Bert Devers was 94 and had never attended a day of church. But two months after he started attending a cowboy church, he made his profession of faith. Two broken hips postponed his baptism for two years, but in October last year, church elders and lay pastors lifted the old cowboy, wheelchair and all, into a horse trough. Devers now is the unofficial "sheriff" of his 300-member church and has not missed a Sunday since his first service there. "Bert is a shining testimony of what cowboy church does to reach people who have not been reached otherwise," said pastor Mike McKinney.
McKinney's church is the Dallas County Cowboy Church, but all across Texas - and other states as well - people are finding that cowboy churches meet a need that mainstream congregations do not. While some churches are faltering, cowboy churches are not only thriving but also helping start new congregations.
In the last six years, the number of cowboy churches has grown from 55 to 181 throughout Texas with a 96 percent success rate. This is a stark contrast to a 40 percent success rate of other start-up churches.
"What's more amazing is that 60 percent of our churches reproduce themselves by starting another cowboy church," said Charles Higgs, the director of Western Heritage Ministries for the Baptist General Convention of Texas since 2006. He serves as the liaison between the Baptists and the American Fellowship of Cowboy Churches.
"We've not only started 181 in Texas but have sponsored others outside the state in Oklahoma, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, New Mexico, Colorado and Minnesota," Higgs said.
The convention has put $6.2 million into funding cowboy churches. Last year, the cowboy churches gave close to half a million dollars to missions through BGCT.
Texas has a population of 25 million people and 20 percent embrace the Western Heritage in some way. Eighty percent of those people never go to church, Higgs said.
"You would be surprised at how many people I've met who are in their 60s and 70s and haven't even been in a church," he said. Seventy percent of cowboy church baptisms are adults and 70 percent are men. "This has been one of our greatest things, drawing men to the Gospel," he said.
Today, between 36,000 and 40,000 people are regularly attending a cowboy church in Texas.
"The average cowboy church has 200 people, and they are baptizing 30 new people every year. The average Southern Baptist Church in America baptizes fewer than 10," Higgs said.
Most cowboy churches are located in Texas and Oklahoma, but the movement is spreading. The Cowboy Church Network of North America, for example, has member churches in Colorado, Tennessee, Georgia, Wyoming, Florida, Idaho and Alberta, Canada.
Cowboy ministries hold cowboy church services at the Fort Worth Stock Show and Rodeo and Western events such as the annual Red Steagall Cowboy Gathering in the Stockyards National Historic District of Fort Worth. Cowboy Church Fort Worth Stockyards at 140 E. Exchange Ave. traces its start to 1991 and the first Steagall event.
Aiming at a Specific Audience
A cowboy church is different because it focuses primarily on reaching men and women who are involved in Western heritage and Western culture. It's a "come as you are both physically and spiritually no barriers" church.
"We reach several kinds of people," Higgs said. "First of all, we reach the guy that makes his living on the back of his horse. That's a small percentage anymore, but we target our church after that working cowboy, and it works. Another is the arena cowboy and cowgirl like the calf ropers and barrel racers. We target the horse people, the cow people and the pig people," he said.
"We target country western music fans, and we target the John Wayne enthusiast, the people who just love to dress and live in the code of the cowboy." About 16 percent of cowboy church members aren't immersed in the cowboy world, but they love the church, Higgs said.
"The cowboy church gives an atmosphere of grace where people can come to love Christ and grow up in Him. They're not judged. It's grace. They feel accepted here," Higgs says.
There's no formal altar call in a cowboy church and no passing of the collection plate. There might be a boot or a milk can or a birdhouse at the back of the church for an envelope with a contribution, but stewardship is rarely discussed. The family life center for a cowboy church may be an arena with rodeo events such as team roping and barrel racing.
"That arena is very important," Higgs said. "The more hoof prints you see in the arena, the more baptisms you'll see."
