On horseback, under a nearly cloudless blue sky, the pastor removed his cowboy hat and bowed his head, speaking to the Lord during an unconventional Sunday worship service hosted by a nascent Christian ministry in northwest Illinois.
“I pray that this time may be blessed,” he said, closing his eyes and holding the reins in one hand. “I pray that you watch over everybody here. And I just thank you that we get to do this. This is insane. I just ask that your message would come forth.”
After the blessing concluded, the crowd of around 140 responded “amen” from the wooden bleachers of the horse arena at the Ogle County Fairgrounds in Oregon, roughly two hours west of Chicago.
The pastor, Kerry Hughes, led the service in jeans and cowboy boots, no clerical collar or vestments.
Many of the worshippers were similarly dressed, some donning sneakers, shorts, riding boots or their work clothes.
A church advertisement for the event had instructed them to forego their “Sunday best” in favor of something a little more comfortable.
This is cowboy church – a unique form of worship using Western culture and rural lifestyle to share the Bible, part of a broader movement of similarly country-themed congregations and ministries scattered across the United States, primarily in the South.
Founded by Hughes and a small group of like-minded worshippers, the Ogle County Cowboy Church held its first service in late September 2025.
Most Sundays, they meet inside a historic college chapel in Mount Morris, a nearby rural town of just under 3,000 residents.
But the 53-year-old pastor said he prefers to preach and pray in more rustic spaces. Barns. Machine sheds. Horse arenas.
His favorite sanctuary for worship is outdoors, among “God’s creation.”
“I’m not much into brick and stained glass,” he added.
So during favorable seasons of weather, worshippers gather once a month for “Church in the Dirt,” an event that mixes prayer, Gospel readings and preaching with various equestrian exhibitions. Some worshippers bring their own horses to church and go riding.
The service on July 12 featured a worship band on a hay wagon playing guitar and a cajon, a hollow box-shaped percussion instrument the musician sits on and taps to produce a drum-like beat. The vocalist added a country twang to hymns like “How Great Thou Art” and “Open the Eyes of My Heart.”
Worshippers watched a performance by the Ogle County 4-H Horse Drill Team followed by a scripture-laced message from Hughes, who drew parallels from the synchronized equestrian choreography to living a Christian life, working together as a unified church and trusting in God.
Previous “Church in the Dirt” events included barrel racing and mounted shooting.
The nondenominational Bible-based ministry is designed to be “a place where the unchurched are loved and accepted,” according to the church’s website.
“A place where every person is a disciple and disciples others…. A place where scripture is preached without apology,” the description continued. “A place where the cowboy in us comes out.”
It’s unclear exactly how many cowboy churches exist nationwide.
The American Fellowship of Cowboy Churches, a nonprofit based in Texas, includes more than 200 on its “church finder” link, many clustered in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Alabama, Louisiana and Tennessee. An online directory “cowboychurch.net” lists roughly 400 around the country, though some are traveling ministries.
Attempting to track numbers and demographics of cowboy churches can be challenging, said Marie Dallam, University of Oklahoma professor of American religion and culture, during an interview with the Tribune. While some are affiliated with various Christian denominations, many are independent.
“It is impossible to say how many cowboy churches exist on any given day. Based on my knowledge of the field, I estimate that in the United States today there are more than 500 churches and possibly close to 1,000,” Dallam wrote in her 2018 book “Cowboy Christians.”
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“The fact that so many are independent, rather than denominationally affiliated, means they cannot all be tracked through formal channels. It is not uncommon to find a church that has no permanent location, nor any web presence.”
There appear to be a little over a dozen in Illinois, based on online and social media searches, although it’s uncertain if all are still operating.
The Southern Range Cowboy Church near the southern tip of the state invites visitors to “come hear a simple message of God’s grace” at weekly Sunday services inside a small church in Union County, as well as Thursday nights at the Goreville livestock auction barn, according to its Facebook page.
Randolph County Cowboy Church advertises services Sunday mornings at the VFW Hall in Red Bud, a town of under 4,000 roughly 40 miles southeast of St. Louis.
Several online reviews for Brush Arbor Meeting Cowboy Church in Long Point, roughly 100 miles southwest of Chicago, include comments that read in part “we have been welcomed like family” and “everyone is accepted.”
During the recent service at Ogle County Cowboy Church, one little boy wearing a red, white and blue cowboy hat speckled in stars cheered particularly loudly for the horse drill team from the bleachers.
“He’s had this hat out all week, ready to go, making sure we were prepared for Sunday,” said his mother, Maria Chambers. “He likes being around the horses and just being one of the guys. … We’re just country people.”
