John R.Rice's birth certificate gave only "R." as his middle name. Family members have suggested that the "R." stood for "Reece," "Robert" or "Richard." John Rice Himes, John R. Rice, The Last Revivalist of the 20th Century (Menomonee Falls, WI: Christ Walk Publications, 2021), 36. 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."Howard Edgar Moore, "The Emergence of Moderate Fundamentalism: John R. Rice and 'The Sword of the Lord,'" Ph.D. dissertation, George Washington University, 1990, 26. (Will Rice was also a Mason, an Odd Fellow, and "an ardent Klansman"—all of which memberships his son later believed were "mistakes.")John R. Rice, Lodges examined by the Bible : is it sinful for a Christian to have membership in secret orders? Findlay, Ohio : Fundamental Truth Publishers, 1943(?), 45. The death of Rice's mother when he was six years old left a lasting mark on him."I remember the November day when we laid her body away….The rain beat down upon us and a friendly neighbor held an umbrella over our heads. O death! death! DEATH! All the years my lonely heart has known the reality of death." "What Will Happen When Jesus Comes?" The Sword of the Lord (December 3, 1943), 4.
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.Rice later recalled that although he had participated in evangelistic ministry, he knew "very little about the Bible" and had "absorbed a great deal of evolutionary teaching" from his college courses. In 1921 he had a long conversation with William Jennings Bryan and realized that "both evolution and the Bible could not be true and that modernism was a deadly enemy of true Christianity." "Surrendered to Preach at Pacific Garden Mission: Dr. John R. Rice Tells About How He Came to be a Preacher," Sword of the Lord, December 25, 2009), 3; "How I Went to College," Sword of the Lord," June 17, 2016, 4. 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.Moore, 132. 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.No cause was ever assigned to the fire, which completely destroyed the uninsured building. Moore suggests that Norris may have been responsible for having the church burned. Moore, 125-26. When Rice refused to bend to Norris's will, the older man threatened him and then viciously attacked him in print.Norris wrote Rice, "No man will get anywhere in the cause of Fundamentalism in the North, East or outside Texas, if he fails to have the love and confidence of First Baptist Church," a virtual blackmail threat, which Norris attempted to make good. Moore, 99-100. 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"Viola Walden, John R. Rice: The Captain of Our Team (Murfreesboro, TN: Sword of the Lord Publishers, 1990), 34. In 1940, Rice offered advice to revivalists: "Preach on booze. Preach on the scarlet sin, adultery.... Preach on the dance, tell people that it is rotten as sin....Preach on the movies...made by vile, lewd people, holding up rotten moral standards, breaking down respect for marriage, pure love, hard work, God and the Bible.... Preach against lodges.... Preach against evolution and false cults. Preach on death, sin, Hell, judgment! Such preaching with boldness, with love, with tears, with Scripture, with faith, will bring great revivals, will save hardened sinners." "Evangelistic Preaching," The Sword of the Lord, (September 20, 1940), 2.
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.Moore, 129-131.
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.Barlow, 14.
When Rice re-entered full-time evangelism in 1940, he moved The Sword of the Lord to Wheaton, Illinois, partially to educate his daughters at Wheaton College, and partially to put distance between himself and Norris. Rice had already begun to publish his sermons, and at his death, The Sword of the Lord had printed more than 200 of his books and pamphlets, with more than 60 million copies in print. His sermon booklet, "What Must I Do to Be Saved?" was distributed in over 32 million copies in English, 8.5 million in Japanese, and nearly 2 million in Spanish. Perhaps his most popular books were Prayer--Asking and Receiving (1942) and The Home: Courtship, Marriage and Children (1945). Rice also wrote commentaries on books of the Bible, and he attacked humanism, worldliness (especially movies and dancing), evolution, fraternal lodges, and the Southern Baptist Convention.
A special target was religious liberalism. Rice recalled that while at the University of Chicago, he had heard a message by William Jennings Bryan and then observed a missionary's son turn to infidelity during the subsequent campus discussion. "It was a time of crisis in my life," recalled Rice. "Standing there on the steps of Mandel Hall that spring afternoon with dusk coming on, I felt burning in me a holy fire. I lifted my hand solemnly to God and said, 'If God gives me grace and I have opportunity to smite this awful unbelief that wrecks the faith of all it can, then smite it I will, so help me God!'"Barlow, 15, 19. Rice became a fierce opponent of the National Council of Churches, the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, and prominent liberal ministers, such as Harry Emerson Fosdick, Nels Ferré, and G. Bromley Oxnam.
The Sword circulation grew dramatically. It was 30,000 in 1940, 50,000 in 1946, and 90,000 in 1953, surpassing the circulation of the venerable Moody Monthly. Rice regularly published reports from evangelistic campaigns that became valuable publicity tools for approved revivalists. In 1946, he and other prominent evangelists adopted a code of ethics and a statement of faith to prevent "evangelists from being unduly criticized for commercialism and unethical practices."Moore, 171-72. The same year Bob Jones College conferred on him an honorary Litt. D. degree.
Evangelism conferences
In 1945 Rice began organizing evangelism conferences, which in 1974 became Sword of the Lord Conferences. These meetings drew influential evangelists, such as Hyman Appelman, Joe Henry Hankins, Jack MacArthur, and especially Bob Jones Sr., whom Rice called "the dean of all the evangelists." The conferences attracted large crowds of clergymen from various denominations, not just Baptists. For instance, the Fort Smith conference of August 1952 had an average attendance of six to eight hundred at the morning sessions and a thousand to two thousand in the evenings.Moore, 164-66. So many fundamentalist churches began to accept Rice's role as a clearing house for approved evangelists that to relieve some of the burden, he established a "Sword Extension Department," headed by his brother Bill. The Sword of the Lord even placed babies born to unwed mothers.Moore, 178; Walden, 204-05.
Separation from neo-evangelicals
For a brief period during the late 1940s, Rice and The Sword of the Lord held the allegiance of many orthodox Protestant Christians who would shortly be divided into Neo-Evangelical and Fundamentalist camps. While continuing to support older independent evangelists such as Bob Jones Sr. and Hyman Appelman, Rice now also endorsed the newer ministries of Youth for Christ, the Southern Baptist evangelist R. G. Lee, and especially, the young Billy Graham. By 1948, Rice believed Graham might become another Dwight L. Moody or Billy Sunday,"A Word from the Editor", The Sword of the Lord (November 19, 1948), 6. and Graham's evangelistic successes were regularly trumpeted in the pages of The Sword of the Lord.Moore, 201.
Meanwhile, Graham was distancing himself from fundamentalism. In 1954, Graham spoke to the faculty and student body of liberal Union Theological Seminary in New York, repeatedly referring to his ministry as "ecumenical". Presbyterian fundamentalist Carl McIntire picked up on this "compromising" speech in his Christian Beacon, but Rice continued to defend Graham in The Sword of the Lord. Graham used his considerable charm to remain in Rice's good graces for as long as possible, even inviting the older man to participate in his 1955 Glasgow campaign. At 59, Rice had never been out of the United States, and his response to Graham's red-carpet treatment in Scotland was more effusive praise.Moore, 220-21, 229-231.