John R. Rice (pastor)

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 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.

[6] In July 1932, Rice held an open-air evangelistic campaign in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas and hundreds made professions of faith.

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.

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.

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.

'"[12] 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.

[14] 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.

[15] 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.

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.

[20] When the seventy-five-year-old Bob Jones Sr. decided to draw the line of demarcation between fundamentalism and neo-evangelicalism, Rice agreed to chair the resolutions committee at a meeting of fundamentalist leaders in Chicago held on December 26, 1958.

Ninety attendees signed a pledge, written by Rice's committee, promising not to participate in evangelistic campaigns sponsored by clergymen who denied such cardinal doctrines of orthodox Christian belief as the inspiration of the Bible, the virgin birth, and the bodily resurrection of Christ.

[22] Rice had clearly cast his lot with such separatist fundamentalists as Carl McIntire, Robert T. Ketcham, W. O. H. Garman, George Beauchamp Vick, Lee Roberson, Oliver B. Greene, and Archer Weniger, while the majority of Protestant evangelicals opted for a less militant position.

Rice was also refused the use of a conference center in Toccoa, Georgia, where he had held Sword rallies for thirteen years, because its founder, R. G. LeTourneau, had sided with neo-evangelicalism.

Even more distressing to Rice was the break with radio preacher Charles E. Fuller, whose namesake seminary quickly moved to the vanguard of the neo-evangelical movement.

One was Jack Hyles, who in 1959 had become the pastor of First Baptist Church of Hammond, Indiana; another was Curtis Hutson, who eventually became Rice's successor.

[29] Rice argued that his position on separation was the same as that held by Bob Jones Sr. and that there was "nobody living in this world who was more intimately acquainted" with the late evangelist.

Unlike the split with Billy Graham, however, Rice's refusal to agree with separationist fundamentalists like Bob Jones Jr. and Ian Paisley only enhanced the growth of The Sword.

His book Home, Courtship, Marriage and Children was written almost entirely on the road, one chapter dictated on a train between Chicago and Albany, most of another while waiting for a plane at LaGuardia.

A daughter who took a semester out of college to play the piano for Rice in two large revivals was there also pressed into service taking his dictation and typing the manuscript of the final chapters of the book.

[35] At 81, with a hearing aid, suffering from arthritis, and aware that his memory was "not quick as it was years ago," Rice still managed to be at the office most mornings at 6:30.