Circuit rider mixes preaching and horse sense : Looking every bit the part, Robert Harris takes his brand of old-time religion to Southern hamlets.

Like something from an American history text, Robert E. Harris saunters into town atop his steadfast steed, Sundance, carrying only a weathered Bible and some religious pamphlets.

Except for his white shirt, he is adorned in black: frock coat, pants, string tie and a 10-gallon Stetson. Dismounting, he turns to several astonished folks and begins preaching a simple Christian message.

He does this every day there is good weather here in the mountain towns of western North Carolina. Harris is a circuit rider, and, according to local lore, he is the last one in the country.

Circuit riders were the preachers who, in the 18th and 19th centuries, traveled on horseback into the wild American frontier, stopping wherever people gathered--in cabins, taverns, even by the side of the road. Most of them were Methodists, although all Protestant denominations had their riders.

At age 68, Harris has been riding his own circuit now for a dozen years. It is not unusual to find this slight, white-haired man with piercing blue eyes hunkered down with a pack of leather-garbed motorcycle riders or some muscular prisoners. He appears at craft shows and amusement parks, stock car races and hang-gliding contests. He is a regular at the rest stops along Interstate 40 east of Knoxville, Tenn.

And in this time of slick, millionaire preachers and defrocked evangelists, Harris seems the ultimate oddball, a description he heartily accepts.

Said Bob Terrell, a columnist for the Asheville Citizen-Times: “He is not eccentric, but he takes an odd approach to his work and it is odd. But he believes that is the way to reach people that other preachers couldn’t. He is a good old country fellow. Everybody likes him.”

Harris refuses to pass a collection plate. Instead, he funds his operation on the small donations sent to him in the mail and the contributions of people who attend the little church he built down the road from his house. One recent Sunday, churchgoers left $170 on a table as they left.

“I haven’t passed a collection plate in 30 years,” said Harris, who has been preaching since he was 17. “I don’t want people to feel like I want something from them. I have lived purely by faith.”

He lives alone in a neat-as-a-pin, five-room farmhouse his parents built just outside Asheville, using the same furnishings they did when they set up housekeeping there in 1933. He has never married. His parents died years ago.

Harris is well known to anyone in the area who rises early or stays up late to watch television. He does the devotions that begin and end each day’s programming on WBIR-TV in Knoxville. Yet he has no television set himself.

“I told the Lord I would use TV but not let TV use me,” he explained. In the 1950s, he had a 30-minute television program, but dropped it when televangelists seemed to him to be little more than panhandlers begging for bucks.

He has also had several radio programs, including “The Nightwatch Pastor,” a talk show where a caller once referred to him as the “poor man’s Billy Graham.” Terrell remembers that every night someone would call Harris and try to outsmart him. One evening a fellow called and asked what the Bible said about a minister who regularly shouted out sermons to anyone who would listen in Asheville’s Pritchard Park.

“Harris said: ‘To my knowledge, the Bible doesn’t mention Pritchard Park.’ That shows how quick his mind is,” Terrell said.

At his white clapboard church, Harris does not encourage membership, just attendance. And although he is a Baptist, he always has something good to say about other religions. He also preaches at a drive-in church in an Asheville shopping center and regularly visits jails, prisons and housing projects.

“The best place to work is at the rest areas,” Harris said. “You have people from all over the world. In 15 minutes one day, I talked with people from Canada, New Zealand and India. I figure if I stay here long enough, the world will come to me.”

Harris knows people criticize him for being a showman, but he responds: “I use the showmanship to get the attention of the people. If I came up as a preacher handing out tracts, I wouldn’t get anywhere.”

Adds Terrell: “Harris is never averse to being ridiculed. He uses it to reach the people. He starts off slow and then socks it to them.”