By Mark Maynard
Kentucky Today
Bullittsburg Baptist Church will be celebrating its rich history of 230 years on Sunday, June 9, with a full day of activities and retrospection.
According to Pastor David Panella, the services will include talks from Dr. Ted Alexander, a historian and director of the Florida-based Baptist Heritage Revival Society, who will speak about the beginnings of the church and the Baptist movement in Northern Kentucky.
Alexander will also speak during the Sunday School hour about church planting and effective local outreach efforts and in the evening about the history of the Baptist movement in southern Indiana.
The celebration will include dinner on the grounds after the morning worship with the evening service starting at 6.
Alexander has studied and written about Bullittsburg Baptist Church founder John Taylor among others. He said many great revivals came from Bullittsburg Baptist.
“There was no one like John Taylor,” Alexander said. “Nothing was able to stop him. He floated across the Ohio River in 1782 and gets off near Louisville. He ends up at Clear Creek, about 30 miles south of Bullittsburg. He helped found Bullittsburg Baptist Church. Great things were happening the first couple of years and then things began to decline across Kentucky until about 1800 with the start of the Second Great Awakening.”
Taylor is the subject of one of the chapters in a booklet Alexander put together about heroes of the faith.
He was among a large faction of Virginia Baptists who left for Kentucky. Many had been imprisoned there for preaching the gospel.
Panella has been the interim pastor at Bullittsburg Baptist since 2020 when the former pastor, Roy Miller, resigned. Miller was in his 80s and his wife’s immune system was compromised. He was afraid of contracting COVID and bringing it home to her, Panella said.
With the church in need of a pastor, Panella, a graduate of Southern Seminary in the 1980s, stepped up to be the interim. He had been a member of Bullittsburg since 2008.
Panella said he had retired from a secular job in finance, but he and wife, Karen, moved back to Kentucky and began attending Bullittsburg. “We poured our life into the church,” he said.
The couple helped nurse the church through COVID when only about a dozen were attending. Since then, the congregation has steadily grown to around 50 and has found new life under Panella’s leadership.
The history of Bullittsburg Baptist is well documented through church historians Norma Hennigen and Rita Hodges, who have combed through the minutes and provided a history that has been sent to Southern Seminary for good keeping.
“Norma is the one who is putting it together and Rita knows the history,” Panella said. “She has a great heart, and she loves children and missions.”
Historian Alexander was impressed with the accurate record-keeping of Bullittsburg Baptist Church through the years and that the orthodoxy had not changed throughout history.
“A lot of things that Bullittsburg did, through a series of pastors, was they maintained orthodoxy all the way through. They have always been a Bible believing, evangelistic church,” he said.
Panella said that will not change under his watch and he said that Bible teaching has kept the church alive through difficult years.
Panella said he became keenly aware of the history when reading on a placard that the building was constructed in 1819. The church was founded in 1794 near Bullittsburg Bottoms near the Ohio River.
The church has been a part of planting eight other churches including one in nearby southern Indiana called Grant’s Creek. Mark Hetzel, a deacon at Bullittsburg, was walking through a cemetery and saw a sign indicating that Grant’s Creek church was established through Bullittsburg.
It was at Grant’s Creek that they became aware of Alexander’s work on the church’s history.
“Mark and I went there on a Sunday evening, and it was such a charming congregation,” Panella said. “We had a great time touching base with our roots. The pastor there knew of and met Dr. Alexander. It kind of tied the shoelace for us.”
They found some of the 10 volumes of the book that Alexander had written and Dave Bergman, another deacon, contacted him about coming to the 230th celebration.
“That’s how the ball started rolling,” Panella said.
Even the grounds around the church drip with history. Bullittsburg has a keyhole-shaped baptistry that is fed by a spring, and it is still used for baptisms during warmer days. There are only two others like it in the world, the pastor said.
Panella doesn’t call himself an interim but a GF – “a gap filler” – but said he will be there as long as necessary. “God’s hand is not off of us,” the pastor said. “He wants his witness there. The church is 230 years old, and I suspect it will be there until He comes back.”