Saturday, March 15, 1997

Pastors find parishioners relate better to country music

By DIANE SAMMS RUSH

Knight-Ridder Newspapers

WICHITA, Kan. - The sign behind the preacher advertised a best-butt contest. The mirrored saddle that hung above him would be rotating in a couple of hours, scattering light throughout the country dance club.

All of the accouterments of the nightclub - the saddle, the signs, even the ashtrays - were in place. And in the middle of it all, about 35 people spent 45 minutes singing praises to the Lord and hearing the preacher draw from Dr. Seuss' "Cat in the Hat" to make the point of how easy it is for all of us to make messes of our lives.

The preacher, the Rev. Joe Cobb of First United Methodist Church in Wichita, has been in charge of the 5:30 p.m. Saturday service at The Cowboy Club in Wichita's Old Town historic district for 15 months.

The alternative worship experience is called Spirit Fusion, and it is typical of a sprinkling of others nationwide that are designed to reach the non-churched through contemporary texts and music.

In Tisdale, a rural community in Cowley County, Kan., the United Methodist Church celebrated a honky-tonk Pentecost, using Garth Brooks' "Standing Outside the Fire" and a Billy Dean song, "We're Only Here for a Little While," as contemporary connections to the gospel.

"Country music is touching people where they live," said the Rev. Quentin Bennett, minister at Tisdale. To him, it makes perfect sense to speak the language most familiar to his congregation.

It's a principle he learned at St. Paul School of Theology, a United Methodist seminary in Kansas City, Mo. More specifically, he learned it while studying with the Rev. Tex Sample, professor, author, sociologist and working-class theologian.

Last year, Sample wrote a book titled "White Soul: Country Music, the Church and Working Americans" (Abingdon Press, $14.95) that criticizes the musical elitism of the dominant church culture. Sample suggests that country music speaks to people's needs today better than the well-worn hymns that have been sung for generations.

"For some folks," said Sample, who confesses in his book to having been a musical elitist, "Garth Brooks and Reba (McEntire) are providing the stories that people can identify with."

In a seminary course titled "Music and Society," Sample and Oklahoman Larry Hollon, who produces secular and church videos, take several styles of music and match them to the populations to which they appeal. In studying jazz and blues, they discuss how the music that expresses the black experience has spilled over into the white middle class.

Rap music started with street kids but now has an audience that is three-quarters white, Sample said. Rock is discussed as the music of the baby boomers, beginning with the rockabilly of the '50s and evolving into hard rock, psychedelic rock, heavy metal and other forms as the post-war babies aged.

"Music reflects and helps to produce a culture," Sample said.

Bennett of Tisdale agrees. In his rural church, he has learned that people get more meaning from country music than they do from traditional church music. Mary Chapin Carpenter's "Sometimes You're the Windshield, Sometimes You're the Bug" has a message that is easier to grasp than the message in a classical hymn like "Standing on the Promises," he said.

"Now and then we sing one of those heavy hymns," Bennett said, "then we scratch our heads and wonder what it means."

To Bennett, those hymns, with their outdated language, get in the way of helping people make sense of their complex lives.

A recent wedding in Bennett's church featured three country songs: "I Cross My Heart" by George Strait; "The Maker Said Take Her" by Alabama; and "I Am That Man" by Brooks & Dunn.

He expects to use Vince Gill's "Go Rest High on That Mountain" in a funeral service, just as he has used Garth Brooks' "The Dance."

For Spirit Fusion, Cobb has used country music ("The Dance" and songs by Shania Twain), but there has been more of an emphasis on contemporary Christian music, or praise music, with simple melodies and lyrics that are easy to project on screens so people can sing along.