A band performs country western gospel music. Sermons are short and relevant to cowboy culture. Bible studies are an important part of the church. Every night of the week and on Saturday mornings, the members of the congregation meet somewhere and come together as a small group.
Baptisms are done in a horse trough or stock tank.
Baptists Get Involved
"There have been cowboy churches for 40 years, but we got into it 12 years ago," Higgs said, starting with Ron Nolan in March 2000 in Waxahachie.
Nolan's son competed in rodeos as a roper. One day Nolan asked his son where all the people he saw at rodeos went to church. He told him they didn't go to church. Six months later, with the goal of reaching that rodeo community, Nolan started Cowboy Church of Ellis County, which now is touted as "the largest cowboy church in the world." Today, Gary Morgan is the pastor, and the membership is about 1,700.
Before that first service in 2000, Nolan started asking men why they didn't want to go to church.
"They thought it was sissy," said Granbury's Triple Cross Cowboy Church pastor, Ray Lane.
Seventy-five percent of the people in traditional churches are women and children, and women are likely to be in the leadership positions, he said.
"Those cowboys said that the only leader in a church that looks masculine is wearing a dress that looks like a gown," Lane said. "The buildings were intimidating.
"Think about men that spend their lives outside riding around in an old busted up pickup truck, and then you ask them to come to a place that has carpet and stained glass and everything is hush-hush. Our church is a noisy place. It's just a bunch of country people meeting with each other. What do they have in common with men in white collars and ties and suits?"
Not so much, Lane says.
"They don't dress like that. They dress in cowboy boots and jeans and wear hats. Most of the pastors wear cowboy hats. The music feels comfortable because it's the same country music they listen to driving around in their trucks.
"Most churches make you stand up for half an hour and sing songs where you sing seven lines seven times, over and over. I call that "seven and seven" and that's not a drink," he said, laughing. "Cowboys don't like standing, and they don't like being forced to sing."
Lane says the men felt a mainstream pastor couldn't relate to the "dog-eat-dog, no-quarter-asked, no-quarter-given" world they live in. "They didn't understand the sermons, and they didn't get anything from them," Lane said. "And they like the place they're meeting in to look more like a barn."
But the hats come off "when we call the Master," Higgs said.
A Different Meeting Place
A typical cowboy church might meet in a "farm-to-market-road" setting in a sale barn, an old western building or arena. Triple Cross Church members meet in an 18,000-square-foot metal building with concrete floors and a covered arena.
Each Sunday, one of Triple Cross's events might include an obstacle course, sorting, team roping, ranch rodeo practice or youth play day. At other times, there may be special activities such as family fun nights, horse clinics, jackpot ropings and team pennings. Additionally, Triple Cross Cowboy Church Children's Ministry has a number of activities planned for the little buckaroos.
Triple Cross has a membership of more than 1,000.
"If most churches get one-third of the number of their members every Sunday, they consider it a home run," Lane said. "It's the opposite in a cowboy church. Cowboys aren't so much about the joining so at times we have more than the actual membership attending."
More than one-third of Triple Cross members were baptized in the church, and most are over the age of 18. That's unheard of in a traditional church, Lane said.
"Pastor Ray," as he is called, came to Triple Cross Cowboy Church from the Leon River Cowboy Church in Eastland, where he was an elder. He grew up in Breckenridge and worked his way through college as a meat cutter. Lane earned his bachelor's degree in business administration from Midwestern University in Wichita Falls and served in military intelligence with the 1st Cavalry Division in Vietnam. He spent 25 years in the tire industry where he founded and was CEO of his own chain of truck tire and retread centers.
All his life he wanted to be a cowboy, Lane said, and it took 25 years to be able to buy a cattle ranch in Eastland County. On Jan. 1, 2006, wildfires burned him completely out.
"It looked like the surface of the moon," he said. "It was like everything I'd worked for all my life was gone in a matter of hours. But God gave me a new purpose for life. I got a call from Granbury to be the pastor of a new start church."
