c. 2006 Religion News Service

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. _ The cruisers rumble into the parking lot in quick pairs.

The riders dismount, shaking ponytails out of their helmets. They’ve got patches on their leather jackets, tattoos on their arms, and eyes that have seen everything.

Move over, Satan, and heads-up, heathens: These bikers have Jesus in their hearts and Bibles in their saddlebags.

“The Hellfighters are sold-out, 100 percent, foot-stomping, Bible-thumping Christians,” said Richard Headrick, a bike-riding sign painter from Laurel, Miss., who started the Hellfighters motorcycle ministry a few years ago. “Only the bold will qualify.”

Headrick and his wife, Gina, recently came to Huntsville to meet with a group of Hellfighters _ one of their 10 national chapters _ that meets at the International Worship Center, a nondenominational church led by mild-mannered pastor Mark Beaird. Beaird, whose says his ride is a red Schwinn bicycle with a card stuck into the spokes for some extra noise, welcomes the group of unconventional Christians as part of the flock of about 100 at the church.

“I don’t care if they wear leather to church or not,” Beaird said. “Give me someone who wears leather and wins souls over someone who wears a suit and never talks to anybody about God.”

The Hellfighters aren’t shy about talking about God.

“Being aggressive is a must,” said James Caffery, an ex-con who is a member of Hellfighters. “We kind of like you to be a born-again heathen. Sure, we ride and we eat, but our main concern is to tell people about Jesus.

“We’ll pretty well go in anywhere,” he said.

Their witness to a biker bar out east of town a couple years ago led to the owner renouncing the business and closing shop. The Hellfighters were there the day he brought out his stash and smashed the bottles of beer and whiskey. For the biker Christians, many of whom are recovering alcoholics, the fumes rose from the lake of alcohol in the parking lot like a cloud of devils set loose.

Then everyone circled round the building, their palms flat against the walls to pray for a new use for the building that had sheltered a place of temptation.

It was a place God had called them to, said James Caffery’s wife, Lynn. She and her husband, formerly partners in crimes of fraud that landed both of them in prison for more than 10 years, now team up for God’s work.

“God always lets you know where you need to be,” she said.

On one ride, they pulled in for gasoline and saw an elderly man putting gas into his car. Lynn felt led to start a conversation with him.

“He didn’t know Jesus,” Lynn Caffery said. “He gave his life to God at the gas pump. He and I were both just boo-hooing.”

James joined the conversation a moment later, giving the new convert his first pep talk. “I told him, `You need to stay tight with Jesus because you’re fixin’ to meet him face-up,”’ James said. “Lynn punched me in the ribs, but, look, he was 86 years old. It was time for him to get right and stay right.”

The bikers have ridden to Sturgis, the infamous two-week rally that draws upwards of 500,000 bikers to South Dakota every August. It’s famous for scantily clad women, drunkenness, good bands and full-throttle hedonism.

“Sturgis is where Satan is,” Richard Headrick said.

But it’s also where, the bikers say, Jesus would want them to be, handing out their biker’s Bibles, their tracts and their relentless call to turn to Jesus.

They figure their past qualifies them for that ministry in a way no seminary ever could.

“Jesus Christ did not use `Goody Two-Shoes’ to take his message,” said David Bates, a psychiatric nurse who’s come out the other side of drug addiction and mental illness. “He used people like in this room. We’re survivors.”

Add up the prison time, the bike wrecks, the methamphetamine and cocaine, the drinking and brawling, the times they’ve been shot or cut or confronted by bad dudes _ and none of the Hellfighters should be alive, they agreed.

“It was like my ears was handlebars and the devil was riding me like a motorcycle,” said Possum Pierce, a tough old biker who moves with the care that comes from a body wired together with plates and screws. “I was riding wide-open.”

That past gives him a wealth of compassion to share with the bikers he meets, Pierce said.

“When I see a guy drunk and sick, I know what he feels,” Pierce said. “I’m not going to put him down _ you know you’re low-down when you’re doing it. I knew I was nothing but trouble.”

That, James Caffery said, is the main message they can give other bikers looking for fun in a bottle, a syringe, in the rush of committing a crime or the heat of an embrace with a new lover.

“The Lord put me on a permanent high,” Caffery said. “He just made me high and left me there. I’m on a mission to deal the devil all the pain I can. I like pulling his top dogs away from him.

“And when I get to heaven and they come out with my crown, I want it so big that two men and a fat boy are totin’ it. And I want Jesus saying, `That’s my boy!”’

(Kay Campbell writes for The Huntsville Times in Huntsville, Ala.)

KRE/PH END CAMPBELL

Editors: To obtain photos of the Hellfighters bikers, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.

Editors: Beaird in fifth graf is CQ.