The outfit
Two paid staff, seven elders and a couple hundred volunteers who will pull your truck out of the meadow when it rains.
Every one of us has a day job or a place to run. Evenings are the best time to call.
Staff and elders
We all answer our own phones, if not always the first time.
Cowboy pastor
Clint grew up on a place off Bethel Road and rode bulls until a wreck in 2015 broke his pelvis in three places. He walked into Saddle Creek on crutches that fall, was baptized in the tank the next spring, and took over the preaching from Amos in 2019. He still heels at the Wednesday roping.
How we got here
Seventeen years, one address change, two pastors and a lot of borrowed trailers.
2009
Amos Birdwell and a few roping partners start meeting on Sunday mornings in the Parker County sale barn, between the pens and the café.
2011
A member welds steps onto a ten-foot trough. Thirty-one people are baptized in it that first year.
2014
The church buys a run-down hay farm with a pipe fence, a well and not much else.
2016
Ninety volunteers raise the covered arena between Friday night and Sunday morning, and we worship under it that same Sunday.
2019
After ten years in the pulpit, Amos asks a former bull rider named Clint Haskell to take the preaching. Amos still runs the Saturday breakfast.
2022
In the worst drought in a decade, members start hauling their own bales to neighbors who are selling off cattle they can't feed.
2026
The youth rodeo club outgrows the small pen, and the building fund goes to new steel pens on the south side.
What we believe
We're a non-denominational church in the cowboy church movement. Here's the short version.
Nobody earns it, nobody ropes their way in. Jesus lived right, died for what we did wrong and walked out of the grave, and he takes anybody who comes.
John 14:6 · Romans 5:8
We read it straight through, a chapter at a time, and let it have the last word.
2 Timothy 3:16
For anyone old enough to decide for themselves, in the stock tank by the gate.
Acts 8:36–38
The arena is just a roof. The church is the folks under it, and the ones driving hay to a neighbor on a Tuesday.
Acts 2:44–47
Jesus ate with everybody. So do we, and there's always more brisket.
Luke 15:2
Design notes
A site for a cowboy church that meets in a covered arena outside Weatherford. It is written for people who have not been inside a church in years and want to know, before they turn in at the gate, that their boots, their truck and their past will not be a problem.
Besley is a Clarendon, the letterform of saddle-shop signs, feed-store calendars and county fair posters, set heavy at 800 with its italic for the occasional aside. Libre Franklin carries the body because Franklin Gothic was Clarendon's partner on every handbill and newspaper ad, and it stays plain at phone sizes. Barlow Condensed handles labels and times like the numbers stencilled on a trailer gate.
The brown is latigo leather, the color of a saddle that has been oiled for twenty years. The blue is faded denim and the steel of a stock tank, and the background is caliche dust, the pale road base of every county road out here. At night the palette turns to a lit barn: warm tan on near-black, with the denim lifted so it still reads.
A classic top bar, because the people this church serves did not grow up on websites and should not have to learn one. Six plainly named pages and one action, Find the arena, always top right. The double rules and outlined cards borrow from rodeo programs and sale-barn catalogues.
The first screen is a photograph with no words on it at all, cowboys resting along a fence, with the headline set underneath like a caption and the place and time hanging in the margin. It says what this church is before it says anything about church, which is the whole point for someone sitting in the truck deciding whether to go in.
Find the arena is the main action, because the hardest part for a newcomer is a gravel turn-off with no steeple. The others are just as literal: See arena nights, Talk to Clint about baptism, Ask for hay or help, Give to the Hay Fund. Nobody here would say plan your visit.
Working ranch photography: roping in a dusty pen, riders crossing a pond at golden hour, a saddled horse tied at the rail. Portraits are weathered and unposed. We avoided anything that looks like a costume or a theme park, because the congregation would spot it in a second.
Body text is 17px with generous line spacing and every color pair passes 4.5:1 in both themes. Times are given as plain text, never only in images, and the visit page spells out ramps, golf-cart shuttles and the step-free path from the lot, because a lot of this congregation is past seventy or has been thrown off a horse.
Every text pairing is checked against WCAG 2.2 in both themes.
| Pairing | Sample | Ratio | WCAG |
|---|---|---|---|
| Body text on page | Aa | 13.38:1 | AAA |
| Body text on cards | Aa | 15.16:1 | AAA |
| Secondary text | Aa | 5.87:1 | AA |
| Links | Aa | 6.9:1 | AA |
| Button text | Aa | 8.58:1 | AAA |
| Accent label text | Aa | 7.98:1 | AAA |
| Text on dark bands | Aa | 13.38:1 | AAA |
| Muted text on dark bands | Aa | 7.16:1 | AAA |
| Text on brand bands | Aa | 8.58:1 | AAA |
| Muted text on brand bands | Aa | 5.62:1 | AA |
| Pairing | Sample | Ratio | WCAG |
|---|---|---|---|
| Body text on page | Aa | 14.9:1 | AAA |
| Body text on cards | Aa | 13.74:1 | AAA |
| Secondary text | Aa | 6.6:1 | AA |
| Links | Aa | 7.53:1 | AAA |
| Button text | Aa | 7.63:1 | AAA |
| Accent label text | Aa | 8.76:1 | AAA |
| Text on dark bands | Aa | 15.69:1 | AAA |
| Muted text on dark bands | Aa | 7.93:1 | AAA |
| Text on brand bands | Aa | 7.63:1 | AAA |
| Muted text on brand bands | Aa | 4.93:1 | AA |
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