Minnesota couple relies on their Episcopal faith as they serve their local wrestling community

[Episcopal News Service] Jayne and Nick Kinney are sometimes a bit late for Sunday services at St. Martin’s by the Lake in Minnetonka Beach, Minnesota. When they are, fellow parishioners can tell it’s because Nick spent the previous evening in the ring and still sports remnants of the colorful, glittery makeup he wears as his professional wrestler persona, Nick Pride. Pride is a bad guy (a “heel” in wrestling lingo) whose name exemplifies the worst of the seven deadly sins.

The Kinneys have been members of St. Martin’s for four years, Nick told Episcopal News Service, after being drawn to a Christmas Eve service they found so compelling that he wondered aloud if the service was always that good. They returned on Christmas Day just to see, “and sure enough, it was that good,” he said. “I thought, I kinda want to make this our church.” They’ve been attending regularly ever since.

Their faith also has moved the couple to make a difference in the lives of others in the Minnesota wrestling community, making themselves available to offer a prayer, a friendly word or even a place to sleep.

Nick and other local wrestlers are professionals and get paid for their matches, though most need to keep their day jobs. They are booked through some of the 13 local wrestling companies within a four-hour drive of Minneapolis. The goal for many is to get to the pinnacle of pro wrestling, the WWE – formerly the World Wrestling Federation – which launched the careers of the likes of Hulk Hogan, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and John Cena.

As in the WWE, which describes what it offers as “sports entertainment,” the physicality in the local circuit is real, but the outcome of matches is determined in advance.

Jayne told ENS they don’t consider what they do within the wrestling community a ministry. “We’re just being servants where God puts us, and for us it’s wrestling,” she said. She said the wrestlers they know are “a hodgepodge of people from every walk of life” – people who are getting a master’s degree, battling addiction, having their career funded by a wealthy relative or sleeping in their car.

One thing many have in common, she said, is having been burned by a church. And that’s where Nick saw how his faith could make a difference to them. “He quickly became intentional about how he used his time, becoming the person that people could talk to about literally anything,” she said.

Sometimes that means listening over a cup of coffee or cat-sitting when someone is on the road. The guest room in their new house became a place where people could stay for a few nights.

St. Martin’s rector, the Rev. Jeff Hupf, told ENS he knows the couple “are true believers in the redemptive power of Jesus active in the world, and it just spills out of them,” and that’s what fuels their care for the people in their community.

Jayne, who grew up the daughter of a Methodist pastor, said it was an ironic contrast between the wrestler with a name boasting about the deadly sins and the man in the locker room willing to listen to people for hours after a show. “He offers to pray for them if that’s OK, or offers to think about them if being prayed for isn’t something that they’re comfortable with,” she said. She joins in the conversations when that’s helpful.

She added, “There have been a couple of guys that we’ve been talking to for years that excitedly told us they started going to church again.” They all text each other about things they heard in Sunday sermons or how they see God working in their lives, she said.

Nick’s fascination with wrestling goes back to his childhood, where he found in it “classic stories of good versus evil,” he said. As a young adult, he started to study wrestling and discovered the power of storytelling that takes place.

In 2021, Nick decided to give wrestling a try – at 28 he felt it was then or never – and started studying and training with The Academy of Pro Wrestling in St. Paul, Minnesota. They taught him wrestling basics, including what Nick called the most important one – how to fall and not break anything. Wrestlers fall all the time, he said, and it hurts, but they learn how to minimize injuries.

But importantly, he also learned how to make it a show. He had studied karate, where moves are compact, so he had some things to unlearn. “In wrestling, you have to make it big, to move in a way that the people sitting in the back row can tell what you are doing. It’s very much like stage acting,” he said.

Wrestlers also try to make their actions, which aren’t meant to hurt an opponent, look as believable as possible. “It’s like how a magician doesn’t show where they pull the rabbit out of the hat,” he said.

Nick said he always had envisioned himself as a wrestler good guy, known as a “face,” and adopted that persona early on. He thought he was doing well in that role until a local wrestling promoter came up to him after a match.

“He said your wrestling is fine, but your character is boring, so we’re going to turn you into a bad guy.” He told Nick to come up with a “fun bad-guy character,” with a long-term potential plan of turning him into a good guy later when the time was right.

The bad Nick took off, and eventually, the companies that arrange wrestling events and hire wrestlers for matches only wanted to book him as a heel. “They told me I was much more interesting and marketable as a bad guy,” he said. He now wrestles almost every weekend, and sometimes more than one match a day.

When asked about the contradiction of an active churchgoer adopting a persona based on the deadly sins, he said it is rather humorous. “I think people at church especially get a kick out of the idea of me being this arrogant heel,” he said, but appearing to be a preening, self-loving bad guy is easy for him to get across to crowds.

“I am having lots of fun as a bad guy, and I like finding new and creative ways to get people to boo me,” he said. When that happens, it helps both him and his opponent become more popular.

Jayne, who works for College Possible helping low-income and first-generation college students access higher education, often travels with Nick to matches, selling merchandise. The day in August 2024 that she received her Ph.D.in U.S. history and Indigenous studies from the University of Minnesota was the same day Nick won his first wrestling title belt. During the week, he drives a forklift for a factory that makes springs.

What comes next for Nick depends on how he does as a local wrestler and, he hopes, eventually in places farther away. “In wrestling the goal is to end up going anywhere and everywhere, internationally or across the country,” Jayne said.

And if his storyline ever does evolve into being a good guy, the name of Nick Pride will still serve him, going from a deadly sin to someone proud of what he does. Which, whether he is asked to be a heel or a face, he already is.

— Melodie Woerman is an Episcopal News Service freelance reporter based in Kansas.