c. 2003 Religion News Service

MOBILE, Ala. _ About 20 years ago, Gene DeVine saved a mechanical bull. He’s been preaching ever since.

It’s not exactly what the bow-legged Baptist set out to do. Born in Mobile, DeVine claims he rode horses before he could walk.

“It was part of the deal,” said DeVine, who moved to Florida when he was a young boy. “As I got older, I just grew up on ’em. … I rode ’em here on the farm and run cows.”

Now 50, DeVine still rides horses and ropes calves. But the quintessential cowboy’s work is no longer confined to a rodeo pen. Since 1984, DeVine has traveled from church to church around the Southeast, sharing his love of his Messiah and a mechanical bull.

“I want to tell you a little bit about how God worked in my life as a cowboy and me trying to live a cowboy life and trying to live a Christian life,” said DeVine, warming up a group of singles gathered recently at Mobile’s Dayspring Baptist Church. “I walked on both sides pretty good.”

For as long as he can remember, DeVine has been pure cowboy.

“I never owned a pair of shoes,” said DeVine, a resident of Cantonment, Fla. “My first pair of shoes was a pair of boots, and that’s all that’s been on these feet is boots. I lettered in track wearing boots.”

He’s not kidding.

For years, his attire set him apart from his fellow Floridians.

Then, in 1980, Paramount Pictures released “Urban Cowboy.” Overnight, everybody wanted to wear the hats and boots he’d worn his whole life.

“For once, I was just like everybody else,” he said.

DeVine, who had roped calves competitively since he was a teenager, found himself on the mechanical bull bar circuit.

He started slow, just wanting to ride a mechanical bull one time. “The only place I could find one was a nightclub,” he remembered. “I said, `Man, I can’t go down there, I’m a Christian man.”’

But in time, his friends told him of a tavern that had a mechanical bull set up in a room separate from the bar.

“I eased on there, three folks in there, paid my two dollars, jumped on that bull,” DeVine said. “That thing was fun.”

Before he left that night, DeVine asked to have the mechanical bull set to its most difficult level. He rode successfully.

“The place went wild. I got a standing ovation.”

Then the manager offered him a free drink. With everyone listening, the man now known as “The Gospel Cowboy” ordered a glass of milk.

“You’ve been in a situation where you could tell what the world wanted to hear,” he said. “It’s all about being accepted. … They’ll accept you if you do what they do, but they’ll respect you if you tell ’em what’s really on your heart. Don’t be afraid to say, `I’ll take Jesus. I’ll take Jesus.”’

That night, DeVine said, he went home, black, blue and ready to ride again.

“I got caught up in this deal,” he said, recalling how he’d ride mechanical bulls on Saturday nights, then hurry home to teach Sunday school the next morning.

Eventually friends who knew of his prowess challenged him to ride a real bull for the regulation eight-second stretch.

Soon a regular on the bull-riding circuit, DeVine found himself too busy to teach Sunday school or participate in his church.

“I wasn’t doin’ nothin’ wrong,” DeVine said. “I just wasn’t doin’ what God wanted.

“God kept saying, `I want to use you. I want to use you.”’

DeVine said he told God to reconsider.

“I was hard-headed.” He said he told the Almighty: “`God, you call somebody else. Because I want to be a cowboy and I don’t see nowhere you can use a cowboy in church. There ain’t nowhere you can use me.”’

The perspective is a common one among Christians, said Charlie Granade, minister to singles at Dayspring Baptist Church.

“Everybody faces a question of significance,” Granade said. “For so long, I didn’t even think that God could use me.”

In 1981, DeVine said, God decided to seize his attention.

DeVine and his dad were rounding up bulls when the young cowboy noticed a stray.

“I told Daddy, `I better run out there and get that one bull and bring him back because I don’t want the rest of ’em to tear out,”’ he said. “So I went trotting off out there right in front of him, on foot, nothing but just me. I knew that old bull. I knew every one of ’em like the back of my hand.

“I walked up there pretty close to him, I just throwed my hands up to shoo him, to turn him, to take him back to the pen. And all of a sudden he charged.”

DeVine remembers being thrown straight up in the air.

“As I was goin’ up, I realized one thing: I was fixin’ to come back down, and that bull was still going to be there. And there wasn’t going to be no clown there to get him off of me. … I knew it was time to pray, but I had to have a short prayer.”

He shouted “Help!” three times. “God heard that prayer,” DeVine said, and his father came running to distract the bull. DeVine escaped.

Then his father told him to go teach the bull a lesson _ with a stick. The bull charged again, and again, DeVine said, he prayed.

This time, his father hopped in a truck and broadsided the bull. “That old bull jumped up, looked at me, looked at the truck, then run off,” DeVine said.

That day, DeVine said, he realized that “death was just a breath away.” At last, he said, he surrendered himself to God. “God changed the desires of my heart,” DeVine said.

“I still cowboyed,” he said, but he also began to share his testimony. “He took everything that I ran from and turned it around and allowed me to use it for his glory.”

In 1980, DeVine bought the first mechanical bull he ever rode _ one, he says, that first bucked bar patrons at Gilley’s Club in Pasadena, Texas, the club made famous in “Urban Cowboy.” Four years later he had a fiberglass hull custom-built for it.

The bull “got a new body, washed white as snow,” he told the laughing crowd at Dayspring Baptist Church. “I want y’all to know my bull is saved now.”

“I lived for an eight-second high, folks. Eight seconds, one weekend to the next. I traded that high in for an eternal high that’s every day. I live on a high now every day. I look for Jesus every day. I look for something he’s going to do every day.”

KRE END CAMPBELL