Just off Highway 63 on the outskirts of Clark, Missouri, is a red-roofed barn-turned-worship hall bestowed with a mission. On a recent Sunday morning just before 11 a.m., people file into wooden pews. In the center of the room, a few musicians get ready to play.
The Sunday gathering is the home of Gateway to the High Country Cowboy Church, where Pastor Brook Kurth stands at the front, singing and playing a powder-blue electric guitar.
Kurth has been serving as pastor at the cowboy church for a little more than three years. He said in that time he’s been to a number of cowboy churches, and every congregation is different. But, he said, they all have a few things in common: informal services, Western aesthetics and, of course, music.
But Kurth said what really makes a cowboy church a cowboy church, is its authenticity.
“You don't have to get dressed up,” he said. “It's real people who sometimes have got real problems, and it's individuals within the church helping each other through those problems.”
Across from the baptismal horse trough, a large map displays the locations throughout Missouri where church attendees live. It’s a few years out of date, but Kurth said some members drive hours to come each week. And he said that’s something he's noticed with many cowboy churches, which tend to be “more regional, as opposed to local.”
While there are a lot of hats and boots on display at Sunday service, not everyone at the church would call themselves a cowboy. Many of Gateway to the High Country’s members come from a livestock background — but many more don’t. Kurth said some people just come to try something new.
“There's a lot of churches where it's, you have to dress a certain way. You have to do a certain thing to fit in or to be accepted,” Kurth said. “It's not cowboy church. That's not at all cowboy church.”
Daphne Hood goes to church at Gateway with her husband of 52 years, Gary. She helps with Sunday School; he plays with the band. Hood said other churches they’ve attended have felt ‘sanitized,' but at cowboy church, they get to be themselves.
“I don't have to act like I'm perfect," she said, "I'm not, because I fail every day. I get mad sometimes, I say ugly words, and I know that. We're all in process.”
For their fiftieth wedding anniversary, the Hoods helped the church start its Benevolent Fund to help struggling families. Gary Hood said the congregation’s small-town spirit means people look out for one another.
“We're just a culture of people that if something needs to be done, somebody will step up and do it,” he said.
The theology of cowboy churches is not so different from their more traditional counterparts — Kurth’s congregation is part of a larger Southern Baptist organization — but it’s the style of worship that has adapted to fill a need in rural America’s religious landscape.
“What they demand in the cowboy churches is, they want the culture and the style of the worship to change,” said John Williford, a retired professor of communications from North Greenville University in North Carolina. He wrote his doctoral thesis, “The Ethereal Cowboy Way,” on cowboy church culture.
“They don't want to be in a formal worship setting, where people are wearing coats and ties," Williford said.
The cowboy church movement was born out of rodeo culture in the early 1970s, first with evangelical Christians reaching bull riders and cowboys from the back of a horse, then with a wave of stationary churches spreading north from the stockyards of Texas.
Williford said he’s watched the movement grow, even as church attendance has declined nationwide. He recalled the cowboy television shows of his youth, where heroes always defeated the bad guys and ended each episode with a moral lesson. Even as that imagery has grown less prominent in the media, he said those messages have continued to resonate.
“Cowboy culture has not declined. I mean, it is just as popular now as it ever has been,” Williford said. “And cowboy values, good defeating evil, doing the right thing and so forth, those things have held steady too.”
As the last song fades out at Gateway to the High Country Cowboy Church, congregation members head toward the table for coffee and donuts.
Other families head out the door, and get busy hitching horse trailers, corralling dogs and kids, and exchanging goodbyes — until next Sunday.
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