Johnny never thought he would be baptised by a run club. The 24-year-old student from San Diego, California, had grown up Christian but drifted into selling drugs. Then, inspired by a religious friend, he left this wayward life behind. He joined a branch of Run with Christ (RWC) not long after it had launched in 2024. They ran to a beach in San Diego, and Will Garinger, a 19-year-old business student, re-baptised him in the Pacific Ocean in front of 120 joggers. When he told his family, they were surprised at the absence of a pastor. “I was just, like, ‘Dude, like, this is literally the Holy Spirit moving right now and I just can’t pass up the opportunity.’”
RWC is a running club for Christians, set up by Garinger. The club now has branches in more than 30 cities across the US, with an overseas presence in London, and is looking to launch in South Africa and Costa Rica.
“Not just a run club but a movement to make heaven full” is the RWC motto. Practically, that translates into what one member calls the “five Cs: cardio, Christ, community, cold plunge and coffee”.
Runners gather – a hundred or so in most branches – enjoying doughnuts or electrolytes as they prepare to hear a “leader” (a branch organiser – something like a priest, but dressed in shorts and trainers) offer a communal prayer. They might listen to testimonies of often traumatic journeys into faith before they set off on a 5km run, usually accompanied by upbeat music.
The runners at RWC are mostly young, healthy and good-looking. “We’re out there jumping and we’re loud and we’re singing and we’re dancing,” Mikayla Adams, a San Diego leader, told me when we spoke on the phone. “But there’s no alcohol, there’s no sleeping with each other.” This youthful enthusiasm, she admits, means people often think they are a “college fraternity party, when really, we love the Lord”.
Many leaders and runners are sober. Rather than spending time at bars, they are looking for “like-minded people to call them higher”, as Hadley Mueller, a leader in Chicago, put it. RWC’s branch in Morgantown, West Virginia, is based near the state’s university campus. Students have a reputation for partying, said Valerie Brunner, a branch leader and physical therapy grad student. “They enjoy it at first, but after they’ve done it for so long, they just feel like, ‘Is this really what life is?’” More than 100 students now take part in the branch’s Saturday-morning runs. Her aim is for partygoers to realise that “there’s this Jesus guy”.
Many RWC leaders are dedicated to helping their members join local churches. In Morgantown, they engage in conversations such as, “Did you grow up religious? What kind of church did you grow up going to? Let’s try to fit a church that meets those needs,” said Brunner. “If you like it, good. If you don’t, we’ll find another church.” For recent converts, the range of denominations within RWC helps them find a church that best fits their growing faith.
Baptisms, however, are a more radical affair. “There is no rule book, per se, for how we do baptisms,” said Adams. “We believe that you can jump in a pool and get baptised by somebody who is not ordained, because Jesus said, ‘Let them be baptised.’ And it doesn’t have to be [by] somebody who has some high-end qualification.”
This separates RWC from most Christian denominations. RWC members argue, as some evangelicals do, that scripture does not explicitly limit baptismal powers to ordained clergy. Conservative Christians contest this interpretation, saying Jesus commanded his apostles to baptise believers; priests, pastors, ministers, deacons or bishops, they argue, are spiritual leaders rigorously trained to administer the sacraments, akin to the apostles.
RWC baptisms, on the other hand, are spontaneous affairs. Groups not blessed with an ocean in which to dunk heads, as the San Diego branch is, rely on plunge pools normally used for ice baths to aid muscle recovery. Caden Callahan, an RWC leader in Lynchburg, Virginia, once put several unknown numbers in a WhatsApp group and invited them to an RWC worship night. A woman who had responded to the group chat invitation decided to get baptised that same night. “She immediately hopped in the ice bath,” Callahan told me. “And she shared her vulnerable testimony… she started weeping.”
Run club members don’t believe baptism is essential for salvation, as Catholics and some Protestants do. “It’s literally not even something that is… required to get into heaven,” said Adams. “It is just a declaration to your community of your inward faith.” Despite the diverse denominations of the group’s membership, theological interpretations do not seem to be tearing it apart – though Catholic members are sometimes, in the words of one RWC leader, “absolutely shocked” to find runners were “confessing to one another and not to a priest”.
Initially, leaders were keen not to let clubs become a “dating app”, said Mueller. Those who come looking for dates, she told me, “end up experiencing the love of God. That’s the real love they were looking for!” Nonetheless, romances have blossomed. Those who have found love at RWC events are determined not to abandon their conservative morals. “I want to date how a Christian is supposed to date,” said one loved-up runner in San Diego. “It feels very healthy, very wholesome.”
[See also: How low can King Charles go?]
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This article appears in the 27 Aug 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Gentle Parent Trap