The wandering days are over for the Cowboy Church of Harrison County.
A daylong celebration of its first service in a 14,000-square-foot home Sunday actually was just another example of a religious movement that's hitting home with many Christians.
Justin Baker/News-Journal Photo |
Church staff direct traffic and greet worshippers Sunday at the gate of Cowboy Church of Harrison County.
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"We're hoping to stay here as long as we can," church leader Darrel Neal , nodding toward some 400 worshippers who sang and sometimes clapped to traditional hymns blessed with a Western swing beat. "But you can see this morning, we are going to have to build another building."
It will, judging by the 65 or so sons and daughters ushered off to Sunday school after the children's service ended. They've got land, lots of land — 13 acres of room to grow, just south of Hallsville High School, minus a mid-sized arena behind the church building.
The children gone for Bible lessons in at least five Sunday school classrooms, the grown-ups in the sanctuary continued to make music. A handful lifted their palms skyward in praise. All ages were represented, the older men almost uniformly in Western boots and the younger cowpokes in sneakers (their wives or girlfriends wore the boots).
Three large screens hanging on walls of saw-cut pine broadcast lyrics to the songs being sung.
"We started (building) in the middle of August," member James Floyd said, pointing to donated cedar felled by Hurricane Ike and redeemed to frame the raised pulpit area. "Everything else inside the church, the members finished."
Sunday's inaugural service, and an afternoon dedication ceremony, marked the congregation's second anniversary. The earliest meetings for the Cowboy Church of Harrison County occurred in members' homes. They met briefly in a Sunday school classroom at First Baptist Church of Hallsville, but spent the bulk of those two years in a barn on Galilee Road and then at Triple Creek Ranch just south of Interstate 20.
Out of the chute
The Harrison County cowboy Christians are not alone. A larger cowboy church movement is out of the chute in Gregg and surrounding counties.
Members at the service were able to list an Open Range Cowboy Church in Longview, Frontier Cowboy Church in Gilmer, Circle C Cowboy Church north of Henderson and the inclusively named Bar None Cowboy Church in Tatum. These all sprang up in the last three to five years, they said, naming the Cross Brand Cowboy Church in Tyler as an area pioneer at six or seven years old.
At 50 to 60 members on a given Sunday, the congregation at Circle C Cowboy Church is smaller than the one in Hallsville, but more are added every Sunday.
"We baptized two this morning," said the Rev. Pat Alphin , pastor at Circle C, who attended the afternoon dedication at the sister church.
"We've got three more we're doing next Sunday," he said. "We've got five more waiting."
He described his membership as largely comprising people who might have grown up attending church but gave it up during adulthood.
"Just about everybody that is in our church was not in church (immediately) before," Alphin said, estimating three out of every four cowboy church members coming from the so-called unchurched population.
The great unchurched
That's in keeping with the rest of the cowboy church movement, said the executive director for the Waxahachie-based Texas Fellowship of Cowboy Churches.
Ron Nolen estimated one in five Texans belong to a sub-culture he called Western heritage.
"This is such a large group of people that many of them are unchurched people," Nolen said. "We can connect with them and get a hearing for the gospel in the first part of the 21st century. ... The message of Christianity has never changed. The methods change from generation to generation, and we have to find what works to bring the gospel to the world."
In this case, he said, God is using the Western culture like a delivery device for his message.
"There seems to be a massive movement of the spirit of God in this culture," Nolen said. "It's an awakening taking place in this culture."
The Texas Fellowship of Cowboy Churches tallies 152 cowboy churches in the Lone Star State.
"The cowboy church is an example of church planning around the cultures of people," Nolen said. "They are north, east, south and west. They all tend to have 100 to somewhere around 200 in attendance."
Nolen said the Western heritage culture is predominantly Anglo. There were about 20 Hispanic worshippers at the Hallsville service; the rest appeared to be white.
Nolen also said the movement is largely rural.
The Rev. Joe Hall , pastor of the Cowboy Church of Harrison County, said that is changing.
"You're seeing them in suburban areas, as opposed to rural areas, more and more," Hall said. "(Members) may not own a horse, they may not own cattle. They may be cowboys at heart. ... It's really trying to reach folks that basically aren't being reached by traditional churches."
Hall, Alphin and others hope to form a Cowboy Church Network of Texas that is separate from Nolen's outfit.
"We think, probably, some of the things we're looking at doing might better suit our churches," he said, describing the network he envisions as a resource for sharing ideas among autonomous congregations.
At the service Sunday morning, musician Jerry Hubbard urged the worshippers to reach out to disaffected Christians.
"I call them church refugees," Hubbard said, before his family of bluegrass artists struck up a tune. "I hope y'all continue to reach out to church refugees who may not be happy with where they worship."
