When we arrived, the sun was shining brightly. As we parked the car nearby, our ears rang with the sounds of adolescents screaming vociferously as they dropped from incredible heights on vomit-inducing rides. The smell of deep-fried foods wafted over the heads of the thousands of people streaming through the gates.

This was the Royal Queensland Show, its formal name since its inception in 1876. For everyone today, it is known as the Ekka.

Ekka is short for ‘Exhibition’, and what an exhibition it is. From the sideshow alley, to the twirling, spinning rides, to the smell of the livestock as they patiently await their turn, the Ekka is a fantastic, albeit, expensive way to spend a family day together.

I’ll be the first to admit it: I am allergic to spending money on amusement park rides. As we walked through the alleys, the girls pleaded with us to fly down the fifteen-second slide. ‘It’s only three dollars, Daddy!’ they shouted. ‘Look at that!’ Greta said, ‘A trampoline!’ I walked to the window and asked how much it would cost for my daughter to jump on the exact same thing that is in our backyard. Chomping her gum like a cow with her cud, the bored-looking lady at the ticket window said, ‘Ten dollars. No refunds.’ Ten bucks? To jump on a trampoline?

I almost swallowed my uvula.

I looked at the expectant smiles of the girls. ‘You know, ladies, what would be really fun? Let’s go look at the animals! You don’t get to see cows and chickens very often, do you?’

Elsa rolled her almost teenage eyes. ‘We live in the Lockyer Valley, Dad.’

Keeping my wallet firmly in my pocket, I gathered my family together to go look at cows.

Almost wading through the smell of livestock, we arrived at the pens. As we wandered around, I noticed something amazing: there was a woman grooming a black-and-white cow. She was combing the hair on its back into a bovine Mohawk (I called it a cowhawk). Then she used clippers to make the hair uniform in length. It wasn’t so much that she was clipping the hair of the cow that made me laugh; it was her shirt that said, ‘Pimp My Cow’. That was the name of her business, and her business was to make cows look as good as possible. I thought at first the T-shirt was a misspelling — they forgot the ‘r’ from ‘primp’, but no, no; ‘pimp’ was probably made into a verb by a rapping recording artist from the United States.

I don’t think we should go so far as to think about ‘pimping’ church (it really doesn’t have a good ring), but we can think about how ‘church’ can have a makeover. What things need to be trimmed? What things need to be cleaned up? How can we make the church, the body of believers, more enticing to those who are enticed by non-belief? How can we ‘show’ and ‘exhibit’ the life of the church as a wonderful opportunity for life in community and life in faith?

Good questions for churches on the prairie.

Reid Matthias is pastor of Green Pastures Lutheran Church, Lockrose, Queensland.