She’s not sure how much of the Gospel or preaching her 7-year-old comprehends yet. But he’s hearing and taking in “the positive background noise,” she said.
“Eventually, when he is older, he’ll understand more,” Chambers added. “And I want that God aspect in his life.”
The opening of the church came amid a resurgence in popularity of American cowboy culture and imagery, from Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter” tour to a rise of “cowboy-core” and “country glam” in mainstream fashion to the hit neo Western drama television franchise “Yellowstone,” with its multiple spinoffs.
While some attendees at Ogle County Cowboy Church are farmers, horse owners or live an agrarian lifestyle, the pastor believes the ministry attracts folks from all walks of life.
“Our United States has gotten kind of soft,” Hughes said. “Church has gotten kind of soft. When we look at the Bible, they weren’t soft people.”
He considers the concept of “cowboy” more of a mind-frame, “versus hats and boots.”
“It’s an attitude, a state of mind. The heart of the cowboy hasn’t changed,” he said.
To Hughes, it’s about ideals like integrity. Resilience. Grit.
“Like if I get knocked down, I’m going to get right back up,” he said.
Humanity today is hungry for this kind of culture and mentality, the pastor added.
Simple message, tangible experience
Across the arena, eight girls from the local drill team rode eight majestic glitter-covered horses in sync, executing complicated patterns with exact timing and precision.
As high-energy music pulsed through the speakers, two lines of horses galloped toward one another, expertly weaving in and out of the gaps between them under the hot sun.
Afterward, their coach explained that each of the horses has a different personality and temperament. Some were speed horses. Some were pleasure horses. Some were “do whatever you want to” horses.
“The horse just has to yield its independence to the rider. Its desires, they’ve just got to surrender that to the subtle cues of the rider,” the pastor said. “And I believe that…walking in faith with Jesus Christ, as believers, we need to walk how he wants us to walk. And walk in a way that’s the fullest path we can go down. I think we need to surrender our independence to the subtle cues of the savior.”
Hughes explained how the bridle and bit are used to steer and give the horse cues, guiding it to safety or through tight places.
Similarly, God gives believers certain cues to steer them on the right path or keep them from danger, the pastor said. He then quoted from the New Testament Book of James, “We can make a large horse go wherever we want by the means of a small bit in his mouth.”
The metaphors and messages at cowboy church are intended to be easily understood and never complicated, Hughes said.
“We try not to teach over our heads or over most people’s heads,” he added. “Jesus never did that. His teachings were, most times, very simple. Why are we trying to do anything different?”
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when the cowboy church phenomenon started, Dallam said.
“There isn’t a single moment and there isn’t a single founder,” she added. “That’s part of the tricky thing about it.”
But the professor points to various historical precursors to the modern movement.
In her book, she offers examples of Christian pastors bringing religion to the Western frontier, like Baptist clergyman Leander Randon Millican, dubbed the “cowboy preacher,” who was licensed to preach in the late 19th Century and “remembered for baptizing a cowboy at the watering hole late one night between the man’s shifts on the round-up” in Texas.
Another was the Rev. Sam P. Jones, a prominent Methodist minister of the late 1800s who “deliberately used slang when preaching so as to reach the cowboy in his own language.” He faced criticism from other pastors for using “impertinent” phrases, such as “You grand old rascals,” during preaching, the book noted.
More recently, from 1968 to 1984, a Methodist church in Colorado Springs sponsored a “cowboy church” during summers, advertised in a brochure as “the most unusual worship service in the West.” Followers met at a drive-in theater; men and women on horseback ushered the crowd and rode from car to car to collect the offering, according to “Cowboy Christians.”
Numerous horse race track and rodeo ministries also emerged during the 1970s, Dallam added.
About 25 years ago, some cowboy church leaders began forming networks and associations, offering written guidelines and founding principles for cowboy churches interested in embracing them.
“That’s when it really became a movement,” she said.
As for the Ogle County pastor, Hughes grew up on a farm in the area and was taken to church by his grandmother, who lived on the other side of the cow pasture.
He would have much rather been outside with the cows or on a tractor.
“I’d either go on my own free will or I’d go by my ear, cause she had a hold of it,” he added.
But when Hughes was 13, a new pastor had explained to him “that the only way to God was through Christ and to accept the fact that he came to this Earth, that he lived a sinless life and he paid the price for my life, for my debt,” he recalled.
This moved him to give his life to Jesus; he went on to become a pastor. Yet he described being continually plagued by frustrations with traditional churches, particularly when he saw a dissonance between the teachings of Jesus and the way church leaders and members often behaved.
He prayed about this frequently, he said.
