About Us

CheckPoint Saved started out as a small idea with a big dream.  When Brad was in Bible college for Youth Ministries, he had a chance to attend a LAN Party for a youth subculture study.  A LAN Party was the forerunner of in-person multiplayer digital gaming, but instead of playing with other people online, you would all meet in one location.  The location would require a Local Area Network, hence the term LAN.  Brad went to this event to have fun, but also to study the subculture of geeks and gamers.  Even though Brad was a computer expert, his device refused to properly function that night, so he took the opportunity to chat with some attendees.  He met gamers from all walks of life.  While studying this subculture, he began to see that the church, in general, essentially wrote off this entire subculture.  Brad then realized that something had to be done about this issue. 

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When Brad graduated college a few years later in 2008, he moved to Upper Michigan and joined a campus ministry called Chi Alpha at Northern Michigan University.  There, Brad ran into theological and political resistance to his ideas and decided to start his own campus ministry organization called Et3rnal R3ality at NMU in 2010.  This group was well-received by all, due in part to Brad’s college study of the gaming subculture and his approach to running a campus ministry based on that knowledge. He wanted to allow students to be entertained by video games and other forms of digital media, but not be judged by their personality, beliefs, looks, etc. 

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Et3rnal R3ality went through many changes in trying to find its identity.  It even went through a few name changes because the organization we were associated with in 2015, Gamechurch, felt that our name would turn away non-Christians, so in an attempt to market specifically to gamers, we used a gaming term in our name and became GodModeX from July, 2015 to April, 2017.  We eventually learned that name was already trademarked by a gaming company in Ireland, so we brainstormed again and became CheckPoint Saved. 

 

Weekly meetings were held for many years by mixing our time with video games and Bible Study.  We have held and participated in annual campus events, such as StressBusters, Geek Alley, and Superior Con.  These were popular, but our membership was still suffering.  Students were a little confused at times. Some would come for the Bible Study and some just for the video gaming.  Eventually, membership dropped significantly because of the lack of focus.  Eventually, our weekly meetings no longer centered on Bible Study, but instead on having fun with video games, card games, board games, Dungeons and Dragons, etc.  We have since transitioned from a campus ministry to a non-profit organization designed to provide a safe environment for people of all ages to be entertained, as well as educated on how to properly use digital technology.

 

To this day CheckPoint Saved stands by a non-judgmental policy that no one is perfect, and we are all at different stages in our journey through life.