John Kentish

John Kentish (26 June 1768 – 6 March 1853) was an English Unitarian minister.

Life Kentish was born at St Albans, Hertfordshire, on 26 June 1768. His father, at one time a draper, was the youngest son, and ultimately the heir, of Thomas Kentish, who in 1723 was High Sheriff of Hertfordshire. His mother was Hannah (d. 1793), daughter and heiress of Keaser Vanderplank.

After passing through the school of John Worsley at Hertford, he was entered in 1784 as a divinity student at Daventry Academy, under Thomas Belsham, William Broadbent, and Eliezer Cogan.

In September 1788 he moved, with two fellow students, to the New College at Hackney, a dissenting college, as a result of a prohibition by the Daventry trustees of any use of written prayers at the school.

In the autumn of 1790 he left Hackney to become the first minister of a newly formed Unitarian congregation at Plymouth Dock (now Devonport), Devonshire. A chapel was built in George Street (opened 27 April 1791 by Theophilus Lindsey, and a prayer-book drawn up by Kentish and Thomas Porter of Plymouth.

In 1794 he succeeded Porter as minister of the Treville Street congregation, Plymouth, after Porter emigrated to America.

That same year, Kentish wrote a scathing letter in which he decried the refusal of a trustee of George's Meeting house in Exeter to allow the Western Unitarian Society to hold their annual meeting there, allegedly based on religious prejudice.