He had felt the call to ministry first at age 17.
"This is what God called me to do, and it's the greatest job I've ever had, to get a chance to reach those people that nobody else can reach, that never would consider coming to church," Lane said.
He and his wife Domonie have been married for 43 years and have two married sons and three grandchildren.
Making Scripture Apply
Lane has a simple preaching philosophy.
"If the Bible is not practical in your life, what's the point of having it? I'm very practical with my teaching. It's "Here's how the Bible is relevant to your life," " he says.
Most every sermon is started with a cowboy illustration that's relevant to the Bible reading.
"When ranchers go to talking about cattle, they've all got this idea that they know which cattle breed is the best," Lane said. "There's no one breed of cattle that works in everybody's cow and calf operation. You've got to be careful, and you've got to know what kind of commitment level you have to your breeding program because there's not one cow breed that's all things to all people."
That's true of churches.
"No one church fits everybody. Almost all churches will tell you everybody is welcome, anybody that wants to come can come. I believe with all my heart that they believe that with all their heart. But the problem is what they really mean is everybody's welcome that's like them," Lane says. "If you want to look and act and dress the way we act and behave and dress, you're welcome."
Lane said that many times churches are in love with the idea of reaching the unreached, that they're in love with the idea of evangelism and in love with the idea of reaching people who don't know Christ.
"But when those people come to their church that are broken or scarred or have a past, they don't fit and they don't know how to deal with them," he said.
Sarah Prater, 51, is a member of the band who plays rhythm guitar and sings at Triple Cross. She left home at 14 and married at 15. She used drugs and started drinking and was in an abusive situation for five years. Today she is happily married to Charles, who also is a member of the church, and she works as a telemarketer.
"I knew of God but never had a relationship with God," she said. "Not having an education, I didn't know who Jesus was. I woke up one morning, and I was 46 years old and still battling my drug using. I knew what I was going to do. I was going to a motel and spend the weekend with my drugs.
"That very day a woman from Triple Cross Church called and asked me to be a part of the band. So God reached into the pits of Hell and he gave me that line of hope and allowed me to be here," she said.
Prater says Triple Cross has saved her life.
Steeples vs. Stalls
The cowboy church structure is different from a typical "steeple" church. The staff is small. In the case of Triple Cross Cowboy Church, there's no church office and no secretary. Lane answers his own phone and prefers it that way.
"I don't want to hide from these people," he said. "If I can't talk to them, I can't minister to them."
Teams carry out the specialized ministries of the church, and each ministry team has specific functions and responsibilities assigned or approved by the pastor and/or elders.
The elders are not a board of deacons that control the actions of the church. They are spiritual leaders of the church. They provide support for the pastor and help the ministry teams with difficult issues and serve as arbitrators in matters of conflict or church discipline. In a new church start, the first elders are appointed by the pastor with the approval of the church.
The pastor is the lead elder and the primary spiritual leader of the congregation. He guides the church in carrying out the cowboy model and ultimately fulfills the pastoral role.
Lay pastors - often a minimally paid staff member - minister to members of the congregation and get a portion of the budget every year for bands or the rodeo arena or children's ministries. Essentially, lay pastors are appointed and replaced by the pastor at his discretion to help carry out ministry duties. Lay pastors are attached to one or more ministry teams and act as a liaison between the team and pastor.
Book Learning
Many cowboy church pastors have no formal education in theology, but there are programs available to teach the model and provide other help.
Baylor University's George W. Truett Theological Seminary offers 18 hours - all online except for a one-week on-campus preaching course - leading to a certificate of ministry. Dallas Baptist University is offering a 12-hour concentration of Western Heritage study.
And the American Fellowship of Cowboy Churches offers three levels of Ranch House Schools of Church Planting, funded in part by BGCT, taught regionally in Texas for pastors, lay pastors, elders and team leaders of newly started churches.
The goal is to have 300 cowboy churches and 100 Vaquero or Hispanic churches by the end of 2018, Higgs said.
