By MARK MAYNARD, Kentucky Today

Kentucky Baptist pastors have reacted to the assassination of Charlie Kirk with social media posts, blogs and in the pulpit with many reported an uptick in attendance in Sunday morning services in the wake of the tragedy.

Kentucky Today has published several of their posts since the Sept. 10 shooting of Kirk at the Utah Valley State University college campus.

The Southern Baptist Convention issued a statement Saturday morning condemning the violence and encouraging churches nationwide to set aside time for prayer. SBC president Clint Pressley urged pastors to guide their people through collective lament.

Jonas Larkin, the pastor of Heartland City Church in Elizabethtown, wrote a blog post that has attracted a lot of attention and was reprinted with permission in Kentucky Today on Monday. Read the column here.

He said that he mentioned the Kirk assassination from the pulpit on Sunday and that it was the second-highest attendance of the year, not far behind Easter.

"More specifically, I opened up the sermon by addressing it and then leading our congregation in a time of lament," he said. "Interestingly enough, for several months I had been planning to preach from Jeremiah 29:1-14 on living as faithful exiles in a foreign land, so in the Lord's providence it all kind of fit together."

Burlington pastor changes directions on sermon

Josh Schmidt, the pastor of Burlington Baptist in northern Kentucky, said he was awakened at 2 in the morning Sunday with the Holy Spirit telling him to change his message to address the Kirk situation "It was a complete 180," he said. "It was so clear."

Schmidt veered off his sermon series for the week and preached from John 14.

He said there were a lot of guests in attendance including three he had never seen before Sunday. One of them was an atheist in his mid-20s.

"We had a good conversation after the service and I definitely think he will be back," Schmidt said.

The pastor said he had more people reach out to him after the Kirk assassination than any one issue - aside from COVID - in the past 10 years.

"A lot of people were having a hard time thinking through this," he said. "I can't remember an event that led to more conversations about fear and anxiety, maybe other than COVID."

Schmidt said because of how public the shooting was it was terrifying, and "tears down the face than any of us are OK apart from God. You can't hide from it anymore. It was a very public thing we saw that life is fragile."

'God's providence' at 12 Stones

Kenny Rager, the pastor of 12 Stones Baptist Church in Elizabethtown, had corporate prayer at the altar at the start of the service and then his prepared sermon series was a perfect fit for the situation.

"By God's providence, I began yesterday a series called 'Better Together,' how the church has to be unified," he said. "I promise that happened. It was from the first half of Ephesians 4. It had been planned for months, how we have to be united as a church in dark times - one body, one Lord, one faith, one spirit.

"I did not ignore the state our nation is in. I called all our people to the altar and led in a directed prayer in healing for our nation and for the gospel to go forward and the altar was full."

Read Rager's column on the Kirk shooting HERE.

Coffey preaches on 'spiritual' battles

Ryan Coffey, the senior pastor at Somerset First Baptist, posted on social media a blog that was later picked up by Kentucky Today. It was shared and viewed hundreds of times.

Coffey said on Sunday, after wrestling about what to do, decided to speak to his congregation about the tragedy.

"In fact, I did something Sunday I've only done a handful of times in my ministry. I had an entire sermon mapped out about the early church in Acts 2, and I went away from that to speak to the heart of this situation and the scripture that I thought would minister to my flock as needed in this hour," he said. "It goes back to just being honest about it, standing on truth, speaking truth and love. We talked about how traumatic this had been and that parents and grandparents needed to minister to their children, their grandchildren during this season."

Coffey said it was important to help the church process what had happened and learn how to best deal with it.

"We talked about unity, the role of unity, because Satan would want nothing more than to divide his church over these perceived political things. This is something that is very much spiritual, not physical, and so helping our church process that, and I hope other pastors have done the same and will do the same."

Coffey said he was "encouraged to speak the truth and stand on God's word" and offered a statement from the late Adrian Rogers who said, "It is better for us to be divided in truth than united in error.' And so I truly believe this is the time for us to speak the truth of God's word, and hopefully I did that Sunday."

Across the state, pastors agreed: the tragedy underscored the fragility of life, the need for unity and the hope of the gospel in uncertain times.