With a Bible balanced on a knee over her crisscrossed legs, Christen Ibarra wove scripture into the “Holy Yoga” class she taught during the first week of December in the recreation room at Golden’s First Presbyterian Church.

Interspersed between lunges, quiet moments of rest and downward-facing dogs, Ibarra reminded the class how much they were loved by Jesus. As the class laid back on yoga mats atop church carpet, Ibarra told them to press into the earth and remember that their maker has their back.

Mindy Heimer also leads “Holy Yoga,” but on this night, she was a participant. She breathed deeply while sinking into traditional poses, moving her body after a day of work. “Holy Yoga” — a trademarked, Christ-centered yoga program with trained instructors across the globe — is Heimer’s favorite way to engage in her faith.

The 38-year-old Lakewood Presbyterian is all about finding non-traditional ways to connect to the divine. She and her husband Nathan Heimer, 37, launched a paddleboard ministry out of their Morrison stand-up paddleboard shop Surf’SUP Colorado, where they welcome everyone to hit the water, paddle together and talk about the big and small questions of spirituality.

“This place isn’t a bait and switch,” said Mindy Heimer while sitting near the budding coffee shop in the back of their paddleboard store. “It’s not like, ‘Here’s your paddleboard. Do you know who Jesus Christ is?’ That’s not our style. We just want people to know that they belong here and this can be their third place where they can come and sit and be.”

A Stoked Life, the name of the Heimers’ nature-and-wellness-based ministry, is one of the Presbytery of Denver’s “new worshipping communities.” These communities — ranging from groups that only meet online to immigrant collectives who worship in their cultural traditions — receive financial and supportive resources from the local and national Presbyterian Church (USA) and can be led by lay leaders.

There are 14 new worshipping communities in the Denver Presbytery, part of the church’s goal of creating 1,001 new groups nationally to help reach different, younger members and diverse demographics.

Americans’ religious affiliations have been on a steady decline for years. About three in 10 adults in the U.S., or 29%, identify as religious “nones” — atheists, agnostics or people who identify as “nothing in particular,” the Pew Research Center found in 2021. In 2007, Christians outnumbered “nones” almost five-to-one, but now the ratio is a little more than two-to-one, Pew found.

New worshipping communities were created, in part, to address this decline, said the Rev. Fernando Rodríguez, associate presbyter for mission at the Denver Presbytery, who oversees the city’s new worshipping communities. However, they also exist to serve a more diverse population and allow existing members to branch out and try something new.

From 2018 to 2022, the Denver Presbytery averaged total gains of 300 members per year, and that number doesn’t include people in new worshipping communities. The inventiveness seems to be paying off.

“It was a realization that times have changed,” Rodríguez said. “The church doesn’t quite have the societal role it once did. The role religion and spirituality play in society and individuals’ lives has changed significantly. We have broadened our definition to new worshipping communities to allow Christian communities to develop in different ways. The spirit of God can take different forms to reach different people.”

100% yoga, 100% Jesus

Mindy and Nathan Heimer met as teens in Colorado Presbyterian youth ministry.

They attended Colorado Christian University and began working in youth ministry together around 2005.

In 2012, Mindy Heimer was hired at Lakewood’s Shepherd of the Hills Presbyterian Church, where she helped develop a health and fitness ministry, teaching free exercise classes at the church for the community.

“There are barriers to keeping people from getting in shape: it’s costly, healthy food is expensive, fitness classes are expensive,” Mindy Heimer said. “I wanted to make fitness free. In turn, it became a place of community.”

A couple of years later, Mindy Heimer became a “Holy Yoga” teacher and started offering classes.

“We forget our faith is part of our entire being, which means our physical body,” Mindy Heimer said. “There’s a big focus on grounding, how your breath can heal your body, how yoga lowers stress levels.”

Lara Adamson, who is Episcopalian, has been attending “Holy Yoga” classes with Mindy Heimer for two years.

