March 10, 2003
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| WORSHIPPERS (left) leave a Cowboy church service. Teenage bullriders (right) hear the Christian message during a break at the weekly "Buck Out" sponsored by Living for the Brand Cowboy Church in Athens. (Rex Campbell/BGCT Photos) |
Cowboy churches round up God's lost dogies
___By George Henson
___Staff Writer
___With the explosive growth in Western heritage churches, a few pastors might be tempted to pull on a pair of boots to rustle up more people in their own pews.
___But the "cowboy church" phenomenon is about more than boots and jeans, according to a Baptist General Convention of Texas mission worker who helps start such churches.
___An estimated 1 million people in Texas are either active
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| PASTOR Perry Smith preaches at Living for the Brand Church, one of a growing number of Western-heritage churches cropping up across Texas. (Ferrell Foster/BGCT Photo) |
ly a part of the Western-heritage culture or bear a strong affinity for it. In most cases, established, tra
ditional churches do not effectively reach these people.
___"A new church can do that more readily than an existing church," said Ron Nolen, a church-starting consultant with the BGCT. "An existing church already has a culture, and that's neither right nor wrong. But it can't change gears to try to be something else, and it's not even healthy to ask a church to do that."
___That's why new churches are needed to reach this segment of the Texas population, said Nolen, himself the pastor of a cowboy church. Currently eight churches affiliated with the BGCT are classified as Western heritage. Nolen believes the state needs at least 200.
___"The oldest predominantly Anglo culture in Texas is Western heritage, and basically it hasn't been evangelized," he said. "It's almost
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| CHURCH members provide bulls and instruction for the young riders at no charge. (Rex Campbell/BGCT Photo) |
an ethnicity unto itself."
___Larry Johnson, director of missions for Ellis Baptist Association, agreed.
___"This is almost like an unreached people group. The cowboy churches have connected with a culture that has been ignored by Baptists until recent years," said Johnson, whose association now has two cowboy churches.
___Organizers are looking for a meeting place for a planned third cowboy church in Ellis County. Fifty people from the first Western heritage church in the association, Cowboy Church in Waxahachie, will help it get started. The first church, now two years old, sometimes draws more than 800 people for worship.
___Two other Texas cowboy churches probably will get off the ground in the next six weeks--one in the West Texas community of Clyde and another in Pleasanton, south of San Antonio.
___While Baptists are making advances with cowboy churches, they weren't the first to start them in Texas, Nolen said, noting charismatics and non-denominational evangelicals have "hundreds of small ... cowboy churches."
___With more than 1 million people remaining unreached, however, Texas Baptists face a large mission field, he added. "We as Baptists ought to have a vision to evangelize the people who put Baptists on the scene in Texas."
___To reach these people who feel far more comfortable in a saddle than a pew, Baptists first must seek to understand them, he said.
___"When we send people overseas as missionaries, we tell them to spend time learning the culture so they can understand the people they are ministering to. That is just as important when dealing with cowboys."
___The Western-heritage culture is driven by several factors, he said, including interest in arena activities such as barrel racing and team roping, a great love for open spaces, an appreciation of country music and a dress code of boots, jeans and cowboy hats.
___"To have a work planted that is going to appeal to these people, we have to know what the barriers are and refuse to let those barriers be erected," he continued.
___Barriers can start with the pastor, Johnson said.
___"The pastor has to be a cowboy. Cowboys connect with cowboys. Cowboys know cowboys. They have a network, but you have to be a part of the network to get into the network."
___A cowboy mindset may be the most important factor, Nolen explained. "The start-up pastor has to have a great love and respect for Western culture and values."
___Those values include being non-judgmental, a love for simplicity and a country gospel without a lot of embellishment.
___"They also must focus on empowering men and women to do more than just sit in a pew," he added. "These are people who are used to doing things."
___If the pastor is not a cowboy, he must have someone close to him who is immersed in the culture to enable him to gain a hearing, Nolen said.
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| AT Living for the Brand Cowboy Church in Athens, a worshipper sports a hat that illustrates the intersection of his faith and culture. (Rex Campbell /BGCT Photo) |
___People in this Western culture can be divided into two groups--the hard-core cowboys who live in the Western culture and those who don't have a horse but would like to.
___Because many of those with an affinity for the cowboy way live in cities, even the outskirts of metropolitan areas may be ripe for planting cowboy churches.
___Nolen and Johnson's experience so far indicates that most of the people who become Christians in Western-heritage churches are adults, not children or youth. This runs counter to the pattern in established churches.
___In Ellis County's two cowboy churches, 77 percent of the 60 baptisms recorded in the past year have been adults, primarily men. "Although they did not lead the association in baptisms, most if not all of their baptisms would not have occurred had cowboy churches not been started," Johnson said.
___Nolen credits a number of factors for the large number of adults being reached. Foremost, he said, is that many in the Western-heritage culture have been raised with a "John Wayne" set of ethics of being kind to women and children and overall being good people.
___A strong second factor is country music.
___"Western-heritage people listen to a lot of country music and in much of it is an underlying belief in God," he explained. "Because of that, they know about God; they just don't know how to know God. When people from the Western culture come to these cowboy churches, many of them are hearing the gospel for the first time. They find out that God is not out to get them but loves them very much."
___The culture also requires a different approach to some staples of Baptist worship.
___"There's not a big to-do about passing the plates," Nolen explained. "Stewardship is a developmental issue, and honestly their understanding of stewardship is not these adults' primary need. What they need is an understanding that Jesus Christ paid the price for their sins on the cross. Then we're going somewhere."
___Most cowboy churches do not give a public altar call at the conclusion of the service. Instead, the pastor prays a sinner's prayer of confession as a model for those who want to make a profession of faith in Jesus Christ. Those who pray the prayer with him are asked to fill out a card, and the pastor follows up with a home visit.
___"In the New Testament, there wasn't an aisle to walk," Nolen said. "They professed their faith when they walked out into the water before baptism."
___The objective, he said, is to get cowboys walking with God more than to get them walking a church aisle.
___Doing so will reverse a trend of neglect in Texas, a state born from the cowboy culture, Nolen said.
___"For 150 years, seeds have been sown. Now we're reaping what we didn't sow."
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