“I love you but the church still sucks,” he recalled telling God. “And he said, ‘Well, do something about it.’”
Hughes, who lives in Ogle County, learned about cowboy churches in 2018 and felt called to bring this kind of ministry back home.
“I just heard this crazy concept ‘cowboy church,'” he recalled. “It just settled in my soul.”
The pastor sought guidance from several cowboy church leaders in Texas; many offered support and advice. Yet there were some who were skeptical that this kind of culture, ministry and style of worship could thrive in Illinois.
Ogle County Cowboy Church started with about 20 people; now roughly 45 or 50 come to most Sunday services, with “Church in the Dirt” events drawing more than 100, said Hughes.
“Some of my pastor friends thought I was crazy; others said, ‘How can I help you?’” he added. “There’s a peace here that we don’t experience anywhere else. We want to feel and experience the tangible presence of God. People say they do. And so they come back.”
‘Meet them where they are’
Following “Church in the Dirt,” many worshippers gathered at picnic tables covered in red and white checked cloths for a “cowboy breakfast” of biscuits and gravy with bacon, sausage and other fixings.
Emari Gustafson, 27, brought her horse, Clifford, to the fairgrounds.
She was already accustomed to this blend of Western theming and worship: Gustafson was raised in a cowboy church in Waxahachie, Texas, about 30 miles outside Dallas, an epicenter of cowboy ministry.
The city – which had a population of under 25,000 when she was a child – was home to three cowboy churches at the time.
As a teen about a decade ago, she committed her life to Christ and was baptized in a horse trough, fully immersed in the water.
When Gustafson later met and fell in love with a man from Illinois, she was hesitant to leave Texas.
At one point, she told him it wouldn’t be possible for her to move because she didn’t own a trailer to transport her horse.
Two days later, the man bought her a horse trailer, carving their initials into it along with the number 2022, the year they began dating.
They married last year and now live nearby in Byron.
Her husband, Andy Gustafson, said he felt at home at the Ogle County Cowboy Church.
“I’m an outdoors guy, being outside all day and driving tractors and being in the dirt. That’s just kind of who I am,” the 26-year-old farmer said. “So if I can come to church and do the same thing, getting in my own element, outside and not in a building, it’s just good.”
After church, Olivia Steingraber, 38, brushed the roan coat of her horse Mesa.
The mom of three spent much of her childhood and young adult years competing in rodeo and barrel racing events around the country, where it was common for traveling ministries to hold cowboy church services on Sundays.
“So it’s always been … my favorite way to go to church,” she said.
Yet this was the first cowboy church she’d attended that remained local, and she loved how rooted that felt.
The outdoor service, and the multiple equestrian analogies tied to scripture, also moved her.
“There’s a lot of times when you’re outside and you take the time to be observant and you’re with a horse — so much of it applies. So much of the Christian life can apply,” she said. “Just being open to it and looking around and realizing that (God) created the trees and the sky and the horses. It’s all intertwined.”
She points to Mesa, whom she has raised since the horse was about a year old.
“I can be working her and it makes me think of something that I heard in church or something I read in the Bible,” Steingraber said. “Just how much that they have to trust you … I feel like that’s the same with us and God. We don’t know everything he knows.”
At 16, Steingraber was baptized — also in a horse trough — by cowgirl preacher and former rodeo bull rider Crystal Lyons, founder of the Texas-based nonprofit Crystal Lyons Ministries.
Lyons, who goes by the social media handle “Cowgirl Logic,” travels to “western world events with the message of Jesus backed by His power to heal, deliver, redeem and give new beginnings in life,” according to her Facebook profile.
In more than three decades of ministry, Lyons estimates she’s baptized hundreds of folks — often in horse troughs, other times in rivers, creeks or ponds — in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost.
“We’ve failed so much in our churches. We’ve turned walking with God into man-made religious stuff, with all of its bondages. So it’s been great to have the freedom to do these services at these events, these secular events,” Lyons said during an interview with the Tribune. “You can share the Lord Jesus in a place where a lot of people who won’t go to church will go to. And you meet them where they are.”
For Steingraber, the manner of her baptism or where the ritual occurred were less important than her spiritual transformation within.
“Dying to sin and living a new life,” she said.
She sees her faith and cowboy culture as intricately connected.
“The Western life is a lot of hard work. And super fun and totally worth it. I’d say that’s kind of the same as what Jesus is,” Steingraber added. “In the Bible, he doesn’t say it’s going to be easy or that following him is going to make everything go smoothly. In fact, it tends to make things go harder. That’s part of the journey. The sanctifying work of Christ is huge.”