Stache Skate Session

It’s a Friday Night in November 2011. It is dark and cold outside. Usually there is already snow in a beautiful town tucked away in the Swiss Alps. The skateboards of the local youth are stored away and the snowboards and skies are waxed and ready to hit the slops. But at that night, something was different. You see young people with their skateboards going to a large building midst in town. It’s where YWAM Davos is having their Snowboarders DTS and the first Stache Skate Session took place. 

Well, to tell the whole story, we have to start in the beginning. YWAM Davos was started in Fall 2007. God put the local community and freestyle culture heavily on our hearts. One of the main things God said was: “Ministry happens where the people are, it can happen in the light of the street lamps”. That is why we started a thing called “Skate & Wurst”, basically dragging a BBQ to the skate park to fry some sausages and give them away. We started to build relationship with the local skateboarder. A year or two later we built a small skate setup for a street festival and dragged our leather couch out to the road and had a great time. This same setup could be used now for our Stache Skate Session in our Community Room. 

As Wes Luke, a guy from the JSAW (JSAW is an outreach and leadership development ministry for youth involved in action sports www.jsaw.org), asked if he could spend a weekend with us, we where so stoked (slang for really exited). That was the moment when the idea of the Stache Skate Session was born. We invited the skateboarders from out town to come and hang out with us, to skate, to play the Tony Hawk Game on our Nintedo Wii, to share life and have fun. As November is high season for a beautiful mustache, you had to have a so-called stache, no matter if it was real, fake or painted on. The evening ended with an award for the best real stache and the best fake one. It was so much fun. 

The Friday Night Event ended with an invitation for the next evening, to hear how God is using Wes Luke through skateboarding. The people who showed up that evening where truly touched by the word of God and how God has a purpose for our lives, how he cares and that we can live such a simple, jet so fulfilled life. The students of our Snowboarders DTS did a great job hosting the event, along side with the newly started “GoTeam”, which we call the Freestyle Department.

Because we have been interested in the lives of these young people, they have started to trust us with their questions and problems. We have the privilege to speak into their lives, encourage them and get along side them. Some of them started to join us for our Open Nights during the last two Snowboarders DTS’, where we open up our school to the community and have our guest speakers’ share usually on their weekly DTS Topic.