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.