The Rev. Albert San Jose recently went all X Games during Mass at a parish in the Philippines and ended up catching holy heck from his bosses. Moved by both the season’s spirit and a motorized skateboard beneath his feet, the agile priest, dressed in traditional white cassock, darted around the congregation on his hot wheels and belted out a Christmas tune through a handheld microphone.

Sound like anything you’ve seen leading your church in prayer lately? Probably not. Not unless Father Guido Sarducci, who always favored Saturday night services, is the regular celebrant.

The local diocese came down swiftly and with conviction on San Jose, admonishing that he should not “capriciously introduce something [i.e. his hoverboard] to get the attention of the people.’’

As seen on YouTube, some of the worshipers applauded their Holy Roller. They were obviously engaged, so the message was effective and seemingly well-received, even if the medium wasn’t, shall we say, kosher.

Actually, extreme sports, specifically those performed on a skateboard, gained some traction in European churches last year, including one in the Netherlands and another, more recently, in Spain. With Christianity on the wane across Europe, there are hundreds of old empty churches up for grabs, and skateboarders have taken a shine to ditching the pews in favor of pipes (both quarter and half).

In Arnhem, Netherlands, the Church of St. Joseph about a year ago was reconfigured as the Arnhem Skate Hall. A Wall Street Journal story last January noted how skateboarders ripped off their tricks and turns inside St. Joe’s, all the while with a “mosaic likeness of Jesus’’ and a “solemn array of stoned saints [i.e. statues]’’ still in place to bear witness to their sport.

Opened in 1928, St. Joseph’s, like hundreds of Christian churches in Western Europe, fell into deep disrepair in recent decades. Per the Wall Street Journal story, the once-proud house of worship was in need of some $3.7 million in repairs before it was put up for sale, along with its rectory, for a $812,000 bargain purchase price.

With altar, organ, and pews removed, boarding took tenancy as the building’s new religion. “Ride the Dark Side’’ was sketched across one skateboard affixed to an interior wall. One painting also featured Jesus, a carpenter by trade, with a skateboard.

“It’s a bit Middle Ages,’’ one boarder told a Wall Street Journal reporter.

In Llanera, Spain, where it rains some 200 days a year not far from the Bay of Biscay, the Church of Santa Barbara opened in 1912, the same year as Fenway Park, another of the world’s revered houses of worship. For decades, Llanera was home to a big munitions factory, and scores of Catholics filled those jobs through the week and then filled Santa Barbara’s pews on Sunday.

When the Spanish Civil War came to a close in 1939, Santa Barbara’s fate was all but sealed. The munitions factory closed, and parishioners moved away, leading the majestic old building ultimately to close in the 1970s. Abandoned for decades, it reopened just last month as a dazzling skateboarding park, funded in part by Red Bull. Again, pews out, halfpipe in, boarders up!

Okuda San Miguel, an accomplished 35-year-old Madrid-based street artist, covered the walls and ceiling of the former Church of Santa Barbara, now doing business as the Kaos Temple, with his bright, dazzling art. It is bold, striking work, featuring faceted faces, geometric skulls, and some freakish looking wildlife, all of it the stuff of late ’60s LSD trips. Turn on. Tune in. Drop out.

“It’s like my personal Sistine Chapel,’’ San Miguel said in a video posted on the Restos De Cultura.

Here in Boston, 104 years later, we still have Fenway doing business as hardball heaven. In Llanera they have an all-but-forgotten Catholic church with boom boxes blaring, psychedelic painted walls glowing, and wall-to-wall X Games wannabes riding state-of-the-art twists and turns.

God help us.

Yet, it could have been worse for these once-sacred places gone fallow.

For instance, according to the Wall Street Journal story of a year ago, some of the Netherlands’s old churches have been refashioned as supermarkets, floral shops, bookstores, and gymnasiums.

In Bristol, England, the Church of St. Paul was reconfigured as a Circomedia training school, its high ceilings easily accommodating the training center’s requisite trapeze.

Oh, and a Lutheran church in Edinburgh was repurposed as a Frankenstein-themed bar. God gave way to an unholy creation of science gone bad.

Here in the Hub, where Catholic parishes in particular continue to be reconfigured and church properties sold off, we have yet to see the saints go marching out and the boarders come surfing in.

“No, nothing like that around here,’’ said Bryan Bottachiari, 33, who is both buyer and assistant manager at Eastern Boarder in Natick.

The former churches in Arnhem and Llanera both charge boarders at the door. Around here, noted Bottachiari, there are plenty of free options, especially for street skating, though some of those choices disappear during the snow season.

“There’s also an underground, I guess illegal or do-it-yourself option,’’ said Bottachiari. “I mean, it’s not a big market, but people will find abandoned buildings — old mills and factories, stuff like that — and by word of mouth that gets passed around.

“Some of us did that around Worcester for a while. A college had an abandoned mill building and some of us would skate there. We built ramps inside and paid the school $300 a month to use the space. But that didn’t last long.’’

For now, it appears we have been spared. Our New England cities and villages, the latter so often dotted with iconic white clapboard churches and towering spires, have yet to yield sacred space to the new-age holy rollers. Our churches aren’t full, but at least they’re intact and doing business as intended.

We’ve also heard of no one going rogue like San Jose, powering up his hoverboard, lights aglow, and working the parish as if it were a Vegas lounge act. One can only wonder what prop he’ll take to the pulpit if he sees the new robotics in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.’’

But let’s remain on guard, be ever vigilant, because what’s trending in Europe, good and bad, often ends up here. One day we could be kneeling, praying, genuflecting, and the next we could be eyeing a pile of plywood shaped into a ramp, or, as in Arnhem, wondering who the hell draped a tire around the statue of a saint.

Pray, I say, that we forever keep church and skate apart.

Kevin Paul Dupont’s “On Second Thought’’ appears regularly in the Sunday Globe Sports section. He can be reached at dupont@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeKPD.