By Graham Averill

It was 17 degrees outside when Wayne Lankford began to see God while riding a mountain bike outside of Birmingham, Alabama. Not the God that most of us think of from the Old or New Testament. This was more like the God that exists in all things. Call it a spiritual awakening, call it a transcendental journey, call it a physical course in metaphysics. No matter what name you give it, through mountain biking, Lankford became acutely aware of his spiritual connection with every single molecule in the universe.

“At first, I was just getting in shape by riding my son’s bike,” Lankford says. “But I kept riding, and you can’t spend that much time in nature without connecting with all the change and beauty around you. You start thinking about something simple like a tree, and how that tree is a miracle. It did a number on my head.”

Lankford is part of a growing number of people who are using action sports as a path for spiritual enlightenment. From Buddhist monks in Japan to new age spiritual gurus in New York, more and more religiously minded individuals are treating sports like trail running and mountain biking as the centerpiece of their religious practices. Even certain Christian ministries are using outdoor sports as an evangelical tool and route toward salvation.

ON THE SEVENTH DAY, HE SKATED

When you blow up a microwave, stand back at least 50 feet. Shrapnel and sparks fly in every direction. Toilets shoot straight in the air when you stuff them full of explosives, and watermelons, probably one of the safest objects to blow up, scatter in a million juicy pieces. This is one of the things you learn if you watch the daily Steelroots TV show on The Inspiration Network. You also learn about living life as a Christian during contemporary times. Steelroots is a multi-media action sports ministry based in Charlotte, North Carolina. It’s part of a fresh wave of Christian outreach programs designed to link action sports to the word of the Lord. The message of Jesus is there in the TV show, during and between the potato gun segment, the snowboard footage, the hip hop performance, and the pro skater interview. Each show has a theme: idolatry, lust, temptation. Name one of the seven deadly sins and the Steelroots show is designed to help its teen male demographic get through it. And if there’s one thing teen males respond to, it’s blowing stuff up. And hip hop. And skateboarding.

The daily TV show is just one arm of the Steelroots ministry, which has a roving skate tour, a glossy magazine, an interactive website, and a number of DVDs on the market. All of which revolve around the action sports lifestyle. Watch the Steelroots Snow Tour DVD and you might mistake it for standard snowboarding porn: quick cuts of guys riding steep chutes, hucking cliffs, and jibbing in terrain parks laid over crushing hard rock and hip hop. Cut to one of the boarders for an interview and he’s thugged out in typical boarder fashion: hat turned backward, baggy camos, and a larger than life platinum cross dangling from his neck. You’ve seen these crosses everywhere: hip hop videos, tattoo parlors, skate parks. But when this boarder wears the cross, it’s not just decoration, it’s a declaration. This boarder, starring in the Steelroots DVD, is a devout Christian. That thumping hip hop and rock music intensifying every scene? Christian. All those boarders cutting up the T-park? Christian. The tour itself, where 20 young pro and amateur boarders pile into a van and drive across America looking for the best snow and terrain? Christian. This is missionary work for a new generation.

“Five or six years ago, when our founder developed the concept, there was a real need for a cool action sports ministry,” says Joe Gruber, an ex-pro skater turned Steelroots marketer. “We use skateboarding and other action sports as a platform to reach active young people and reveal the Truth to today’s generation.”

While Steelroots uses a variety of sports to disseminate the word of the Lord, Gruber is most proud of the ministry’s work in the world of skateboarding. During the Steelroots “Reveal Tour,” pro skaters travel the Eastern seaboard putting on skate park demonstrations while delivering the message of Jesus Christ to the throngs of spectators. And the soon to be released full-length skate video, Kaleidoscope, captures a similar international skate/missionary trip in hip, documentary style. “We sent pro and amateur skaters all over to skate the best ramps in the world,” Gruber says. “This movie has awesome skate footage, but also the message of Christ.”

