Giving God the reins: Cowboy churches get back to basics

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. 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 sendoff. Pastors further set the tone by wearing cowboy hats, doffed only for prayer. Extracurricular activities typically include trail rides, bull riding and roping contests. 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...Dallas Morning News