John R. Rice - Sword of The Lord

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 .

When Rice re-entered full-time evangelism in 1940, he moved The Sword of the Lord to Wheaton, Illinois, in part to have access to Wheaton College for his growing daughters, in part to put geographical 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!'" 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's circulation grew dramatically. It was thirty thousand in 1940, fifty thousand in 1946, and ninety thousand 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." The same year Bob Jones College conferred on him an honorary Litt. D. degree.