That’s the essence of Steelroots in a nutshell: action sports and Jesus Christ, which is a surprising combination for some. It’s not that people are shocked that many professional X-Games-type athletes are devout Christians; it’s just that action sports is an unlikely tool for evangelism. Chances are, the last thing you’re thinking about when you watch Sandro Dias pull a 900 on the skate ramp at the X Games is that Jesus Christ died for your sins.

But then, Christianity is in the middle of a public relations overhaul. Bibles are being printed in contemporary language. One such Bible is even printed with a duct tape jacket. You can pick standard silver or camo. There’s even a Bible that glows in the dark. It’s no secret that these marketing changes are designed to attract a younger, hipper audience, and action sports ministries have the same demographic in mind. It’s a form of niche marketing that has led to some criticism from more traditional ministries.

“Some churches are against us,” says Ryan Melson, the manager of the action sports division of Vertical Ministries, a Christian group that produces a number of BMX and skate tours similar to the ones found at Steelroots. “They say what we’re doing is too worldly. These are the same churches that shun the kinds of kids we’re reaching. They put 'No Skateboarding' signs in front of their church. But God loves skateboarders just as much as the guy in the business suit.”

And according to Melson, there is a tangible connection between the kinds of high-impact, action-packed demonstrations that Vertical Ministries is producing and the lessons of Christianity. Vertical Ministries’ signature tour is the “Freedom Experience,” a multi-day extravaganza complete with performances by BMX superstars and a high-energy Christian illusionist named Brock Gill. After the bikers shred the half pipe, Gill catches bullets between his teeth and breaks out of a coffin that’s submerged in a water tank. Melson believes this sort of show is an ideal platform for demonstrating the power of Christianity. “When Brock escapes from a watery coffin, that’s the perfect allegory for someone who receives Christ. They’re dead, and now they’re alive.”

And it’s not like Vertical Ministries is the first group to use sports as a religious tool. Throughout history, sport and religion have essentially been synonymous.

WHAT THE MAYANS AND PROMISE KEEPERS HAVE IN COMMON

If you lost a ball game in ancient Mesoamerica, there was a chance you would be killed. According to the Mayans, the sacrifice of an important human was necessary to keep the sun in the sky. And there was no human more important in that ancient culture than ball players. The Mesoamerican ball game is considered mankind’s first team sport and seems to have had similar principles to modern day soccer. The game was played with a solid rubber ball, and was a huge distraction for the Mayan people, but it also played a significant role in the Mayan creation story. As the legend goes, the gods who created earth were avid ball players, and when they finally got around to creating humans, they created two ball playing brothers. The first two humans on earth played the game so much that the bouncing ball disturbed the gods of the underworld. So the brothers were beheaded. Throw in some mild necrophilia, a pregnant god and her half-breed offspring, and you have the Cliffs Notes to the Mayan creation story-all of which revolves around this sport, which became a cultural obsession for the Mayan people.

For many Native North American tribes, running held a similar place in their religious beliefs. The practice of running was actually a gift handed down from the gods, and according to one Native American religion, a mythic foot race between man and buffalo determined the hierarchy of life on earth. Man won, so we were allowed to eat the buffalo.

In West Africa, wrestling matches were part of religious ceremonies. In Ancient Greece, Zeus oversaw the Olympic games and was responsible for the victories and losses of the athletes. The games themselves were the central focus of an expansive religious festival. The religious purity of the Olympics was so important that all women (except for unmarried virgins) were banned from the stadium.

Throughout history, sport and religion have been linked, with very little distinction made between the two. It wasn’t until the era of Judeo-Christianity that religious leaders started drawing a line between sport and their holy beliefs. The distinction was made to further separate Judeo-Christians from their polytheistic competition. This same reasoning led to the ban of the Olympics in 393 A.D. by a Christian emperor who was worried about the popularity of pagan rituals.

