The Kiokee Baptist Church in Georgia was founded 250 years ago by a pastor who was converted during the religious revival that swept through colonial America, celebrated its semiquincentennial anniversary recently.

Thomas Hammond Jr., executive director of the Georgia Baptist Mission Board said, “Kiokee has an incredible heritage, but, more importantly, it is still impacting lives today, for 250 years, Kiokee has stayed true to its convictions, saving the lost, disciplining the saved, sending missionaries and supporting missions.”

He continued, “Countless souls have been saved as a result of the ministries and faithful members of this church and hundreds of other churches that it has helped to plant.”

Bert Pollard, a descendant of Kiokee’s founding pastor, Daniel Marshall, said the church is careful to make reaching lost souls its No. 1 priority.

“We still proclaim the timeless truth of the gospel,” Pollard said. “The greatest need of the human heart has not changed. The greatest need is Jesus, and our church proclaims Him as Lord and Savior. That’s why God has blessed us.”

Despite the massive changes in the world around them, Kiokee has managed to keep the evangelistic fervour of the group of hardscrabble farmers who started the church in 1772.

Marshall, the founding pastor, was a Connecticut native who planted churches in Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina before arriving in Georgia.

Hartman noted, “He was threatened with imprisonment by Anglican authorities in Augusta if he continued to preach in colonial Georgia. He did preach, and he was arrested.”

History records that the constable who arrested Marshall was converted, as was his jailer, who later became a deacon at Kiokee.

Marshall was one of an army of preachers unleashed on colonial America during the Great Awakening.

“The world has seldom witnessed a more consecrated devotion to Christ than was displayed by these mostly untrained and unsophisticated preachers of the Gospel,” says a historic account compiled by Kiokee Baptist Church.

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