doesn't mean it's easy, it doesn't mean that you don't have difficulties, and it doesn't mean that people that you invest in and disciple don't disappoint and mess up and walk off the rack.

It just means that, as a pastor, I don't start with a need. I start with the Word. I let the Word do the Word.

I just fail as I'm known to be to proclaim it as clearly as I know how to proclaim it. And trust that it doesn't need antics and it doesn't need theatrics, that the Word is sufficient. One of those performers said, when you have a lion, you don't have to defend that lion, just open the cage and let the lion defend itself. But the power of the Word, the lion, and then there's the lion of the tribe of Judah. He came as a lamb, he came as Mary's little lamb, the lamb of God, taking away this world.

He's coming back as a roaring lion. How are we proclaiming Him, presenting people into Him? Another thing about preaching is Jesus multiple times in the Gospels confronted religious people and basically said, here's your problem. You don't understand that the Word, in the Old Testament, is about money. And on the road to Emmaus, He unfolded from the Old Testament how everything pointed to Hell. And the Bible, I tell people all the time, the Bible's a hymn book.

It's not a you book, it's a hymn book. It's all about Him, Jesus Christ. So I want to make sure, like Spurgeon said, every passage has a road to the cross. I want to make sure that in every sermon, I'm showing them from the text what this has to do with Jesus, what this has to do with our inability to save ourselves. There's only one hero in the Bible, and it's Jesus. Even Mary, who is exalted among some, she even confesses in her Psalm that she needs a Savior. Everybody needs a Savior. So I don't preach the characters of the Bible as these great heroes we're dealing with, because every single one of them needs a Savior. And so I just, I think it's really important for pastors to examine their sermons and say, man, as a Christian, then I preach a Christian sermon.

How can people hear your sermons, Pastor Chris Griggs, Denver Baptist Church, near Lake Norman area, North Carolina, what's the what's the best website, I guess, for Denver Baptist Church. Thank you for being out. Thank you for being faithful to the Word. Thanks for sharing that story. Thanks for reaching skaters and bikers and even basketball players, and you're growing and God's using you in a mighty way. What a blessing. Thanks. This is the Truth Network.