John R. Rice (December 11, 1895 – December 29, 1980) was a Baptist evangelist and pastor and the founding editor of The Sword of the Lord, an influential fundamentalist newspaper.
Childhood and education
John R. Rice was born in Cooke County, Texas, in 1895, the son of William H. and Sallie Elizabeth La Prade Rice, and the oldest of three brothers. Will Rice was a small businessman, a lay preacher, and a one-term state legislator "well respected in the community." (Will Rice was also a Mason, an Odd Fellow, and "an ardent Klansman"—all of which memberships his son later believed were "mistakes.") The death of John R. Rice's mother when he was six years old left a lasting mark on the man.
At twelve Rice made a profession of faith and joined his parents' Southern Baptist Church. After being educated in public schools, he earned a teaching certificate and taught at a local primary school. In 1916 Rice entered Decatur Baptist College in Decatur, Texas, riding his cow pony 120 miles to get there and borrowing $60 on the horse to make his first tuition payment. In 1918, he was drafted into the Army, but after his discharge the following year, he attended Baylor University, from which he graduated in 1920. Rice was attending graduate school at the University of Chicago and volunteering at the Pacific Garden Mission when he was called to the full-time ministry and returned to Texas. He married Lloys McClure Cooke, whom he had met at Decatur, and shortly thereafter he entered Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
Early ministry
Rice did not complete his seminary course but in 1923, took a position as the assistant pastor of a Southern Baptist church in Plainview, Texas. The following year he became senior pastor in Shamrock, Texas, an oil boomtown; but in 1926 he left the pastorate for evangelism. Settling in Fort Worth, he became an unofficial associate of J. Frank Norris, pastor of First Baptist Church, who was preparing to leave the Southern Baptist Convention. Rice himself broke with the Southern Baptists in 1927.
During the next few years, Rice held a series of successful revivals in Texas that were promoted by Norris. Rice made converts during his campaigns and then organized the new Christians into at least a half-dozen churches with the name "Fundamentalist Baptist," a title that had come to be associated with Norris. In July 1932, Rice held an open-air evangelistic campaign in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas and hundreds made professions of faith. There Rice organized the Fundamentalist Baptist Tabernacle of Dallas; but instead of moving on, he pastored the church for more than seven years. The congregation of more than a thousand members built two buildings, the first being destroyed by fire. When Rice refused to bend to Norris's will, the older man threatened him and then viciously attacked him in print. Nevertheless, Rice's sermons continued to include much of his mentor's sensationalism, with titles such as "Wild Oats in Dallas--How Dallas People Sow Them and How They Are Reaped," "The Dance--Child of the Brothel, Sister of Gambling and Drunkenness, Mother of Lust--Road to Hell!" and "Diseased, Decaying Bodies with Undying Maggots and Unquenched Fire in Hell"
Rice believed that the mission of churches was "not to take care of Christians" but to "win souls," a notion his mostly lower-middle-class church members did not wholeheartedly endorse. When Rice spent more time away from his pulpit to hold revivals elsewhere, a supply pastor and his supporters staged a coup. Rice decided to reenter evangelism. Yet before he did so, he encouraged the church to change its name from Fundamentalist Baptist Tabernacle to Galilean Baptist Church, thus distinguishing his ministry and that of the church from J. Frank Norris.
Sword of the Lord
In 1934, Rice founded The Sword of the Lord, a bi-weekly publication that grew into an influential fundamentalist Baptist newspaper. At first it was simply the publication of his Dallas church, handed out on the street and delivered door-to-door by Rice's daughters and other Sunday School children.