kentucky Newspiration: Issues Published by the Church of God from 1956 to 2001

It all started in 1892 at Dodge, Kentucky—where the L&E Junction met the C&O Railroad at the Clark and Montgomery County lines— when three preachers, A. J. Kilpatrick, J. N. Howard, and W. T. Carter deboarded the train. They had come by request of the W. W. Stevenson family by writing to the Gospel Trumpet to hold a meeting as a “Calls from the Field”.  

 The Gospel Trumpet was a holiness newspaper for the Church of God Reformation movement. The editor was D.S. Warner. Warner’s Reformation movement was calling people out of sects and sin. They proclaimed one church, the church of God. They believed not only in salvation from sin, but full salvation. Full salvation meant they believed in sanctification as a work of grace following salvation that freed a believer from habitual sinning. A Christian lived holy. They were called “the saints.” These people also believed in divine healing and a blind lady was soon healed and regained her sight in the Mt. Sterling Court House.

W. T. Carter really liked Kentucky and bought property in Jeffersonville, marrying a local girl there. A camp meeting was started in Jeffersonville that preceded Winchester and had attendances of 5,000 to 10,000 persons.

From this beginning, the message began to travel across the Blue Grass state. Advances were made. Congregations were planted. Pioneer preachers such as W. F. Chapel, Little Joe Lykins, Moses Kitchen, Clark T. Farley, Walter Strong, and many others would hold a meeting in new territory, baptize around 100 converts, and form a new congregation. They experienced this over and over.  

As the work progressed, so did the need for better communication and promotion of the work. The brethren began publishing a state newsletter, Kentucky Newspiration, around the year 1954.  The earliest copy we have is March-April, 1956 which is Volume 3, Number 2. We have copies through the fall of 2001, with many missing issues in-between.

We found these copies in the library at Anderson University in Anderson, Indiana. The editor had added the library to the mailing list. We are indebted to Librarian Delena Goodman and other library workers for faithfully preserving our state newsletter over the years. This collection of newsletters became property of the Archives of the Church of God in Anderson, now housed in Nicholson Library. We thank Archivist Nic Stanton-Roark for loaning us the original copies for scanning to make a digital file of them.

We do have many missing editions. Will we ever find them? We hope everyone will look. There may be copies in church libraries, ministers’ libraries, homes of the saints, etc. We are interested in any copies of the Kentucky Newspiration that are found and can be added to this collection.

If you are interested in the history of the Church of God Reformation movement in Kentucky, you may also be interested in these books and journals:

            When the Trumpet Sounded by C.E. Brown

            Special Incidents in Pioneer Evangelism by Thomas Carter

In Retrospect: An Historical Review of the Church of God in Kentucky by Luther C. Keeton

            Giants Along My Path by W. Dale Oldham

            Yearbook of the Church of God, various years

            The Gospel Trumpet/Vital Christianity, various issues

We have arranged these newsletters in chronological order. Many editors have composed them over the years and different printers have printed them. They came in different sizes and colors. We have done our best to scan them for the best picture quality possible.

I hope you enjoy looking through these pages as much as I had scanning them. I hope you find information that has been long forgotten. One sad observation is how many works we have lost over the years in our state. Not every congregation, camp meeting, ministry, etc., still exists. I hope we all find inspiration and pray, “Lord, do it again.”

                                                                                                            Steven V. Williams

Reformation Publishers

July 6, 2026