Chuck-Wagon Christianity

For most U.S. Protestants, the church of their choice nowadays is seldom more than a few minutes' drive from home. Not so in the wide-open spaces of the Southwest, where the nearest neighbor may be a rancher who lives 25 miles away and a pastor may be farther still. For many rural families, the annual campfire meeting--an institution designed to bring God to the cowboy--may be their only contact with organized religion.

Steak & Hymns. Last week the 22nd annual Montosa Camp Meeting was in full swing in Socorro County, N. Mex., the fourth in a series of revival sessions held each summer along a circuit that includes the cow counties of west Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado. There were two ministers to conduct services four or five times each day in the big, steel-sided tabernacle, and Bible lessons for the children. Days began with Scripture readings and ended with the singing of hymns. Nights, the men and women swapped stories around campfires before bedding down in trailers or in tents and blanket rolls laid out beneath the pine trees.

Among the 700 people at the New Mexico meeting were some who came all the way from ranches in Texas and Arizona--just as their forebears did in decades past. The cow country's first campfire meeting was organized back in 1890 by the Rev. W. B. Bloys, Stated Clerk of the El Paso Presbytery, who rode out to a campsite in the Davis Mountains to preach for three days to a handful of cowpokes and ranch families. Onetime Texas Cattle Dealer Joe Evans, now 80, remembers hearing Bloys preach. Evans, a Baptist layman, worked with the forerunner of the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. in setting up a regular circuit of campfire meetings in 1940 for churchless southwestern areas. He still travels the circuit himself each summer, telling Bible stories and frontier yarns.

Sermons & Nostalgia. Although Montosa has its own tabernacle, the Presbyterians' Sunday School Missions Board puts up a tent for campfire meetings that have no permanent worship center, helps recruit ministers from four churches--Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist and Disciples of Christ--to conduct services. Each meeting is backed by a local layman's association, which provides a campsite and the hearty food, cooked chuckwagon style. The Presbyterians now operate two circuits in ten states, expect to draw at least 21,000 people this summer.

The religion is strictly oldtime, and the Bible-centered sermons are liberally illustrated with metaphors drawn from ranching life. But spiritual need is only one reason why people attend. Some are drawn by nostalgia for the Old West; for others, the annual revival is an important social event--sometimes a family's only opportunity to see old friends in the county. Says Sid Burchard, a Texas ranch owner who has been attending since he was eight: "The camp meeting brings people to God when nothing else will."

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