He's not just any Lutheran pastor. This is the Rev. Conrad Warner, pastor of Hope Lutheran Church, St. Paul, and, for the past 17 years, the chaplain of the Minnesota Street Rod Association.

What are the chaplain's duties?

A few weddings and, once in a while, a funeral.

Warner knows his doctrine and he knows his cars. He owns about 25 of them, including a couple of Model A Fords, three 1940 Fords and a 1955 Ford, and he won't sell any of them.

"I just buy," Warner says. "When my wife looks in the pole barn, she just shakes her head. I bought this pickup off a guy in Iowa. I paid $100 for it. We drove back to St. Paul in it after I graduated from Dana College in Nebraska. We must have looked like the 'Beverly Hillbillies.' It was all piled high with our belongings, straight pipes coming out the bottom, with my banjo sticking up on one side."

Warner does all the car work himself, except for the welding, which he leaves to professional welder Fred Hollman. He rebuilds the engines and puts everything back together. In the 1940 Ford pickup, he even rebuilt the dashboard, added some gauges and put a radio in the glove compartment.

"My dad wasn't much interested in working on cars," Warner says. "I grew up on a farm about 50 miles north of here. The family still owns it, so that's where I store the cars. So when you're living on a farm, you're required to do some things. While I lived there, I worked on a Model A."

Warner has been at Hope Lutheran for eight years. Previously, he served congregations in Duluth and Forest Lake, Minn. He has also been a counselor for chemically dependent people. Through his interest in cars, of course, he got to know the street rod folks.

"They asked me to be the chaplain in 1981," Warner recalls. "So by 1983, we started to have a Sunday service. I would play my banjo or guitar. Then I would talk a little, and when people started to nod off, we'd quit.

"I even remember what I preached at that first service -- it was about a Minnesota Street Rod Association member who had an organ transplant and how grateful he was. We took up a collection for him."

Everybody in Warner's family is involved with street rods. His son rebuilt a Volkswagen Bug, and his daughter volunteers at the Back to the Fifties event every year. "She's got her eye on a couple of cars she wants us to build for her," Warner says. Warner's wife, Susan, attends many of the shows and appreciates the network of friends the couple have developed over the years.

One of those friends, the Rev. John Manz, pastor at Gloria Dei Lutheran Church in St. Paul, is having a Volkswagen restored in California.

"What I've heard is that people are attracted to the kind of car their parents had when they were kids" Manz says. "When I was a kid, my dad had a Fulbright scholarship and we lived abroad, and we went everywhere in a little Volkswagen Bug.

"It's kind of a social thing, from what I gather," Manz says of the street rod weekend and similar get-togethers. "I love the car shows. Some of those cars are beautiful. For me, it's the joy of something being reclaimed. There's an art piece to it. Just being able to join in the process."

Some cars have sentimental value, too. Warner, for example, still owns the car, a Model A Ford, that was used to teach his mother how to drive. "Everything is original," Warner says. "It only has 30,000 actual miles on it. I just don't think It would be fair to cut it up."

Warner says he doesn't know how much his cars are worth. There's no need to know, he says, since he isn't going to sell them. "When I can no longer have a vote in these things, then the family can do with them as they please."

Clark D. Morphew