Olympic ban be-damned, baseball fans say the separation between religion and sport came to a head in 1965, when Sandy Koufax refused to pitch the first game of the World Series because it fell on Yom Kippur-a decision that shocked America’s predominantly Christian public, which had grown accustomed to the connection between sport and salvation ever since the "Muscular Christianity" movement of the late 19th century. During this time, a number of ministries made a commitment to living a healthy, active life. The movement influenced the development of the YMCA and was so popular that some ministers insisted you weren’t a true Christian unless you were a physically fit Christian.

The correlation between Christianity and sport has only grown since the heyday of Muscular Christianity. One of America’s most famous evangelists, Billy Sunday, was a famous baseball player who gave up the sport for evangelism but used his athletic prowess to gain favor with the American public around the turn of the century. The Promise Keepers, a Christian movement that focuses on married men, uses the game of football as an allegory for being a good Christian. They even hold meetings in football stadiums and employ football stars to appeal to their male demographic.

Today, the ministers that rely on skating and snowboarding to reach the public see their activities as an extension of these well-established evangelical principles.

“You tell people we’re putting on a skate demonstration with pro skaters and we’re giving away iPods and money for a best trick contest, and people show up,” Gruber says. “And these are the kids that aren’t going to show up to see a speaker preach from behind a podium, so it allows us to reach them in a situation they’re more comfortable with.”

Action sports are bait on the hook for ministries like Steelroots and Vertical Ministries, but not a matter of bait and switch.

“We’re not lying to these kids about our intentions. There’s no secret about why we’re going on tour. We’re going to skate and spread the message of Christ. That’s who we are,” Gruber says.

But evangelism is just the beginning of the spiritual side of action sports. For some religiously minded individuals and groups, the physical practice of these activities is the perfect opportunity for spiritual growth.

JUMP OFF A CLIFF, TOUCH GOD

The last thing Lankford was looking for when he took his son’s bike to Oak Mountain in Alabama was a spiritual awakening. Honestly, he says, he had nothing better to do. It was the middle of January, in the dead air between the sporting events he loved to watch. The Super Bowl was over and baseball was months away. Lankford was bored with his own inactivity. Bored of being overweight. Bored with drinking too much. Bored with smoking too much. So he loaded his son’s bike in his car and went for a ride. He didn’t know mountain biking would change his life forever.

“Oak Mountain is a big-ass mountain with an 18-mile loop of mostly singletrack winding around it,” Lankford says of the bike path that led to his dramatic transformation. Lankford’s book, The Bike Path, details his spiritual awakening and immortalizes the trail in a reverent light. “It’s a beautiful trail,” Lankford says. “And now, Oak Mountain is my church. When I ride there, I can find my center and connect to things spiritually.”

Things get fuzzy when you ask people what it is, specifically, about running or mountain biking or snowboarding that transforms the sport from simple hobby to spiritual activity. But then, explaining spirituality is a lot like trying to explain sex. It’s an awkward and entirely personal subject. Words do it no justice. However, beneath the metaphysical theories, personal interpretations, and multiple perspectives, the spiritual awakening found within action sports seems to boil down to one central concept: connectivity.

Jeremy Jones, a devout Christian and avid surfer, uses surfing as a way to connect to God and His creation. “When you catch a wave, you’re literally a part of the dynamic, moving energy that surrounds you. Whether you’re a Christian or not, surfing is a very spiritual activity.”

Jones, the author of Walking on Water, a book that details the spiritual lives of professional surfers, believes the sport itself is an ideal avenue to explore the same notion of connectivity that Lankford finds evident in mountain biking. “Being in an element like the ocean, with its vast size and power, makes you feel small. You’re in the middle of this great force and there’s so much power there. When you’re surfing, you’re very aware that there’s so much more out there that’s bigger than you. It points me, as a Christian, to the creator of it all.”

A number of Christian ministries are capitalizing on this sense of connectivity in the natural world to awaken their flock’s spiritual side. Doug Garner takes people into the woods to emphasize that connection with God. Then he makes them jump off a cliff. Or raft down a river. Think of it as baptism by extreme sports.

