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Cowboy churches get back to basics, emphasize salvation
10:24 PM CDT on Saturday, April 11, 2009
By SAM HODGES / The Dallas Morning News
samhodges@dallasnews.com
samhodges@dallasnews.com
Many churches will round off Easter worship with the "Hallelujah" chorus, but others will be singing "Happy Trails," the old Dale Evans and Roy Rogers tune.
Here, Easter bonnets will give way to Stetson hats, and any baptizing will be done not at a font or in a baptismal pool, but in a galvanized steel trough usually used for watering horses. Easter is a big deal in these churches, but as for the Easter theme of redemption – well, that's what it's about all year 'round.
These, pardner, would be your cowboy churches, a fast-growing part of the crowded religious landscape of Texas. They celebrate Western culture while trying to reach both cowboys and tenderfoots with an unpretentious, nonjudgmental approach.
"What we say is, 'Come as you are,' " said Ron Nolen, executive director of the Texas Fellowship of Cowboy Churches. "We believe that we are to be fishers of men, but we don't have anything to do with cleaning the fish. God does the cleaning."
Long a novelty, cowboy churches have in recent years become a bona fide, Texas-based movement, showing strong growth in congregations, attendance and baptisms even as much of denominational Christianity in the United States is losing ground.
Cowboy churches offer simple, Bible-based sermons and live country music – with "Happy Trails" as a standard send-off. Pastors further set the tone by wearing cowboy hats, doffed only for prayer. Extracurricular activities typically include trail rides, bull riding and roping contests.
People who have a problem with the traditional church – and problems in general, such as multiple divorces or substance abuse – are especially welcome.
"What we're really shooting for is to keep the riffraff in," said Gary Morgan, pastor of the Cowboy Church of Ellis County, in Waxahachie. "We tell people to come as they are, and buddy, they do."
Cowboy churches have been around at least since the 1980s, and can be found now in small numbers across the country and in Canada, within both the Pentecostal and more mainstream Protestant traditions.
But their systemic growth dates to 2000. That's when the Dallas-based Baptist General Convention of Texas, the state's largest Baptist group, began to help start and sustain cowboy churches, offering staff support and financing.
The BGCT-backed Texas Fellowship of Cowboy Churches now includes 136 churches scattered across the state, and a new one is opening nearly every other week. Total weekly attendance has quadrupled since 2005, to about 20,000.
The ranks include a near-megachurch, the Cowboy Church of Ellis County. It draws about 1,500 to weekly services, making it larger than First Baptist Church of Waxahachie, one of its early sponsors.
Each Thursday night, hundreds more – some who would never come for a worship service – show up at the Cowboy Church of Ellis County's arena for "Buck Out." They watch or participate in bull riding and other rodeo events, and hear a devotional during intermission.
"I'm doing everything I want to do," said Billy Jones of Midlothian, who one Thursday last month was helping to oversee the Buck Out's bull riding. "And I'm doing it as a Christian."
Cowboy churches are a rural phenomenon, but they have begun to hit the urban fringe. There's a Cowboy Church of Collin County, in Parker, and a Dallas County Cowboy Church, in Balch Springs.
Last Easter, that latter church was just a dream. A handful of people met for the first time in late April 2008 in a Dallas home.
The Dallas County Cowboy Church now regularly draws more than 150, the denim-and-boots-clad crowd filling a former Balch Springs feed store.
Anticipating much larger attendance, the church will have an Easter sunrise service and two more services. Five people are scheduled to be baptized.
Dallas County Cowboy Church's pastor, Mike McKinney, led traditional churches for many years, but finds himself rejuvenated by his new gig.
"I've never been where I can reach people like I do in the cowboy church," he said.
Cowboy churches – by emphasizing a basic message of salvation and targeting the "unchurched" – have certainly been overachievers in baptizing. They now constitute 2 percent of BGCT congregations, but account for close to 10 percent of baptisms.
And while the traditional Baptist church immerses lots of children, cowboy churches reach an older crowd.
"Seventy percent of our baptisms are adults, and 70 percent of those are men," said Charles Higgs, the BGCT's liaison to cowboy churches.
Men are the express target of the movement, the theory being that if a church can get them through the doors – particularly the kind of man who prefers to be outdoors – the women who care about them will follow.
For sure, cowboy churches attract real cowboys, such as Doug Combs. He attends Triple Cross Cowboy Church in Granbury and brings enough family members to constitute an informal "Combs Section" in worship services.
"I was away from the church a long time," said Combs, a cutting horse trainer who also is in construction. "With traditional churches, I always felt uncomfortable. My wife introduced me to the cowboy church, and I just felt right at home. It fit me real good."
But leaders of the cowboy church movement say that probably two-thirds of those attending are at best weekend cowboys, or people like Rosie McGee who just have an affinity for Western dress, music and movies.
"If there's a Western movie on, my TV is on," said McGee, who attends Dallas County Cowboy Church.
Ray Lane, a rancher and pastor of Triple Cross Cowboy Church, said he's been amazed by all the city slickers in his congregation.
"Of the 700 people who go to our church, there's probably not a dozen that I could bring out to the ranch and could actually help me some," Lane said. "The rest I'd make sit in the truck."
A sly sophistication underlies the cowboy church movement.
"These are not a bunch of dumb cowboys," said Larry Givens, who directs a nondegree program at Baylor University's Truett Seminary that is attended by cowboy church pastors. "They have developed a paradigm."
The model championed by the Texas Fellowship of Cowboy Churches is shared in quarterly schools for those interested in starting such a church, and varies quite deliberately from that of the typical Baptist approach.
Sermons are kept short. So are worship services.
"The hardcore cowboys, they're not going to sit there for very long," said Mike Morrow, pastor of Cross Brand Cowboy Church in Tyler. "We try to be in and out in an hour."
Most cowboy churches don't have an altar call, something standard in the typical Baptist church. Anyone who wants to make a profession of faith first meets privately with a pastor or other church leaders.
"A 40-year-old cowboy or plumber or electrician is not going to go down in front of 200 or 300 people and do his business with the Lord that way," said Morgan, the Cowboy Church of Ellis County pastor.
Because they don't want to feed the cynicism many feel about fundraising by churches, cowboy churches don't collect an offering, though there are receptacles in back for those who want to give. A typical cowboy church operates on a low budget, with one or two paid staff members, the rest of the work being done by volunteers.
In a handful of other ways – including pastors eschewing such formalities as "the reverend" – cowboy churches do their best to remove any excuse a wayward soul might have for coming through their doors.
"Some people may think they don't deserve to be in church," said Randel Everett, executive director of the BGCT. "But they feel welcome at these churches."
By 2011, the Texas Fellowship of Cowboy Churches hopes to have 250 congregations in the state, and its adjunct organization, the American Fellowship of Cowboy Churches, is spreading the model nationally.
For the Dallas County Cowboy Church, near-term goals are more modest, including fixing up the stable out back, and getting an arena in shape for roping and riding.
This Sunday, though, the church planned to be all about celebrating its first Easter. Those who arrived hungry and bleary-eyed for the sunrise service could count on some cowboy comfort.
The church was offering a pancake breakfast, with campfire coffee.
