John Kent (December 1766 – 15 November 1843) was an English Calvinist Baptist writer of hymns.

Kent was born of poor, religious parents in Devonshire, and was apprenticed to his father, a shipwright.

[1] He began to write verse in his youth, and worked hard to educate himself despite limited opportunities.

"[4] The simplicity and force of Kent's hymns' expression of Calvinism has limited their adoption outside a narrow segment of Christian churches, but they have been fairly broadly employed in various Predestinarian Baptist churches, with 51 of them contained in William Gadsby's A Selection of Hymns for Public Worship and twelve in Charles Spurgeon's Our Own Hymn Book.

[2] His most frequently-printed hymns include "What Cheering Words Are These", "O Thou, Before Whose Gracious Throne", "On Zion's Glorious Summit Stood", and "Where Two or Three Together Meet".