“We take people out to experience God’s creation in order to introduce them to a personal relationship with the Lord Jesus,” Garner says. “It says it in the Bible that you can see the reality of God through His creation. It’s like looking at a beautiful painting and you realize someone had to paint it. It’s an instant connection.”

If Garner was going to have a slogan tattooed on his forehead, it might be something like “No Fear Through God.” His enthusiasm for Christianity and adventure, two concepts that he refuses to separate, borders on obsessive, and he’s quick to insert the phrase “God-awesome” in any manner of conversation. Garner is the founder and operator of Going the Distance, an adventure ministry that guides groups on adventure trips throughout the Southeast. They’ve got ski trips and rafting trips. Caving trips and mountain biking trips. Backpacking trips and rock climbing trips. For Garner, God is present in every aspect of these adventures, even the sports themselves, which he believes are the perfect avenue for discovering the power of God.

“These activities are modern day parables,” Garner says. “In every aspect of these adventures, you have to exert faith and take a risk. That’s what life and Christianity is about.”

Going the Distance’s most popular trip is “Slammed,” five days of rock climbing, rappelling, hiking, mountain boarding, cliff jumping, and whitewater rafting. “Caving and repelling are the most obvious parallels for religion because of the element of risk and faith involved,” Garner says. “Both Christianity and repelling require faith and the acceptance of risk. People tend to settle for less in life because of fear. They settle for the path of least pain, so they end up in careers they don’t like, marriages they don’t like, living lives they don’t like. And they settle for less because of fear. We try to confront that fear and get past it with adventure sports.”

The Gyoja know something about harnessing fear through adventure. The Gyoja are Buddhist spiritual athletes who live on Mount Hiei in Japan. Some of them run 20-40 miles a day, every day for 100 days. They wear sandals and run rocky trails with the ultimate goal of connecting their soul with the mountain. The most dedicated run 20-40 a day or more for 1,000 consecutive days over seven years. That's 1,000 marathons and 27,000 miles. Only a select few are even allowed to attempt the seven-year challenge, and the ones that fail are expected to commit suicide. Since 1885, only 49 monks that have completed the task, and the graves of those who tried and failed are scattered across the mountain.

Between the daily runs, the monks pray. Run and pray. Run and pray. That’s there life for seven years. It’s still a bit vague as to why these monks elevate running to the life-or-death spiritual practice that it is, but one interested researcher linked the practice to an ancient Buddhist text that states, “mountain pilgrimages on sacred peaks is the best of practices.” It’s a notion that is echoed in the Bible and other religious texts. Where did Moses get the Ten Commandments, after all? According to the definitive book on the Gyoja, Marathon Monks of Mount Hiei, by testing their physical limits and facing death over and over, “the marathon monks become alive to each moment, full of gratitude, joy, and grace.”

Only through suffering and repeatedly confronting fear can these monks attain a higher sense of spirituality and achieve the ultimate sense of connectivity. It’s a concept that isn’t restricted to an obscure monastery in Japan. Just about every major world religion-including Christianity-is based on similar principles. Pain and suffering are the cornerstone of Christianity, and it informs the quintessential Christian image: Jesus suffering on the cross. The importance of suffering is also the fundamental principle of sport: No pain, no gain. Salvation has to be hard.

Jeffrey Fry, a philosophy professor at Ball State University, has studied the role of pain in sport, insisting that pain itself is a tool for spiritual and physical transcendence. While pain is miserable, Fry says in an interview on Radio National’s “The Sports Factor,” it can also be expansive. “Pain can be an opportunity for growth. It can lead to new self understandings and broaden the horizons of self understanding.”

While the Gyoja have taken the “no pain, no gain” concept to a higher level in order to seek enlightenment and attain the level of connectivity that all spiritual athletes are after, Christians in the West are applying less extreme principles to their daily runs in order to achieve similar goals.

