Cowboy Churches....P-shaw, Hoss.

“Cowboy Church.”

Really?

Is this necessary? Have we really sliced the last remaining fragments of white middle class whiners down to its last onion-thin representative? Is there really some gaggle of down-home rural folk who just don’t cotton to gettin’ gussied up and goin’ to real church? Assuming this is the case, why do these people persist in seeing themselves as somehow unique?

I mean, we’ve got it all now, don’t we? For the snake handlers, we’ve got the shotgun-architecture single-cell church buried in the sticks. For the urbane college kids who are really just looking for a slightly less profane meat market than the Village, there is the spiffy megachurch. For the Mac-using, black-glasses-frame-wearing, beta males who swing lefty because they think that’s more sensitive, we have the Seeker Friendly Emergent Church. The whole church landscape in the western hemisphere appears to have developed in the last four decades as the natural consequence of catering to people’s dumb excuses for not going in the first place.

There’s really only one truly great excuse for not going to church: you’re not a believer and you can think of better things to do with your time. And setting aside the obvious missional purpose of a ministerial calling to change your mindset about this, let’s grant validity to that excuse. Now think of all the dumb reasons that Christians have given for the last forty years for not coming to church.

“I don’t have nice clothes to wear.”

“People weren’t nice to me.”

“The preacher stepped on my toes a bit.”

“The music sucks.” Ok, actually, this one can be really tempting for me, too. That doesn’t make it a great reason for deliberately disobeying the scriptural teaching to not forsake the assembling together of ourselves.

It’s almost as if every 25-year-old who came along and heard a new excuse for the same old sloth and fear that keep people out of God’s house decided to start a new church designed to remove that excuse.

“Oh, you don’t like liturgy? We do it different over here.”

“Oh, you don’t like being ‘preached to,’ and you’d rather have a guy in a turtleneck sit and rap with you over coffee? That’s how we roll over at our church.”

“Oh, you don’t like people wearing their best to church? Well, come on out to the cow barn with us. We stand in cow manure in our blue jeans just to show how relevant to this tiny sliver of subculture we are.”

After careful observation, I’ve noticed that this is largely a white people thing. And many white people, for whatever reason, are just not comfortable saying, “I’d rather be watching football” or “I’d rather be sleeping” or “go to hell, preacher.” So they make up other reasons, and then earnest, well-meaning young pastors spend inordinate amounts of energy to remove that excuse. They heard where people hate sitting in pews, so they throw the pews out and get chairs. They heard where people don’t like hymnals anymore, so they throw those out and get Power Point (and an illiterate 20-year-old to program it). They write books that become best-sellers on how they’re re-inventing church. They give seminars on how to make Jesus relevant to the culture. Which culture? Well, it depends on which narrowly-defined segment of the white population you go to.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m all for walking around Mars Hill, sizing up the cultural context, and delivering your message within that context in appropriate fashion. What I’m a bit weary of is the novelty churches that spring up  like little wildfires in response to some new bit of asininity. When your kid gives you an excuse for why he doesn’t want to brush his teeth, you don’t buy it. Brushing your teeth is good, even if you don’t always enjoy every waking minute of it. Why would a pastor change the basic definition of church for the people he’s supposed to be leading? Is he their shepherd or their babysitter?

Do we really only want to hang out with other people if they’re exactly like us? Must I look around church on Sunday morning and see people who always share my politics, worldview, racial makeup, and general bad attitude toward traffic hooliganism? Are we really going to insist on this as a definition for church? I mean, if that’s really how it’s going to have to be from now on, what’s to stop me from starting my own I Hate Christian Music church? (Save the hate comments on that one; I’m going to write on that topic next).

My father-in-law is a real cowboy. And if he were to decide to go to church—which might be a small miracle—he would just go to church. He would be ashamed to demand that a 2,000-year-old institution bend over backward to accommodate his personal comfort. And his church experience would be richer for it.

Which brings me to the Cowboy Church people. Do they really see themselves as a unique culture? You can literally find a Cowboy Church in every community any more. They pass out little bumper stickers to advertise their “no-church” church, and the stickers have the pious vaquero standing alongside his horse near a cross, perhaps wondering how in the tarnation a danged old cross got here in the middle of the danged old cow pasture. I’m not questioning their sincerity here; I’m questioning their necessity.

Thanksgiving.

I’ve always believed that people who start Christmas early are just those who don’t take Thanksgiving seriously enough. I’m a big fan of Thanksgiving, and there are many reasons. I mean…it’s a holiday built around food, right? How can that go wrong? Add football to the mix, and brisk weather, and catching up with family and loved ones—it’s an important holiday to itself. Of course, I have other reasons to love Thanksgiving.

