Joseph Barker (minister)

Joseph Barker (11 May 1806 – 15 September 1875) was an English preacher, author, and controversialist. Of changeable views, he spent a period of his life in the United States, where he associated with leading abolitionists.

He was born 11 May 1806, at Bramley, near Leeds, where his father was employed in the woollen manufacture. Joseph was the fourth son of a family of eleven, and was engaged as a wool-spinner. His childhood was one of privation, and his education was chiefly at a Sunday school. His parents were Wesleyans; he was enrolled a member of the community, in which he became an occasional preacher, and then a home missionary and exhorter. After about three years of probation and trial, he was a local preacher. He was then sent to a Methodist school at Leeds, kept by James Sigston.

Leaving the Wesleyan communion, he joined the ministry of the Methodist New Connexion. In this body he officiated for a year, 1828–9, as assistant to the superintendent of the Liverpool circuit, which he left with a recommendation to go out as a travelling preacher, on trial. Barker was appointed successively to the Hanley circuit 1829–30, and to the Halifax circuit 1830–1. At Halifax, contrary to the rule for preachers of his standing, he married a Miss Salt, of Betley, in Staffordshire, and was sentenced by the next conference to lose a year of his probation. He went on to Blyth, in the Newcastle-on-Tyne circuit, 1831–2, a disciplinary migration; and to the Sunderland circuit for six months, 1832–3, with residence at Durham. Popular if accused of heretical views, he was in 1833 admitted into ‘full connexion,’ and appointed, by an innovation, the third married preacher at Sheffield, 1833–5. While at Sheffield and afterwards in the Chester circuit, 1835–7, Barker strongly advocated teetotalism. From 1837 to 1840 he conducted a weekly periodical called The Evangelical Reformer. At the conference of 1839 he was removed from Mossley to Gateshead, a comparatively new circuit, and there denounced socialism.

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