Written by John Mohrbacher, Founder and Executive Director

The dream of Skybacher Ministries Inc. started before I was even born.  I believe the Lord prepared good works in advance for me to do.  The concept of Skybacher all began during my days as a youth.  Growing up as a child I had a severe leg injury.  My mom encouraged me to draw pictures of what I saw myself doing when God healed me. So I drew pictures of myself playing soccer, running, jumping, and doing all of the things that I knew God had created me to do.  And I carried that tradition of drawing into high school.

“For you created my inmost being you knit me together in my mother’s womb.”
“All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.”
–Psalm 139:13, 16

December 6, 1991, was my first basketball game of my junior year and I was slated to start as the center.  That morning in Theme Writing Class, I again drew myself being all that God had created me to be just as I had done when I was a kid and couldn’t yet run around.  Now I have never dunked a basketball in my life (except for that time in the backyard on the 9-foot hoop with a mini-ball).  But in the small little cartoon I drew that monring, I could picture myself giving my all and doing the best I could against a 6’6? giant.  I’ve always been a little self-conscious about the size of my nose.  But in my cartoons, my nose became something that was my trademark – something that I was no longer ashamed of.  I drew a cartoon for each game after. Sure they included a lot of poor high school humor and sometimes were a little egotistical, but what the cartoons really did was help me see myself for who God had created me to be.

On July 27, 2004, Skybacher Ministries became incorporated with the desire to see young people find the vision and purpose of who and why God created them to be.  We held our first program, a volleyball tournament, on November 17, 2004.  Now, we have grown to a jam-packed, year-round calendar of programs for youth that includes everything from weekly fellowship/prayer time to six-weeks of sports camps.  We are committed to helping the youth in this area of Beaver County become all that God has created them to be and to find their “Skybacher” dream.  And I continue to draw cartoons today, only now the cartoons are logos and characters for Skybacher! How cool is that?!