• Alum turns passion for barbecue into service for El Paso’s homeless

    bbq-sept15

    Many barbecue fans travel all over Texas for great brisket and sausage, making it their mission to find the state’s best barbecue. As a Baylor student, Blake Barrow was one of them, regularly driving over 100 miles to find the best barbecue. Now, he’s making barbecue a part of his mission — by serving brisket, sausage and ribs, he hopes to provide an additional service to the homeless.

    Blake Barrow (BA ’80, MA ’83, JD ’88) is the CEO of Rescue Mission of El Paso, an organization that provides shelter, meals, Christian services and relapse prevention programs to El Paso’s homeless. To the people he serves, he’s also known for something else: his “hallelujah barbecue,” brisket and sausage so good that the food is opening doors for opportunities to expand Rescue Mission of El Paso’s services and provide employment for those hoping to better their lives.

    Hallelujah BBQ currently operates as a catering business, but Barrow’s dreams go even further; next year, Rescue Mission of El Paso plans to open a restaurant by the same name. The restaurant would be staffed by those the mission serves, providing them with an opportunity to work and improve the outlook for themselves and their families, train them for future employment and raise money for Rescue Mission of El Paso to boot. The dream is already providing work opportunities; a work crew from the mission is currently remodeling the interior of the building that will house the restaurant.

    Adding barbecue might seem like an unlikely move for a mission, but Barrow is no stranger to making moves that could have seemed unexpected, even to him. In 1997, he gave up a successful law practice to serve full-time at the rescue mission, despite the fact that, in his words, he “still (doesn’t) know everything about how to run a rescue mission. There is a lesson here that God is able to use us in the areas where we think we are the weakest, if we allow God to work through us.”

    But while Barrow is humble about his credentials to run a rescue mission (even as it has expanded during his time as CEO), he’s quite confident in his ‘cue. He predicts that when the restaurant opens, “We’ll have a line out the door.”

    Sic ’em, Blake and Hallelujah BBQ!