DATE: Sunday, August 3, 1997                TAG: 9707240582

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J3   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN

                                            LENGTH:   67 lines

NOTHING'S SACRED TO FORMER MINISTER

Historian Parker Barnes, the Eastern Shore News columnist, is a retired Methodist minister who doesn't go easy on his own profession.

He doesn't go easy on any profession, truth to tell, but that one least of all.

Included in the new collection of his columns, Bits and Pieces (Eastern Shore Printers, 100 pp., $21), one finds wry research on rogues, bounders, editors, pirates, politicians, physicians and - preachers.

``I go after ministers a lot because I was one,'' explains the septuagenarian, born and raised in Onley, currently resident of Onancock. ``I like to point out the foibles of my predecessors. I try to impart humor because people like to see others behaving much like they do.''

That is, comically.

At least, with the perspective of time.

Back in 1810, Barnes recounts, William R. Finney, respected churchman and secretary of the local Methodist conference, ``was tried for immoral conduct, found guilty and sentenced to remain silent in the congregation until he regained the confidence of his brethren.''

The charge against him: attending a ``show.''

``There might be a question here,'' muses Barnes, ``of who else had attended the show and seen the hapless Finney.''

Barnes also makes note of a 1917 adjuration to churches by the Eastern Shore Preachers' and Laymen's Association ``to condemn card parties, dances and horse races as a way of raising money for the Red Cross.''

Barnes is capable of admiration as well as bemusement. Case in point: The Rev. Elijah Baker, who came to Northampton County in 1776 and, on Easter Sunday, marched into the presence of a conservative Anglican congregation whose minister had not shown up. He proceeded to preach a straight-up Baptist sermon. This kind of subversive behavior persisted; in 1778 the Accomack County Court ordered Baker, in the county slam for vagrancy, to depart in lieu of a proper preaching credential.

Aroused Anglicans kidnapped him from jail and parked him on an outbound ship with fervent instructions to the captain to spirit him away to Europe.

On board, Baker performed a spontaneous prayer service that was so effective that the captain, converted, put the ardent Baptist back ashore.

Baker preached on, despite peltings of protest and assorted fruit.

``When he died in Salibury, Md., in 1798 and was buried in a long-lost grave,'' writes Barnes, ``he left a string of new Baptist churches behind him.''

Today Lower Northampton is the oldest on the Shore.

Barnes was editor of the Eastern Shore News from 1957 to 1969; he was 47 when he went into the United Methodist ministry.

``I didn't particularly want to be a minister,'' he admits. ``I liked being a newspaperman. I just felt it was necessary to do it.''

Barnes retired from the ministry in 1992. He and his wife of 44 years, Virginia, have two grown sons and five grandchildren. And Barnes is a newspaperman again, his column appearing once or twice monthly, as the spirit moves him amid his reading and carpentry.

He is also author of a three-volume history, From Pungoteague to Petersburg, on the incorporation of Eastern Shore militia into the 46th Virginia Infantry of the Civil War.

``I like to put a little humor in history,'' Barnes says. ``The column is entertainment to me and, I hope, to others. I don't take myself too seriously.''

Folks in search of edification comingled with wit may find it in Bits and Pieces, available in bookstores or by sending $21 to Box 475, Onancock 23417. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia

Wesleyan College.

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