Life circumstances helped Parrish
give God a hand in deaf ministry
___By Dan Martin
___Texas Baptist Communications
___At the end of this month, Bob Parrish will sign off as a member of the staff of the Baptist General Convention of Texas, but he plans to keep right on talking with his hands.
___On Feb. 28, Parrish will complete 21 years to the day as deaf work consultant with the BGCT. He does not plan to quit his God-called ministry of working with the deaf, just change the emphasis a bit.
___He's planning a trip to work with deaf youth in the Ukraine, and he looks forward to doing more signing in Russian, English and Spanish.
___Parrish grew up in Asheboro, N.C., and spent 10 years as a driver/fireman on the Greensboro Fire Department, near his hometown.
___While that put him in the footsteps of his father, his ultimate calling in life came as a result of two events that could have been tragedies.
___Parrish grew up attending a church of another denomination and made a "sort of" profession of faith in Christ as a teenager in a Baptist church, primarily because his girlfriend at the time was a member of that church. But it didn't take, and he dropped away from church attendance.
___As soon as he turned 21, he joined the Greensboro Fire Department. He married, and he and his wife, Nancy, had a son, Rob.
___"In 1965, we moved to a community where we could see a Baptist church steeple from our kitchen window. We had gotten away from church, but the church visited us, and we started going," he said.
___When Mrs. Parrish was pregnant with their second child, she contracted rubella, the dreaded red measles.
___"We were told the baby would be stillborn, and Nancy was advised to get an abortion," Parrish recalled, adding that when the baby, whom they named Debra, was born she appeared perfectly fine.
___The Parrishes were grateful, and they both soon made professions of faith in Jesus Christ.
___But Debra actually was profoundly deaf, a fact they did not discover until she was 6 months old.
___A doctor told them she never would speak and that he could not offer any help.
___"We went out to the car and cried and cried," Parrish recalled. "I was very disappointed. We had prayed and prayed that she would be normal, and now she was deaf.
___"I was so upset that I literally cursed God," he said, bowing his head in remorse even these 32 years later.
___But the family kept going to church, and the members ministered to them.
___"An old deacon in the church got my attention," Parrish recalled. He said, "Are you so important you can't raise this deaf child that God has given you? It is time for you to shut your mouth and quit griping and raise this child God has given you."
___The Parrishes recommitted themselves to Christ and started to work in the church. Soon Parrish felt God was calling him to "do something." He started to teach and to give his testimony, but he knew he was running from God's call.
___Another tragedy emerged. His father, 55, had a heart attack at his home and died in the back seat of Parrish's car on the way to the hospital.
___"My daughter's birth led me to Christ, but it was my dad's death that made me stop running from God's call," Parrish said.
___He resigned as a fireman and moved his family to Louisiana to attend New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary as a diploma student.
___To make ends meet, the 31-year-old "preacher boy" did a variety of jobs, while his wife worked as secretary at the seminary's child-care facility.
___He came home from class one day to their fourplex apartment, and a neighbor had brought home a brochure. "It had a picture of a girl signing the word 'church.' I had a deaf daughter, but that was the first time I had ever known deaf people could worship," he explained.
___The brochure was from the Southern Baptist Home Mission Board, and it led the family to First Baptist Church of New Orleans, where Larry Barnett, the hearing son of deaf parents, was minister to the deaf. Barnett made Parrish associate pastor and gave him an opportunity to discover and fulfill the ministry to which God had called him.
___After seminary, and after a year working as associate pastor, Parrish came into contact with another minister who gave him a chance--Carter Bearden, director of deaf work at the Home Mission Board.
___Parrish went to work at First Baptist Church of Little Rock, Ark., where he learned more about ministry to people with hearing impairment.
___"I was green as a gourd, but the people were kind, and there was a man in the church who helped me learn where I had made mistakes," Parrish said.
___After several years at the church, he became the coordinator of deaf work for the Arkansas Baptist Convention, a post he held until he came to Texas March 1, 1980.
___Across the years, he has worked not only with the deaf, but with the blind, resort ministries, summer missions, seminary extension, interfaith witness and evangelism.
___Retirement will allow him to keep his hands busy with his true calling--working with the hearing impaired.
The Baptist Standard
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