Cowboy Church of Marshall County reaches out to riders, friends

Greeters wave to visitors from atop their horses in the parking lot. Blue jeans, a Western shirt and a cowboy hat are the outfit of choice. 
   
Saddles are certainly welcome and gospel karaoke is heard coming from within the Sand Mountain Saddle Club in Boaz. 
   
It’s a typical Sunday morning at the Cowboy Church of Marshall County yet it’s anything but typical. This church is one of the many cowboy churches beginning to gallop across the nation.
   
“It’s a way of creating an environment where people will feel comfortable to come and worship the Lord,” said Otis Corbitt, an associate in the office of associational missions and church planting for the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions. 
   
“There are a lot of people in our society who do not feel comfortable in our current churches.”
   
The Cowboy Church of Marshall County — the first of its kind in the state, according to Corbitt — held its first service May 7. 
   
The new Marshall Baptist Association church stemmed from a “cowboy and friends fellowship” that meets once a month at various barns throughout Marshall County.
   
“We thought that if up to 140 people were coming once a month, maybe they’d come every week,” said Chris Campbell, a former youth minister for 18 years who helped establish this new congregation.
   
The church is averaging 50 people each Sunday, and the pulpit is currently filled by a different pastor each week. There is no program and no offering.
   
“It’s not that you have to be a cowboy to go, but the church is for people who would feel more comfortable in a less formal setting,” Corbitt said. “It is reaching out to a segment of population in Alabama that no one else was able to reach with the gospel.”
   
David Denham, a leader at the Cowboy Church, knows what it means to be unchurched and thirsting for the gospel.
   
“I had not been in church in over 20 years,” he said. “I had been hurt in church before. Two years ago, an evangelist stopped by my work, and I was saved right there at work. It goes to show that you don’t have to be at an altar in a church to get saved.” 
   
Now passionate about serving the Lord, Denham wants to see cowboys who are not regularly in church on Sunday mornings feel welcome at the Cowboy Church. 
   
“We don’t want to be a place where people who are disgruntled with the traditional church come to in order to leave their church; we want to be a place for the unchurched,” he said. “We certainly have a different atmosphere here — it’s a Western way of life. But there’s really only one church and that’s the Lord’s church.”
   
The idea of a cowboy church as an effective avenue to reach the unchurched is taking hold on the national scene, according to those involved. In an event preceding the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting in Greensboro, N.C., June 13–14, a stampede showcased cowboys and cowgirls from across North Carolina. 
   
Jeff Smith of the Cowboy Church Network of North America said at that event, “These churches are one of the hottest things going. The cowboy church movement has grown so fast. It’s working. Cowboys who weren’t going anywhere before now have somewhere to go.”
   
Randall Stoner, director of missions for Marshall Association, is an advocate for this style of thinking outside the box. “They (members of the Cowboy Church) have taken on the challenge of Intentional Evangelism,” he said. “This church is reaching a segment of people that need Jesus Christ.”