Alliance minister finds beauty in barns

The Rev. Rich Hall finds beauty in barns.

Evidently others do, too, as two Facebook pages on which he shares his photos continue to grow, with A Preacher and His Barns having 13,000 followers and Hidden Barns having 57,000 followers.

“I’m a preacher, but I am not known for my preaching,” Hall told members of Alliance Rotary Club during a recent luncheon meeting. “I am known for my barn photography.”

A minister's view of barns: Rev. Rich Hall's photography, preaching

Hall, who recently became pastor of Wellspring Church after serving as pastor of Atwater Community Church for 11 years, hesitates to call himself a photographer, though.

“Photographers have equipment and know how to use lighting and stuff like that,” explained Hall, who also takes pictures of mills and churches. “I just go out with my iPhone and take photos and put them online to share with other people.”

Of course, as a man of God, Hall uses those beautiful barns to save souls on occasion.

Really, that’s how his Facebook fame got started.

Hall, an Atwater native who lived most of his adult life in Colorado, moved back to Ohio to help run Men’s Challenge, which is now known as Challenge Ministries. After living among beautiful landscapes of mountains and scenery filled with wildlife and nature, adjusting to the bleak Ohio winter was difficult.

That is, until he noticed a couple of barns and he stopped and took some pictures.

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“People don’t always realize the design and architecture that go into some of these magnificent barns,” he said. “Some of them are truly amazing.”

At the same time, he was working as a chaplain at a rehabilitation house in Hartville.

“We’d get to know these guys as we helped them get their lives order,” said Hall. “We would get them trained and get them a job, get them a place to live, get their relationships back in order, take care of fines and license issues. And then we would send them on their way and they would fall off the map and we wouldn’t hear from them.”

He started texting each one a picture of a barn each morning.

“I sent pictures of barns because that’s what I had,” said Hall, whose sisters suggested he add a Bible verse and devotionals. “What I was really doing was sending them a lifeline.”

Hall said drug dealers often take the phones of relapsed addicts and erase their contacts so nothing can be traced back to them.

“So those guys would have no way of know how to reach us, but that picture let them know that we were still there if they needed us,” said Hall.

The preacher decided to share those pictures and Bible verses with others, and it caught on.

So did his passion for finding barns and taking photos of them as he now has collected pictures of 6,231 distinct barns, including famous ones such as Manchester Round Barn in Auglaize County and Century Barn in Coshocton.

Hall says he likes to document the barns, noting they are a part of history. For most of his favorite local barns, he takes pictures a few times each year so that he has a record of how they have evolved throughout the years.

In addition to Facebook, Hall also runs barnpics.net, a website for devotionals and nightly Bible studies. He also does weekend barn talks in which he speaks for a few minutes about something in the Bible while standing in front of a barn. The barn doesn’t have anything to do with the message. It’s only a backdrop.

Hall said that God, at times, has used his passion for barns to help do His work.

Once, a man who was home from Alabama had stopped in front of the church in Atwater and was admiring it. When Hall asked if they would like any information, the man explained that he had wanted his wife to see the church as well as an old family barn in Marlboro Township, but lamented that the structure had been torn down. Hall inquired about where that barn had been located and was able to call up a photo of it, a copy of which is now framed in the Alabama man’s living room.

But Hall’s favorite story is much more profound.

“Our church (in Atwater) was having a plumbing problem one day and so these two young guys come out to take a look early on a Saturday morning,” said Hall. “Another elder from the church was there and he told these guys about my Facebook pages.”

One of the workers kept telling Hall about a barn he should go see in Lodi.

When the workers were finished with the plumbing project – a simple fix of what at first was thought to be a major problem – the young man kept mentioning the Lodi barn.

“I kept telling myself that I’m not going to drive an hour to just get a picture of one barn,” said Hall. “But then the guy sent me GPS coordinates. I figured I had nothing else to do, so I went looking for this barn.”

Hall headed west, but instead of taking a direct route, ended up meandering around after traffic was stopped by a train, and ended up in Seville. And the first thing he saw was a barn, of course.

Hall thought about stopping, but he saw two men were talking and he didn’t want to interrupt. He drove a couple blocks, and turned around. The two men were still there, and he thought about driving away again. But he didn’t.

Hall got out of his car and asked the men if he could take a couple pictures of the barn.

The owner was thrilled and started walking around the barn with Hall. The man told him all about the Giant of Seville, who at one time was believed to be the world’s tallest man. And on one part of the barn there were outlines of people, one being the Giant of Seville.

As Hall finished and got into his car, the gentleman kept on talking.

When Hall said that he should be leaving, the man said, “Tell me about your church.”

Hall said he immediately turned off his car and thought to himself, “what kind of preacher is so anxious to get someplace that he doesn’t have time to talk about God?”

Later that day, the barn owner prayed to give his life to Christ.

“I always told the ladies of the church that God had to sabotage the plumbing to get me to drive to Seville for that one guy that day,” said Hall. “For me, it just goes to show that God continues to put me where he needs me.”

And if it happens to be in the vicinity of a barn, that’s just fine with Hall.

This article originally appeared on The Alliance Review: Minister of Wellspring Church in Alliance finds beauty in barns