On a recent Sunday, Barber got up at 4:30 a.m., attended a deacons meeting at 7 and preached at his congregation’s 8:30 and 11 worship assemblies. After a two-hour afternoon nap, he drove to Dallas and flew to Nashville, Tennessee, for meetings at the Southern Baptist Convention headquarters.
After three nights there, he caught a ride to Louisville, Kentucky, where he stayed overnight Wednesday and spoke Thursday at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, the oldest of the SBC’s six seminaries. A canceled flight kept him in Louisville an extra night before he returned home Friday.
“It is stressful. It is time-consuming. I do enjoy it,” Barber said of his new job.
Back home, he rose before the sun that Saturday to help his daughter load a 1,000-pound heifer named Iris into a cattle trailer. They drove a half-hour to a dirt-floor events center in McKinney, a Dallas suburb, for a livestock show organized by local chapters of the 4-H Club and the National FFA Organization.
Barber greeted children who came to see the animals, used clippers to help Sarah shave Iris and periodically shoveled manure into a garbage can.
He also enjoyed a friendly chat with rancher Joni Brewer about the miniature Hereford cows her family brought to the show. Brewer attends a Southern Baptist church, but she had no clue that the man she was talking to was the new leader of the SBC.
“I live out in the country,” she said, “so you don’t always see all of those things.”
But James Callagher, who knows Barber through 4-H Club activities, described his friend as perfect for the job.
“The thing that sticks out to me is just authenticity,” said Callagher, who is Catholic. “He lives his faith, and as Christians we have a lot of common ground.”
In addition to such in-person contacts, Barber maintains an active presence on Twitter, where he has 20,000 followers and interacts with supporters and critics alike. Just in the last week, he posted pictures and videos of his cows, debated biblical qualifications for church leaders and shared SBC plans for Hurricane Ian relief.
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Barber and his family live in a church-owned parsonage, but last year they bought 107 acres of land where they’re raising their Santa Gertrudis beef cattle and where they intend to build a home when it becomes more affordable.
“If something happened to me, my wife would not only lose her husband but she’d lose her house, because that house goes with my job,” he said of the parsonage. “So we started making a more permanent plan at this stage of our lives.”
For now, they keep a recreational vehicle with a generator on the property, providing a convenient place for a cold drink or a hot shower.
In a recent sermon, Barber joked that a boyhood job chopping cotton and hoeing soybeans was what inspired him to go into ministry. Asked on the drive back from the livestock show if he’s now enjoying life as a farm owner, Barber smiled and nodded.
“Not only that, but I’m surviving everything else because of how I’m enjoying it,” he said. “It’s a great source of tranquility for me.
“To watch a herd of cattle around sunset slowly graze their way across the pasture, it’s very difficult to be stressed watching that,” Barber continued. “I mean, I can spend 15 minutes on the tractor disking up an area … and everything that you need to rest from goes away.”
This article originally appeared here.
