By RAY WADDLE

What does it mean to love a city?

For 40 years Bill Barnes has embodied his answer: listen to the left-out, hold politicians accountable, defy the pessimists, heal the weak links in the chain of life.

From his south Nashville perch, Barnes founded an interracial church, dignified the struggles of the Edgehill neighborhood by linking them to the dramas of the Bible, and helped shape half a century of local history.

There is nothing fashionable about it. Many churches are in retreat from harsh inner-city life and its stubborn problems.

But Barnes, now 75, has poured his story into a book, To Love A City, to inspire new generations to fight for "the least of these."

After a week of horrific news stretching from Baghdad to Blacksburg, it is gratifying to write about Bill Barnes.

As a Nashville teenager, he knew the grinding despair of poverty after his father, a barber, was stricken with Parkinsons and lost his business. It did not derail Barnes into sullen bitterness but fueled a calling.

"The anger, the indignation, the embarrassment were all indelible," he writes. "I knew what (poverty) felt like, and I wanted the humiliation lifted, for others as well as myself."

Mentors were pivotal. McKendree Methodist pastor Joseph King Vivion persuaded him into ministry when Barnes was still in junior high. He managed through Vanderbilt, the Army, and Yale Divinity School.

He worked in Harlem with lawyer/activist William Stringfellow. He met Martin Luther King Jr. By 1966, amid race riots and the War on Poverty, he had returned to Nashville and was asked to start a multiracial church in low-income Edgehill.

It almost didnt happen. Church leaders dithered, and seed money dried up. Only when Scarritt College teacher Alice Cobb offered Barnes some part-time teaching work did the infant congregation have an income stream.

Barnes pastored Edgehill United Methodist Church 30 years, an unheard of tenure in Methodism. He retired in 1996, leaving a legacy of church after-school tutoring, HIV/AIDS ministries, programs for elderly, and Organized Neighbors of Edgehill.

Foreign travel always deepened his hope and understanding of communal possibility. Sweden impressed him as a society achieving solid health care and social security. There, the government is not the enemy.

For Barnes, biblical vocation means immersion in both systematic theology and the Metro Nashville budget. He finds strategies for fair housing in the Book of Amos, a roadmap to moral politics in teachings of Jesus.

His counsel today to the young heroes who would follow his path: "Soak up the (biblical) Story over and over ... because repetition is a safeguard against the corrosive power of shrill voices in our society dismissing Jesus priorities as sentimental and irrelevant in the real world. Rowing upstream requires constant effort."