Come as you ride: Welcome to Biker's Church in Colorado Springs

Apr. 2—In a cigarette-and-coffee-smelling sanctuary in Colorado Springs, before a congregation of tattoos and black leather and long hair and longer beards, a woman starts to speak into a microphone. She speaks about a recent night of hard, unspeakable emotions.

"I was ready to just go," she says. "And then Pastor Jayme calls me, and she says, 'What are you doing?' I said, I'm leaving, Jayme. I don't understand what I have left here.' And she said, 'You have a whole church here.'"

A whole church of people not so unlike her. People who've known pain and darkness and reached the other side. People who, in some cases, reached that other side thanks to this unlikely place.

This is Pikes Peak Biker's Church. This is the place built by a self-made, born-again Christian who long ago swapped a fast, alcohol-fueled road on a motorcycle for a slow, reflective path toward faith and compassion.

Actually, Jayme Pezoldt-Justice didn't so much build Biker's Church — the congregation has had five homes in Springs buildings and churches since 2007 — as much as she went about fostering it and growing it through a like-minded demographic.

Maybe the clothes were different. Maybe the choices varied. But Pezoldt-Justice knew her fellow bikers to be like any other church-going people: sinners seeking redemption.

In 2007, "I noticed that in the motorcycle world, it was a lot like the church world," Pezoldt-Justice says, "where there was this motorcycle group or club, and there was that motorcycle group or club, like there were Lutherans and Catholics and Baptists. But there wasn't this one place where all of them congregated, and they were all community."

True to rebel form, bikers weren't much for church, she found. Or maybe it was the other way around: Churches weren't much for bikers.

Reads the Biker's Church website: "We know that not all churches are comfortable for 'people like us,' we understand that only we know what that means ..."

What that means, Pezoldt-Justice says with a laugh: "A lot of us look scary, and some of us act scary because maybe we're carrying a persona or we're just scary-looking. We trash talk. We're rough around the edges."

Pezoldt-Justice wants them to come as they ride, "bugs in the beard and all," reads the Biker's Church website.

Come not for your loyalties of people around you, the site goes on to suggest, but for your love of the higher power. For the good word from the pastor, who has a saying: "I marry them and I bury them. I don't pick sides."

The website goes on: "We are not bound by colors or cuts. We are bound by Christ and our love for each other and our lifestyle."

And the common question: Do you have to be a biker to come? "The answer is a very loud NO!!"

With perhaps an important stipulation. "You need to be prepared for the language," Pezoldt-Justice says. "I don't ask people to clean themselves up."

For Jenny Johnson, Biker's Church took some getting used to when she first came close to 10 years ago.

"I was scared about bikers," she says. "But it was just realizing bikers are just normal people with their faults, just like everybody else."

Johnson says she was going through "a nasty divorce" at the time. "They made me feel welcomed, and they were encouraging and caring."

They knew about life's harsh twists and turns. That included Pezoldt-Justice, who was all too familiar with abusive relationships. She recently remarried and is counting nearly 25 years sober. She traces her recovery to a jail cell in 1998.

"Romans 8:28 is one of my favorite verses. He can use all things for his glory," Pezoldt-Justice says. "So he uses our crashes and burns. ... He uses my abuse in my first marriage to minister to people who have been abused. He uses my addiction to minister to people who are addicted. He uses my jail time for people who are jailed."

She's there, too, for people who are hospitalized. Recently, that was David Scott Barnett. An accident left him in a wheelchair.

"I'm grateful to be alive," he says.

Grateful to be here at Biker's Church, where his 1982 Sturgis model is displayed in the foyer. Pezoldt-Justice asked for that.

It would be a tough sight for Scott Barnett — he isn't sure if he'll ever be able to ride it again. But it would also be a reminder of the good times. A reminder to keep the faith.

"I've got a miracle in the back of my mind," he says.

In his skull cap, cut-off shirt and all, he bows his head in prayer.