Pastor Ray takes a humorous approach to preaching.
"I tell people I use humor when I preach for the same reason a child will eat a vitamin if it looks like a Flintstone character," he said.
Lane wrote a pamphlet that he hands out to the congregation that includes 50 or so "You may belong to a cowboy church if …" statements.
Some of his favorites include:
- If a cow dog has ever interrupted a prayer service …
- If all of your church hymns start with a fiddle kick off …
- If the Elders were ever called out to anoint with oil and pray over a "sure enough good" roping horse …
- If there are more spit cups than coffee cups in the trash after services.
"There's hardly a month that goes by that someone doesn't ask me, "Did you know that somebody's dipping snuff in your church?" " Lane said.
That joke about the cow dog isn't a joke.
Justin Whitewood is 33. He and wife Suzanne serve as youth ministry directors for grades 7-12.
"We teach more how to live life in Jesus" principles instead of religious traditions," Whitewood says. "This ain't your grandma's youth group. Everyone's welcome, and don't worry about the horse poo on your pants; the youth pastor usually has a little too."
Whitewood's dog, Dish, a border collie-Catahoula cross, enjoys going to cowboy church, and no one thinks anything about taking your dog in. One day Dish got off his leash and ran up to the front during Pastor Ray's prayer.
"Not something you'd see in a regular church," Lane says.
Back to Real Basics
Cowboy church leaders don't think they are something new. They think that they are something old - like First Century old.
"What does it look like when a cowboy church is right? You've got to go back to the very beginning of the church, where you didn't have to have a seminary degree, where you could meet under a tree, where everyone was considered the same and treated the same," Lane said.
"Some churches go through hard times and come out on the other side stronger than the way they went in, and others go to the same experience and fold up like a three-X hat in a rainstorm," Lane said. "If you know where you're going, you're not going to get deterred by little bumps that come along in the road. [The apostle] Paul was trying to find someway to find common ground with the Jews and the Gentiles, to those people he was trying to win. That's what cowboy churches are trying to do. We're trying to find out what barriers keep them out of church and break through those barriers."
But cowboy culture raises some interesting issues - especially among Baptists, where drinking can be frowned on even today.
"One sweet lady came to me and said, "Now, I know about cowboys, Raymond, and when you build that arena, there's going to be beer. What are you going to do?"
"Well, those are the ones I want to reach. Those are the ones I was thinking about when I drove the first post out here," Lane said.
"You don't have to tell a cowboy he's a sinner. He already knows that," he said.
It is a matter of presentation, Lane says, spinning a yarn about two Texas A&M graduates unable to find work and reduced to panhandling in Dallas.
"One did really good, and one didn't have two dimes to rub together. He asked the other, "What's your secret?" The rich one said, "It's all about advertising. Let me see your sign." The sign said, "Will Work for Food." "You'll never get any money that way," the rich one said as his walked over to his Mercedes. He opened the trunk and showed him his sign. "I only need 10 more dollars to move back to College Station." "
Cowboys know that there is a God.
"They see His images in the sunrise, in calves being born, and they see it in the trees. What they desperately need to know is how God relates to them and their lives," Lane says.
Some people think cowboy church leaders are crazy for doing church the way they do it, and Lane knows that it is offensive to some people.
"But we're supposed to be different. Our battle is in ourselves, not in competing with other churches. The most common thing I hear at this church is, "I haven't been to church in 30 years" and now they come every week. Talk about a paradigm shift," he said.
"Triple Cross is one of the biggest churches in town. There've been over 300 people saved and baptized in a horse trough. Our intention is to reach those men that nobody has," Lane said.
And therein may lie the secret of cowboy church success.
"When momma and the kids come, the kids come until they get old enough to argue and don't have to come, but when daddy comes, the family comes, doesn't it? We're going to start a new cowboy church every year that I'm the pastor," he said.
by Gail Bennison
photography by Jason Kindig
