Straight-shooting Christianity :: Exploratory Essays Research Papers

Straight-shooting ChristianityThe March 11, 2003 edition of USA Today reports on a sassy approach to religious faith in certain performes worship ground in the value and mores of the American West. Straight-shooting emphasis on Christianity spurs a increment trend, reads the headline (Grossman D1). A church service named, with no needed irony, Cross Trails is account to baptize new believers in an 8-foot circular, blue plastic horse boulder clay (Grossman D1). This is a trail to belief that is stripped-down, back-to-basics, a religious attitude that reflects the lives of the ranchers and farmers it appeals to. Cathy Lynn Grossman writes This is cowpoke church - straight-shooter, sinner-saved-by-grace theology throwing a rope out to the lost, the lonely and those who gigantic for an unvarnished faith. No fancy duds. No politicized preaching. No denominational hair-splitting. Its come as you are in spirit, spurs and Stetsons. Its bucking bulls and plumbing Bibles in a dusty ar ena or dropping a hard-won one dollar bill in a boot on the back table later on a punchy sermon. (D1)The nonion Grossman sculpts in her article is part Frederick Remington, part ocean of Galilee. Indeed, fundamentally, its an attitude, whether you ride a bronc or a reckoner keyboard (Grossman 1D). The cowboy church movement seems to cut in on a growing herd of believers in America who seem to think that the values of the church as it should be are undermined by the real urbanity, the very sophistication that has come to characterize modern support and popular culture. They hear their solace in The West, in a picture - however mythical it may be - of a simpler way of life. This is a phenomenon, after all, that exists concurrently with ranchers who hang cell phones where their six-shooter used to be, who use multi-tools to mend fences and all-terrain vehicles to tie down stray livestock. It is an attitude more than anything else. But that attitude is not without some provena nce. Grossman quotes pastor Perry Smith, the leader of Living for the Brand, a cowboy church next to the fairground arena in Athens, Texas The cowboy walk in life is parallel with the lifestyle of deliveryman - doing right and living by your give-and-take (D2). Likewise, cowboy churches themselves seem to be fulfilling the same roles that Jesus did to his followers. The cowboy church movement, for instance, packages its message especially for its audience, much in the same way Jesus used parables because they seeing see not and hearing they know not, incomplete do they understand (Matt.