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First Appearances of Christianity in Kentucky

 By Lesley Barker

When teaching the Christian history of Kentucky to public school students, it is important to note that Christianity has not always been a positive experience here. Its earliest representation was anything but full of love and mercy. Students should understand that Christianity is a religion whose adherents are regular people who default, as we all do to some extent, to behaviors that tend to be self-serving. Since the first century of the Christian era throughout the world, great atrocities have been perpetrated in the name of the Christian God by people who use Christianity to sanitize their personal or national ambition and avarice. This does not discredit or endorse the Christian religion or its message.

Severn’s Valley Baptist Church in Elizabethtown may be the oldest church to have been established in Kentucky but these worshippers were not the first Christians to pass through Kentucky. Severn’s Valley Baptist Church met for the first time on June 18, 1781[1]. They met under a tree for worship where they committed themselves both to God and to each other. The next Kentucky church began on July 4 of the same year. This was the Cedar Creek Baptist Church in Nelson County. Pastor John Gerrard was involved with founding both of these churches. One day he went hunting and never came home so everyone concluded that he had been killed by an Indian[2].

Also in 1781, a group of families came to Kentucky with Lewis Craig and his brother Elijah. They were called the Traveling Church. They moved here from Virginia because the other Christians there disagreed with how they practiced their faith. They started the Gilbert Creek Baptist Church, Kentucky’s third church[3].

Another very important church was started by Peter Durrett who came to Kentucky with the Traveling Church. His nickname was Old Captain. He was an enslaved African American. His owner was a pastor named Joseph Craig. Peter Durrett preached at the Cane Ridge Revival in Bourbon County in 1801. He became the first pastor of the first African American church in Lexington.  This was the third African American Baptist church in the United States.

The earliest church services looked quite different than today’s Sunday morning gatherings. In the winter the congregation met in hastily erected round log shelters, and in the summer they met outdoors. No one dressed up. Both men and women wore moccasins in the winter and went barefoot in the summer. Everyone wore clothes made of buckskin and buffalo wool sewn with deer sinew. The men worshipped and prayed with their rifles ready and, if a meeting was threatened by Indians, it ended and everyone did what they needed to defend themselves[4].

The ancestors of these Native Americans had already met some people who called themselves Christians. More than two hundred years earlier, the first “Christians” passed through Kentucky with Hernando DeSoto. “Christian” was an unfortunate label for these Spaniards because they acted in ways that are not at all consistent with what the Bible requires and what most Christians confess to believe. It was May 7, 1541 at today’s Ft. Campbell, Kentucky. The next day the “Christians” arrived at today’s Hopkinsville where there was an Indian village. There, the “Christians” captured the women and children. They occupied the village and ate the food there for six days. Then, the “Christians” marched due north, taking all the corn stored in the villages along the way. They crossed the Ohio River near today’s Henderson on June 18, 1541.  DeSoto was trying to claim all the land and the peoples who lived here for the king of Spain according to a Catholic law called the Doctrine of Discovery[5].

Nearly three hundred years later, Native Americans were kicked out of Kentucky by President Andrew Jackson. A group of Cherokee Indians camped at Hopkinsville on their way out of Kentucky. There, two of their chiefs, Chief Fly Smith and Chief Whitepath died. By this time, many Cherokees had believed the Christian message. One Cherokee man, Jesse Bushyhead, was a Baptist pastor. He preached the sermon for these funerals[6].

 

 

 

 

 


[1] William D. Nowlin. Kentucky Baptist History. 1922. ONLINE at http://baptisthistoryhomepage.com/nowlin.3.first.churches.html ACCESSED 10/29/2020

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] https://doctrineofdiscovery.org/what-is-the-doctrine-of-discovery/

[6] Native Americans of Clay County & Kentucky. ONLINE at https://sites.google.com/site/claycountykentuckyusa/native-americans. ACCESSED 6/18/2020

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