A lot of people may still view skateboarders as outcasts and scoundrels who seek the thrills of life on the fringes of society.
While that image of skate culture still persists, that’s not the truth for every skater. For Mike Steinkamp, a local skater and filmmaker, he’s managed to find the place where his faith and the sport he loves intersect. Now, he’s helping others find their heaven on wheels.
Steinkamp is one of the founders of Good News Sk8 Night, a space where individuals and families gather to hear a quick word, catch up with a familiar face, and — most importantly — skate.
Steinkamp says combining his Christian faith with his favorite sport just seemed like a natural course to follow.
“I kind of had this vision, when I was 18, I started like a ministry, and I traveled all over the country and all over the world, and I would do skate events all over the place,” Steinkamp said.
But after a decade of this, things started to change for him.
“I was like, man, I'm too old for this, like I'm like not good at skateboarding anymore, and like my body's breaking down, so I knew I wanted to do something local,” he said.
So, he and a group of fellow skateboarding disciples founded Good News Sk8 Night, and recently, the Good News crew celebrated three years of bringing their ministry to skateparks around the Cape Fear region.
This year, they held their anniversary skate night at the Skate Barn in Hampstead, where I caught up with one beginner skater, who only went by their first name, Sakurra, who’s been attending GNSN since their very first event.
“Now I'm here for the third one. I go to every single one,” Sakurra said. And it’s the camaraderie that keeps her coming back.
“Everybody's just like trying to teach everybody, so if I don't know anything, they're like, all right, you got it, like I'm gonna show you, and then we're good. So you know they help out when they can, for sure,” she said.
For many skaters, whether at the beginning stages like Sakurra or more advanced skaters like Steinkamp, it’s the falling and getting back up that’s taught them one of life’s greatest lessons — resilience.
That’s something Co-founder James "Sonny" Russell definitely tries to tap into. As someone who’s battled with a substance abuse disorder and has been clean now for 15 years, Russell exemplifies this philosophy.
“So, my story of God and recovery and skateboarding, it's an open book," Russell said. “I went from being a client at Coastal Horizons to working there to becoming a case manager to getting cherry-picked to work at Eden Village.”
Eden Village is a tiny-home community that provides housing and support to those experiencing homelessness. In both of his roles, Russell says he helps others build a more resilient life, the same way he did.
Together as a group, they serve the whole community not only by partnering with local skate shops, but with community-based organizations like Nourish NC, Communities In Schools of Cape Fear, and Share the Table as well.
And they make sure to pay tribute to local skaters whose lives were cut short.
Early this year, the GNSN group helped petition the City of Wilmington for Greenfield Grind Skatepark to be renamed after local pro-skater Alec Chambers, who sadly passed away from being hit in a drunk-driving incident late last year.
At this year’s anniversary, they honored a more recent loss: local high school student and avid skater Jaden Lorek, who died unexpectedly in May of this year. He was 15-years-old.
His close friend Noah Ball spoke about the importance of GNSN to Jaden.
“This is one of the events where I think was like a light in the dark for him in a lot of ways, because skateboarding is so individualistic and it's so welcoming,” Ball said.
But Ball says that skate life can be a pendulum that swings in varying degrees of good and bad, “ultimately, that can be a bad thing because if you're welcoming things like self-destruction or things that are harmful to everybody around you, not only yourself, that can be at a place of unhealthy justification.”
“I think a common misconception about Jaden was that he was, to his core, like his self-expression, like he was always the dude at a skate park that was laughing the most, brought the most joy," he said. "But ultimately, in certain moments when you were close to him, you started to see through that.”
So, as he spoke to the crowd of skaters about what Jaden meant to him the night of the GNSN anniversary, Ball also reminded them of the importance of checking in on friends.
“I like to spread awareness of the fact that you need to check up on your people, no matter the situation, check up on the severity of the situation," Ball said. "And try and understand and help and assess whatever colors or shades that may come because we, as all people know, that life is not black and white.”
Steinkamp agrees that skateboard culture can be harsh, and he says that is why GNSN exists.
“Skateboard culture is pretty harsh, you know? People might be like, man, I'm like pretty messed up, or I'm too far gone. Like, dude, you're not too far gone, like, dude, you, it doesn't matter what you've done in your past, like you can have a new future, like you really can, and like Sonny's living proof, I'm a living proof," he said.
Russell says Good News may be the “only version of church” people get. But even for those who aren’t religious, GNSN is inclusive to everyone.
“We have a great group of family members and parents that come and are part of the skate ministry... and it's still got that outlaw vibe too, but also it's just culturally here it's inclusive. Good news is inclusive,” he said.
Steinkamp co-signs that, “yeah, everybody's welcome here. Like, it doesn't matter what you believe, what you think, doesn't even matter if you skate. Like, dude, you want to come hang out with a group of people that just think differently about life, like, yeah, come hang out. At Good News, we're for the people.”