“Mindy always says it’s 100% yoga and 100% Jesus, and I like that,” Adamson said after a December class. “One doesn’t compromise the other.”

The idea for worshipping on the water came to the Heimer’s when the couple and their two boys vacationed in Hawaii in 2018 and witnessed as a family the spirituality in being in nature, moving together.

“It’s something we love to do,” Nathan Heimer said. “We find passion and joy paddleboarding, and it has become an instrument of how we can build community.”

The Heimers plan trips to local lakes, where they teach people how to do stand-up paddleboarding and have the opportunity to spend quality time recreating and discussing faith while out on the water.

They bought Surf’SUP Colorado in 2020 and have been selling and renting stand-up paddleboards, kayaks and accessories ever since.

The Heimers host Bible studies out of their paddleboard shop — housed in a nondescript strip mall — and are carving out a coffee shop in their retail store for a future gathering space. A sitting area with chairs and couches is surrounded by walls of tall boards and accessories.

“You can come buy a paddleboard, and we’re not going to indoctrinate you,” Nathan Heimer said, adding, “This is a safe space for everyone, whether you’re a staunch, right-wing Republican or the farthest leftist you can find.”

The Presbytery of Denver — three presbyteries serve Colorado’s Front Range and one serves the Western Slope — reported a total of 7,516 members among its 45 chartered congregations for 2022. New worshipping communities are not counted in membership statistics in Denver or the official denominational rolls, Rodríguez said.

In 2022, more than 700 people were a part of Denver Presbytery’s new worshipping communities and four new communities were created in 2023, Rodríguez said.

Bringing church to the outdoors

The recent declines in Christianity are most prominent among Protestants, the Pew Research Center found. About 40% of U.S. adults are Protestant, which includes nondenominational Christians, Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians and other denominational families. According to the 2021 Pew data, the number of Protestants fell four percentage points in five years and dropped 10 points in 10 years.

“This is a big demographic shift, and a lot of church leaders are asking, ‘Where are these people going?’” said Deborah Whitehead, a University of Colorado Boulder associate professor of religious studies.

Locally and nationally, Whitehead said Christian churches have pivoted to focus on smaller groups to build community among new members and help them establish ties to a church. While the practice of small groups in a church isn’t new, it can be effective, Whitehead said.

“The idea is that, in a small group setting, you can be more personal and get to know people better, but also have conversations about things that you wouldn’t be able to have in a larger setting because you build trust,” Whitehead said. “Things like marriage or parenting or substance abuse or addiction.”

There can be a lot of competition for that traditional Sunday morning church hour, Whitehead said, noting it was especially tight competition in a place like Colorado where weekend outdoor recreation reigns supreme.

Mindy Heimer remembered listening to church leaders discuss how to get young folks back in the door and thinking she kind of understood where the youth were coming from.

“They’d say, ‘How do we get them to stop skiing?’ And it’s like, ‘Guys, I don’t know, I’d rather be skiing, too,’” Mindy Heimer said. “That’s why we’re like, ‘Well, let’s bring it to them.’ We are out in nature literally all summer long. We’re in this place where you can tell there’s something bigger than just yourself. It’s helping give people the opportunity to ask those questions and explore it for themselves.”

A Stoked Life ministry’s membership numbers are hard to nail down, the Heimers said, since people show up for different events from yoga to paddleboarding to special retreats or celebrations.

Part of the appeal of the nature-based ministry, Nathan Heimer said, was getting away from a traditional church building that could be intimidating or triggering to people who have faced pain from past religious experiences.

“People will tell you all the time, ‘I find God in nature,’ but they maybe wouldn’t say, ‘I see God in the church,’” Nathan Heimer said. “Stepping through those doors can be a huge barrier for people. We try not to take a stance in a way that limits anyone from coming in the door. We want them to come to a place where they can be and explore healing and reconstructiveness.”

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