A congregation in Esterbrook, Wyoming, celebrates Buckboard Sunday once per year when churchgoers don their horses and buggies when traveling to worship. For 20 years, Esterbrook Church has hosted Buckboard Sunday to commemorate the old lifestyle their frontier ancestors lived.
The Wyoming church extends invitations to ranchers from Esterbrook and surrounding areas to ride on their horses and buckboards, a term that refers to a buggy, on Father’s Day. The event pays respect to the patriarchal leaders of families in an authentic, old-fashioned way.
“Horses were a big thing growing up, and we showed in Western pleasure,” local Lynnae Broten told Cowboy State Daily. “Usually when we visit mom and dad in Wyoming, it’s too hot to ride horses. So, this was very special,” she added.
Reportedly, Pastor Kirby Kudlak came up with the idea for Buckboard Sunday during a camping trip roughly two decades ago. The preacher explained that his church’s worship has become so popular due to its simple reliance on God and his word, a departure from the complexities of modern society.
Kudlak explained, “We don’t have a fancy service or anything. It’s just simple praise and worship, and then we go do something else.” The pastor emphasized that Scripture is their church’s ultimate authority, where they try to emulate their lives after Jesus Christ.
“I think that’s what people like about our church in general,” he said. “Especially in today’s world, with just so much stuff going on. We’re just pretty simple. Scripture is our authority, and what we try to live by, try to understand, and the basic thing there is love one another like Christ loved us. Treat each other with respect.”
The tight-knit church is full of displays which demonstrate the fundamental aspects of community that seem to be lost in a society where localism is on the decline and people are less involved in the environment around them. Lynnae described how, for her parent’s 50th wedding anniversary she made stained glass windows for the church’s front doors. “I did it for my parents, and for the community,” she said. “For how supportive they are of my parents. It’s important that they have friends here that they can rely on.”
Lynnae further detailed how it’s important to cherish the relationships we have with our fathers as our time with them on Earth is limited. She stated, “It seems like the older you get, the less and less time you get to spend with your father. But it’s important to have those connections, and you forget that when you’re in your middle-ages. You think nothing’s going to happen. Your parents are invincible.”
“My parents gave us that gift to be independent, but there’s not going to be as much time as opposed to when we first got married,” Lynnae said. “As they get older, it’s just more and more important to keep those connections. They gave us great tools, great morals, and now it’s time to give back,” she continued, describing the importance of returning the favor to elderly parents.
Featured image credit: Betty Wills, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cowboy_riding_flaxen_mane_sorrel.jpg