COVID stole Columbia pastor, chaplain’s life suddenly, but ‘he fought the good fight’
The last thing Shannon Barrett told her father was to fight.
“I said, ‘Do your best. You fight. You hear me? You fight,’” she said. “And his last words to me were, ‘I’m going to fight the good fight of faith.’ ...
“And he did just that. He fought the good fight of faith his whole life.”
Her father, Terry Joel Barrett, died just two weeks later, Jan. 31, of COVID-19 at the W.J.B. Dorn veterans hospital in Columbia. He lived 69 years of service — as an Army soldier, a sheriff’s officer, a pastor and a chaplain. Above all, he was known as a man of faith.
His wife, Kathleen, the woman he loved for 46 years, is in the hospital now fighting the same virus that took his life so suddenly.
“She’s a fighter. We are praying. Our faith is in God, which we learned that from our father,” said Shannon, the youngest of the Barretts’ three children. “I’m not going to lie to you — right now, it’s very tough. We are just leaning and depending on the presence of God.”
Barrett was a man of the cloth and of the uniform, a man of faith and of service. As a chaplain for the Richland County Sheriff’s Department and the pastor of a Columbia church, Barrett brought closure and comfort to victims of crimes, mentorship and guidance to fellow officers of the law, teaching and encouragement to his family, friends and congregation.
Barrett knew the word of God well, but he didn’t just know what it said; he mixed knowledge with faith, believing deeply in the truth and power of the scriptures. That’s what he urged his congregation to do in one of his later sermons at Resurrection Life Ministries church, delivered last fall.
Teaching from the book of Hebrews on Nov. 15, he encouraged his congregation to have faith in the things that haven’t yet come to pass, and he asked them to rest in the assurance of God’s faithfulness.
“If he goes through it with me,” Barrett said, “as long as he is with me, I know that I’m going to make it, because that’s just what he does. He won’t leave you alone. He won’t forsake you. But he’ll always be there with you.”
As the founder and pastor of Resurrection Life Ministries church in Columbia, Barrett folded his family into every angle of his spiritual service. He shared the pulpit with Kathleen, and their children have been instrumental in leading worship.
The Rev. Ellis White, now pastor of Edisto Fork United Methodist Church in Orangeburg, grew in faith with Barrett as they both trained to be ministers. White considered his friend a big brother to himself and “a champion of the least of these.”
“He was very giving and compassionate to whoever he met. No airs, no false fronts. He was who he was whenever you met him,” White said.
Well before Barrett studied theology and became an ordained Methodist minister, his colleagues at the Richland County Sheriff’s Department could see that “he’s got a preacher in him,” said Sheriff Leon Lott.
Lott and Barrett knew one another long before they were Sheriff Lott and Chaplain Barrett.
Both joined the Richland County Sheriff’s Department in the mid-1970s as patrol officers and progressed through the ranks. Lott is one of the few remaining members of the department who knew Barrett as an investigator first and a chaplain second.
“You’ve got different generations who worked here to look at him in a different way,” Lott said. “To live a different life but also to be able to excel in both of them — he excelled as a deputy, but he also excelled as a man of God.”
Deputy Chief Stan Smith knew Barrett first and foremost as a teacher and a mentor. Barrett was his first supervisor when he joined the uniformed ranks in the mid-’80s, and Barrett was the one he was never afraid to approach with questions, Smith said.
“He would think things out so carefully, never make a rash comment or decision,” Smith said.
Special Deputy Debo Hayes knew him as a friend as much as a colleague, a “special person” who always wore a big smile and loved a good barbecued Boston butt.
But everyone who’d worked with Barrett for any length of time knew him as a people person — “People mattered to him,” Hayes said. “I don’t know whether it’s his godly spirit or what, but he could get people to just open up and tell all their business.”
Ask almost anyone at the sheriff’s department to tell a story about Barrett, and it’s likely they’ll all tell of the time Barrett, as a investigations lieutenant, coaxed a murder suspect to confess his side of the story. When no one else could get the man to open up, Barrett’s ability to empathize and listen deeply seemed to reach the suspect in a way no one else could.
Later as a chaplain — Barrett returned to the sheriff’s department in a ministerial role in 2015 after retiring from full service in 2012 — Barrett seemed able to connect with hurting deputies in a way others could not “because he’d been a cop first,” Lott said. “He’s done everything the deputies were out there doing, so he was able to relate to him.”
In all his roles in life, there was a natural overlap, from law enforcement to Christian ministry to his family life.
Shannon remembers her father driving herself and her brother, Terrence, to a piano practice when they witnessed a hit-and-run on Garners Ferry Road. He took the time to call it in before carrying on with the children. At 8 years old, it was the first time Shannon had seen her dad in action.
“You always see him as big dad, strong dad, but to see him in that area, I was like, ‘Wow!’” she remembered. “My brother and I were so excited and, most of all, proud, because it was like, you really do your job and do it well.”
Barrett was never fully off-duty, as a cop or a pastor.
“Oh my goodness, I tell him all the time, ‘You really have to be called to be a shepherd, because people’s needs don’t stop from 9 to 5,’” said Yolanda Barrett-Rhodes, the eldest of Barrett’s three children. “He was available all the time. ... That is what he loved. He loved counseling. He loved comforting. He loved ministering, and he taught us to do that same. He and my mom just gave us a really rich inheritance with that.”
As much for his preaching, in his slow, deliberate style, Barrett was known for his singing. He studied music on a full scholarship at Tuskegee Institute in his home state of Alabama before joining the Army and, later, the sheriff’s department.
He wrote his own worship melodies. Some mornings, Shannon said, her father would wake up with a song on his heart. “I’m going to record it on my phone. I want you to listen to it,” he’d tell her.
It was one of his gifts.
In his death, Barrett leaves behind his wife, Kathleen; their three children, Yolanda, Terrence and Shannon; and two grandsons, Jaxon and Josiah. The family is making memorial arrangements.