It was during the last week of October 2005 that I was given around two weeks to live. In the first week of November, I underwent apheresis for an adult stem cell transplant, which I received on 07 Nov. Over the course of the next two weeks, I made daily trips to the 10^th floor of Methodist Hospital in San Antonio during the dangerous neutropenic stage, and by the Monday of Thanksgiving week I was released from the hospital—cancer-free. The following Thursday, I ate solid food for the first time in months. I was home, I was alive, and the sun was still coming up every day. Believe me….I was thankful. And that’s a big reason that Thanksgiving is an important holiday for the Mitchells. But it’s not the only reason I’m thankful.

I am thankful for Christ in my life. This side of eternity, I am not perfect, and still daily battle my propensity to be my own man and do my own thing—but because I trust Christ for my salvation, I don’t have to worry about how good or bad I am at following rules (turns out I’m pretty terrible at it). He accomplished my salvation, not me. And when I think of how many times I should have been dead or in prison by now, I am truly thankful that my life has been transformed. Of course, it feels like it could stand some more transformation, but that’s just life this side of eternity. On the other side, He’s already done the heavy lifting.

I’m thankful for the country where I live. Yes, we’ve been told for a generation by our political class that America is a terrible place that has done nothing but terrible things to people. Today’s kids learn the first story of Thanksgiving, and think it’s all about smallpox blankets and evil Republican types raping the pristine native countryside and building great hulking, smoking factories powered by grime-faced children’s labor. It would be nice if they learned the true story: that the first colonists to the New World were faced with horrific hardship, and originally tried to set up a collectivist economic system in which everyone owned the property and chipped in to produce what was necessary for survival. This led to even more extreme hardship (you may easily read all of this in Colonel William Bradford’s diary), after which they decided that private ownership of property might lead to more production—and they were right. Long before Barack Obama told a plumbing contractor on the street that it was time for government to “spread a little of the wealth around,” the 17^th-century colonists had already experimented with such a system, and had dismissed the idea. With a great deal of help from Squanto and his friends, those colonists learned how to plant and cultivate in the New World, and when they extended an invitation to them to share a great meal of Thanksgiving, it was heartfelt. The colonists wanted to give thanks to God for their friends, whom they saw as a blessing. I’m thankful for this moment, and this tradition.

I’m thankful that I got a scholarship to seminary; otherwise I couldn’t have afforded to go. And since I moved my whole family up here for this, that’s kind of a good thing. I’m thankful that I’m involved in church. Church has gotten a bad rap for the last couple of decades, but the Church was Christ’s idea, not Man’s. And in the Church we find fellowship with fellow-laborers. My own church isn’t a big fancy-pants mega-church with a trendy black-framed glasses-wearing, Starbucks-sipping, blogging techno-pastor—but a normal-sized congregation consumed with finding new ways of reaching its community with the gospel. I’m thankful for that.

I’m thankful for my home and job. I didn’t move up here because I felt called to be a contractor, but this job has enabled me to support my family while we pursue God’s call on our lives. That’s a huge blessing, and in this economy—stagnated by the Keynesian inflationary recession perpetuated by this administration—it’s a big one. I don’t get paid a lot, but we can meet all our obligations. I’ve seen the day when we couldn’t do that—and so I’m thankful. God has blessed me in a variety of ways, and I don’t deserve any of them. I’m not particularly good, or skilled, or awesome in any way. He just does what He does, as He sees fit.

I’m thankful for my idiot dog, General Sam Houston. He’s no good at hunting birds, guarding property, or even showing many signs of vigorous life. But he’s a loyal friend who is completely enamored with children and love—the perfect addition to our family.

And I suppose I’m thankful for Thanksgiving. It’s not just a one-day affair for the Mitchells; we have had our giant turkey for days now, sitting in a carefully prepared, secret family brine recipe. Tomorrow morning, I will get up at 4 AM and fire up my wood smoker (that’s right, suburban weenie dads…WOOD smoker) and will use a careful combination of hickory, mesquite, pecan and some apple chips to smoke the perfect Thanksgiving turkey. My wife will start making pies tomorrow—not the store-bought kind, but the old-school kind, rolled out on the counter, like your grandmother used to make. She’ll make five of those—blackberry, cherry, chocolate, pumpkin, and a new homemade mincemeat she’s been perfecting through the year. She will make homemade dressing, cranberry sauce, and also a ham. There will be nothing canned or microwaved or made from a mix on that table tomorrow. That may not be important to you, but to a fat guy who likes food like me—well, it’s a big deal. It’s how Thanksgiving started, and it’s how it continues over here. There will be family hanging around, playing in the big backyard, jumping on the trampoline, wandering around down by the creek. All of it will take place against the warm backdrop of live football on the big-screen. We’ll keep half an eye on the Detroit game because tradition dictates it, but we will become planted for the Cowboys at 3. By 6, we will have reconciled our emotions to their annual epic choke job, and will console ourselves with rummaging through the still-steaming Thanksgiving dinner. The best antidote to Jerry Jones is pie, after all.

