John Rice - Pioneer Kentucky Baptist Preacher

People: Rev John Rice

In his pension deposition of 1832, John Rice mentioned the year 1791. According to J. H. Spencer [A History of Kentucky Baptists (Cincinnati, 1885), Vol. I, p. 170],

John Rice, the founder and first pastor of Shawnee Run Church, is believed to have been a native of North Carolina, and was born in 1760. He was among the first settlers of Lincoln County, Kentucky. He was a member of Gilbert’s Creek church of Separate Baptists, where he was ordained to the gospel ministry in 1785 and was probably the first preacher ordained in Kentucky. Soon after his ordination he settled on Shawnee Run. Here he preached to the settlers that occupied the beautiful valley of Shawnee Run, ‘til he gathered Baptists enough to constitute the first church which had any permanence in Mercer County. He was immediately installed as pastor, and continued to minister to it more than fifty- four years.

Strother Cook, a long-time member of Shawnee Run church, in an obituary written in 1843 for the Baptist Banner and Western Pioneer, wrote, ”In 1789 he [John Rice] brought his little family to this state on Shawnee Run, near a Baptist church, and joined there. The church had been constituted the year before. Soon after he was ordained by John Ba[i]ley, Robert Elkin, Joseph Bledso[e], and Martin Haggard.”

Whatever the exact date, it seems clear that John Rice was pastor at Shawnee Run by the early 1790s. Of course, “pastor” then did not mean the same thing it does now. Pastors were the regular preachers, who preached at the monthly services which were the custom of the frontier Baptist churches. The Separate Baptists had a firm tradition of not paying their ministers for their services. The pastor was expected to earn his living “in the world,” just like his people did. John Rice undoubtedly made his living as a farmer. (According to Mercer County records, in 1792 John Rice paid tax on two horses and eleven cattle. By 1795 he had added six more cattle. Also in 1795, he purchased about fifty-five acres of land near Shawnee Run Creek for the price of four pounds.) And since the churches met only once a month, he preached at other churches as well as Shawnee Run, most notably the Salt River church in Mercer County.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, then, in 1800, John Rice in his prime at age forty was witness to some of the most historically significant events in the history of Baptists in Kentucky and the nation.