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Part 4
On the Run with Ken Smith
Steve Dennie
March 1987
It's Tuesday. Ken Smith left home at 5:00 this morning, drove 46 miles, worked until 5 p.m., drove home, took a quick bath and, without eating, rushed to Cedar Chapel to lead the midweek Bible study. He does this every week.
Ken works six days a week for a coal company. "How do you find time to study?' another preacher once asked him.
He doesn't. "The Lord just brings it to me. I know He would require more study time out of me if I wasn't so busy."
He's a good preacher, too. And when hear him preach and know his situation, you can't help concluding that this is a man on whom God has a very tight grip.
Ken was saved in 1978. No, that's not quite right. Actually, he was saved in a Baptist church as a youngster. "I asked Him to forgive me, and I know He did, because I felt Him." But Ken got away from the Lord--far away.
He remembers helping start a Ku Klux Klan group in Harlan in the late 1950's, and burning a 12-foot cross on a ridge one night. "Mainly, we were just out for trouble."
He remembers always hanging around the worst people. "If someone was a pothead or drunkard, I was with him."
He remembers drinking moonshine and seeing bugs in the bottom of the bottle, but being too drunk to care.
"If I wanted to think about t, I thought about it. Whatever I wanted to do, I did. If it felt good, I did it again."
Then, when Ken was 28, the Lord convicted him. Recognizing the source, Ken began running. "No matter what I did, I felt Him." But he kept running for two years. Then, all of a sudden, the Spirit quit working on him, and he recalled the verse which says God won't always strive with a man. That's when he starting losing it.
"I felt dry. I got to where I was drinking liquor straight. I would cry for no apparent reason. I felt like I was going crazy. I was so scared I carried a .45 automatic."
Scared of what?
"Scared of my shadow, scared of everything. Just scared. I was resisting God."
Ken had been attending a church where he felt real comfortable, since his fellow parishioners drank and cussed right along with him. During a service in that church--a church which didn't preach against sin--God began dealing with him again. I can't let this slip, he told himself. So he walked to the altar and found Christ.
After two years of running from the Lord, Ken reversed direction and spent two years pursuing the Lord. "All I wanted to do was go to church and read the Bible. I didn't even date.
"I remember flying home from work, getting cleaned up, and going to church--somewhere, anywhere, it didn't matter. Other times I'd just go to my room and read the New Testament--over and over--and pray. So many times I'd be reading the New Testament at 3:00 in the morning."
He figures the Bible was only the fourth book he'd ever read. But now, he has read through the entire Bible nine times, and the New Testament by itself many times.
Ken began attending Alvin Boggs' church in Baxter, and married his daughter Sharon in 1980. "She said she'd never marry a preacher, and she didn't. God called me after we were married. Fooled her."
He found himself preaching at a prison camp on the mountain, filling Alvin's pulpit when he was gone, and doing a half dozen messages a week on the radio--all in addition to his regular job (very few mountain preachers just preach). Then in 1983, he began pastoring Cedar Chapel.
Ken still works fulltime for a coal company doing some of everything--loading trucks, running the bulldozer, repairing equipment. "One time they broke a belt about 2700 feet underground in a tunnel 34 inches high. We had to go in there and put it back together." Right now, he's running heaving equipment across the border in Virginia.
"There are times I come home bone-tired, get on the mission bus, and drive here without knowing what I'm going to preach on. That happened tonight. I went in a little side room and prayed for a few minutes. It just seems like He blesses me."
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