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On the rodeo circuit, chef Linda Weise and her husband, Ted, feed up to 300 people from a 30-foot mobile kitchen they pull behind their Freightliner truck. "Cowboy churches provide good pastoral care," Ted Weise says. "A cowboy preacher on the road is more of an evangelist than a pastor, but the work that Linda and I do is a little of both. We see the same cowboys and cowgirls and their families throughout the year, so we do counseling, weddings, funerals—and are there to encourage them and provide them spiritual guidance."

In California's Salinas Valley, the two churches in Al and Bonnie Stoeberl's Christian Country Helps Ministries meet monthly. Because the Stoeberls' churches designate their outreach to farmers, ranchers, those who train or show horses, and rodeo professionals, they selected worship sites on the Salinas Rodeo Grounds and the Salinas Valley Fairgrounds.

With Christian Country Music becoming a mushrooming genre in the music industry, cowboy congregations are visited regularly by Christian recording artists, who sing for up to an hour before the sermon. R. O. Murray says attendance in his and other churches fluctuates, but "admittedly the larger attendance is on those Sundays when Christian country recording artists are offering the message in song."

Singer Candice Myers describes the music as traditional country. "The lyrics are about people who work hard to put food on the table, who wear faded jeans, and who have given up beer joints and barroom brawls," she says. "They lift up a godly kind of life—love that is pure, marriages that are successful, and families that are staying together."

Like other C&W, Christian country songs describe the hazards of modern life (divorce, alcoholism, domestic violence), but they also refer to the God who redeems wasted years. "The music must have subtle overtones that the non-Christian listener will embrace before he has the chance to identify it with religion," Myers says.

Myers gives her testimony nationwide at cowboy churches and at rodeos wherever her husband, world champion steer wrestler Rope Myers, competes. Myers says that cowboy churches vary—some are charismatic, some are conservative. "The one thing they all have in common is a heart for the lost," she says. "Cowboy church is about winning souls."

Linda Owen is a freelance writer and former pastor in San Antonio, Texas.

Copyright © 2003 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

For more information on Thousand Hills Cowboy Church and Nashville's Cowboy Church, see their websites.

For more Christianity Today articles, see our Missions and Ministry archive.

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September 2003, Vol. 47, No. 9