Cowboy Church

With more than an estimated 1000 Christian cowboy ministries worldwide and approximately 180 individual cowboy churches in Texas, the cowboy church movement is an immensely important religious movement that speaks volumes about contemporary culture. Cowboy churches attracts many disenchanted with traditional evangelicalism’s assumed sterilized and posing religion. Despite the cowboy church movement’s exponential growth since the late-1980s, few outside the movement understand the complexity cowboy churches envelop. The cowboy church movement as a trans-denominational evangelical seeker church movement that originated by delivering an applicable message to a unique population at a specific point in history, and attribute’s the movement’s continued growth to maintaining cultural and social relevance in contemporary American society. Despite others’ attempts, it is important not to disassociate the cowboy church movement from the broader American Christian movement attempting to perform Jesus’ “Great Commission” of converting non-believers and provide a more authentic, or “real," Christianity.