Yes, the next day begins the inexorable march to Christmas, and we enjoy that too. But right now….it’s Thanksgiving.

And what could be better than that?

So....I'm extreme?

“Extreme.”

This is a great word. It’s a tabula rasa term…a blank slate upon which the losing debater—desperately flailing about, treading the dangerous waters of his own weak philosophical position—may write a snappy rebuttal of his rhetorical better. When we are losing on substance, we may resort to the argumentative fallacy of name calling. 

“Racist.”

“Sexist. 

“Extreme.” 

It’s telling that the ones who so quickly throw out this term in shameless attempts to silence dissension are typically the same ones who shriek the loudest about “freedom of speech.” The same crowd doesn’t seem to find “extreme” the films of, for example, Michael Moore. They don’t consider it extreme for an Illinois State Senator to kill a bill that would have made actual infanticide illegal (http://www.nrlc.org/ObamaBAIPA/ObamaKills2003amendedBAIPA.htm). What’s “extreme,” it seems, is any opinion from anyone who disagrees with them. 

A good deal of this negative emotion is tied up in people’s annoyance at those pesky sorts of Christians who take their faith AND their civic duties seriously enough to speak out. Secular society would much prefer the staid, quiet, Christian who leaves public policy to others. The metaphorical toothless hillbilly Christian who has withdrawn entirely from the cultural discourse on this and other topics is the picture that reigns supreme in the minds of many—and it’s the picture that comes to mind when carelessly tossing out terms such as “extreme.” Woe be unto those Christians who dare to speak up for the weak, the innocent, and the despised in culture (you know, the kind of thing Christ did—to the irritants of the cultural gatekeepers of His day, too). When someone does so, he’s called “extreme.”

But why? If the facts are on your side, of what serious threat is dissension? Why would you stoop to name-calling if you have the more defensible position? That’s the essential question that rhetorical giants like Quintilian and Socrates would have asked.

Unlike the bomb throwers, the man who made this video presented facts to a hostile audience and engaged in discourse that had, as its chief end, persuasion. This is classic rhetoric, plain and simple. It’s not extreme in any way. He admittedly had better production value than most Christians use in their arguments, but how is that extreme? Again, it’s not extreme when the heroes of the Left do it. Apparently, artistic production may only be attempted by the Left.

We think that there is plenty of “extreme” to go around in this debate. It’s pretty extreme, for example, for nine people in robes to write law for the people of the United States. Since the Constitution explicitly dictates that this should not be the case, it follows that favoring such judicial activism is BY DEFINITION an extreme position. If the pro-abortion folks are so confident in their persuasive abilities, why not put it to a vote? Let the people have their say, once and for all.

Ah….but there’s the rub. Such a vote would spell the end of blanket federally-sponsored abortion once and for all. For we are no longer dealing with a college bull session philosophical conversation any more….we now have incontrovertible evidence that that fetus is ALIVE in there. There is such substantial scientific evidence that it’s LIFE in there that a majority of American voters would reject abortion for their state if given the choice (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30771408/ns/us_news-life/t/majority-americans-now-pro-life-poll-says/).

And back to the favorite Pal of the Left, Science—now that good old Science has proven that that’s a live baby in there….we are faced with troubling questions. Questions that the pastor in 180 Movie asked.

If that’s really alive in there, at what point does it become ok to kill it?

Now that this is the only unanswered question pertinent to the topic, the onus of moral responsibility falls squarely on the shoulders of those who refuse to see it. For those of us who have seen the evidence with our eyes, there remains only the civic duty of speaking up for the saving of that life. To fail to do so makes our society every bit as culpable as the residents of Auschwitz who deliberately closed their eyes to the unspeakable horrors just outside their city limits.

If it weren’t for “extreme” Christians speaking out, there would have been no movement for the abolition of slavery. If there weren’t “extreme” Christians, there would have been no civil rights movement in the mid-twentieth century.

And if “extreme” Christians don’t speak out now, we are cowards, plain and simple.