Gas prices too high? Thinking of “hoofing it” to church?
If you’re near Forney, it’s no problem — there’s plenty of room for you and your horse at Sunday services.
“People can ride their horses to church or come in their horse-drawn wagons or buggies. Some drive their pickup trucks. We welcome people any way they come,” Katherine McCord said.
McCord and her son Don decided recently that something needed to be done to reach their cowboy friends and neighbors.
“My kids are country kids — we’re horse people. And I noticed all the horse people were out riding horses on Sunday instead of going to church,” Don McCord said.
He was helping with a 4-H program when he and Tim Richardson, of Sand Rock, began talking about the cowboy church that Tim was attending in the Albertville area. “It sounded like a good idea, but I’m not a preacher,” Don McCord said.
But with some encouragement and prayer, along with attending a conference in Texas on starting a cowboy church, he became just that.
On May 10, their cowboy church held its first service — about 25 people came. Since then, Don McCord has been doing a good bit of the preaching, and “more people have shown interest and have been asking questions,” Katherine McCord said.
The service is followed by “regular cowboy and cowgirl activities” like roping demonstrations.
“A lot of people don’t feel at home in the church, and we want to make it easy for them to be in church,” Don McCord said. “The reason is so that we can reach as many of the lost culture as we can.”
Danny Hill, who attends Cowboy Church, said they are “just trying to get people in church.”
“Some folks don’t go to other churches because they can’t or don’t want to dress up,” he said. “We just want them in church, no matter how they dress.”
For more information about cowboy churches, call Phil Winningham of the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions at 1-800-264-1225, Ext. 260. (TAB)
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