Religion even sillier
I didn’t think it was possible, but I guess I should have been more optimistic. MSNBC is reporting on the growing number of so-called cowboy churches, started by the “Cowboy Church Network of North America, supported by the Southern Baptist Convention’s North American Missions Board.” (Hat tip to Michael Airhart at Truth Wins Out for catching the story.)
WAXAHACHIE, Texas – Moments after flying headfirst onto the arena floor dirt, the man gets up and brushes off his protective vest as rodeo clowns rush in to distract the still-bucking bull.
The crowd cheers as the announcer reveals he’s fine, just before the chute opens with another cowboy atop a menacing bull.
But this isn’t a typical rodeo. It’s an outreach ministry of the Cowboy Church of Ellis County, which has grown from about 300 to 2,200 members since it began nearly nine years ago. The church about 30 miles south of Dallas now bills itself as the world’s largest cowboy church.
How can anyone take part in this and still take themselves seriously? I mean, they are baptizing people in horse troughs. It’s one thing if you’re starting up a church somewhere that’s not at all industrialized, and the only thing that holds enough water that you can bring to the designated “church” space is technically a trough. But these people are doing it for theme consistency. Like it’s a kid’s birthday party or something.
Sure, it might be more fun than “regular church.” Sure, it might get people in the door. Neither of those things make it necessarily still church. If Six Flags renames one of its locations “church,” it’s still an amusement park. Even if there’s a guy walking around the fairgrounds, trying to strike up conversations with people about Jesus and the Bible… it’s still an amusement park. The people running the cowboy churches seem to acknowledge that people are there because of the country music and the rodeo acts, not because of their devotion to God and desire to worship. Where do you draw the line between prayer and play?
I don’t have a problem with cowboy churches themselves. I would be completely fine with a tradition of going bowling at 10 AM on Sundays, or an hour of crocheting, or a weekly session of playing video games and eating Cheetos. Rodeos and country music are a-okay by me. My problem is with the hypocrisy of it. It’s as though the Southern Baptist Convention is simply defining other activities as worship, in order to proclaim their success at converting people and getting them closer to God. I wish they would just admit that that “man in a feed store who said he hadn’t been to church in 40 years” was doing just fine without church. I wish they’d leave him, and everyone else, alone.
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