Roger Joslin writes about spiritual transcendence through running in his book Running the Spiritual Path. An Episcopal priest, Joslin sees running as an opportunity to come to know God. “God exists all along the path and at all levels,” Joslin writes. “Our task is to be aware of that Presence as we move along it. The true runner can see God more clearly while running.”

Joslin even likens the runner’s feet to the sacrament of communion, both of which are treated as the contact point between the body and the divine. Of all the so-called adventure sports, spirituality is most often connected with running. Runner’s World published an article about enhancing your running ability by building a spiritual connection with the sport. Merrimack University, a catholic college, recently offered a course called “Spirituality and Running.” And many runners consider the act their one true spiritual outlet. Ultra running has even been used as a spiritual tool by certain religious cults in the United States.

ALL ONE, EVEN EDDIE MURPHY

Sri Chinmoy has lifted Eddie Murphy straight over his head-with one arm. He’s lifted airplanes, buses, politicians, you name it. The small-framed, 75-year-old man from Bengal claims he can lift 7,000 pounds with each arm-7,063 with his right, 7,040 with his left, to be exact. Chinmoy says his ability to lift heavy weights comes not from any sort of muscular training, but directly from his heightened sense of spirituality.

Chinmoy, who The New York Times has called the “Spiritual Stuntman,” is considered a spiritual guru by many and is the founder of a religious sect known as the Sri Chinmoy Society. Critics say the Society is a cult and Chinmoy is a fraud, as many of his feats of strength have never been validated by any legitimate organization. But Chinmoy has been collecting followers since the ‘70s from all walks of life (from Eddie Murphy and Carlos Santana to housewives and business owners), most of which are rabidly loyal. The exact numbers are hazy, but it’s estimated that anywhere from 2,000 to 5,000 people are active in the Sri Chinmoy Society. And all of them are encouraged by Chinmoy to test the limits of their physical abilities.

Members of the Sri Chinmoy Society have held, at one time or another, the world record in continuous hand clapping and the world record in continuous rolling on the ground. One member even pogo-sticked up Mount Fuji. The Society is a collection of individuals constantly seeking spiritual transcendence through physical activity.

“Our goal is to go from bright to brighter to brightest, from high to higher to highest,” Chinmoy has said of his followers’ activities. And most Chinmoy followers seek the “brightest” and “highest” of spiritual lives through running.

Chinmoy created a marathon team in order to “help promote spiritual growth through sports.” All of his Society members are encouraged to run, often times at great length, and the Society is known for putting on some of the most spectacular ultra marathons in the world. Their signature race, the New York Self Transcendence Marathon, is considered the longest foot race in the world. Runners attempt to run 3,100 miles around the same New York City block. The world record is 42 days, 13 hours, 24 minutes, and three seconds.

If you are a believer of Chinmoy, then you assume that at some point within that 42-plus day run, the winning runner experienced a moment where his performance was perfect and his senses were heightened to an almost supernatural level-a moment where he experienced an overwhelming sense of universal connection unlike any other. This moment of spiritual transcendence has a number of names but it’s most often referred to as “the zone.” It is the moment of connectivity and clarity that lies at the heart of all athletic practices, particularly those used as religious rituals. It’s the moment that Roger Joslin writes about extensively in his book Running the Spiritual Path, the moment that Jeremy Jones finds while surfing, the moment that Sri Chinmoy encourages all of his athlete-disciples to get to through their running, and it’s the same moment that changed Wayne Lankford’s life on the bike path near his home. Lankford, who refers to this moment as “the float,” believes that it is in this state of being that he attains a sense of spiritual clarity.

“If you go for a workout and get your heart rate up and then settle into a rhythm, then you find yourself in a spiritual kind of beginning place, where you can separate your mind from what your body is doing and contemplate the connections and miracles around you. Mountain biking got me to a place where I can see that this, life, me, everything, is temporary. Some people don’t believe me, but you can go off into space while you’re riding a twisting, technical trail. You can see things in clear light.”

And perhaps clarity is the endgame of all noble religions.