By Pat McCaughan, Episcopal News Service

The Revd Canon William “Jay” Geisler has baptized during a biker rally over a motorcycle sidecar, performed weddings with the bridal couple in black leather and sparked rousing cheers when he told mourners “there’s only two types of bikers — those who have gone down and those who will go down.”

“Someone got up [at a funeral] and asked ‘where’s Billy?’ and I started talking about God’s love for all of us. I said he’s with God of course,” Geisler recalled during a recent interview. “Everybody erupted with cheers of happiness, because they’ve been told they’re bad people.”

An avid biker, Geisler, 57, rector of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh, realized the need for a motorcycle ministry after a biker said to him, “you don’t know what it’s like to look like Frankenstein and have the heart of Shirley Temple.”

He and other biker priests say their love of motorcycles has opened up new avenues to proclaim the Gospel to an overlooked and underserved community.

Motorcycle masses in Maryland

The Revd Steve McCarty was inspired to begin a motorcycle ministry after another biker asked about the Episcopal shield on his jacket.

“I said, yeah I’m an Episcopal priest,” recalled McCarty, a biker since age 16. “We spent an hour and a half talking about his faith and how he’d been shunned from the church he was at, how they didn’t accept him, and he didn’t think he was good enough to go there...

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