Steve Hill
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Steve Hill (born 17 January 1954 in Ankara, Turkey to an American serviceman and his wife) is an American Christian clergyman and evangelist. He is best known as the evangelist who preached in what became known as the Brownsville Revival. The Brownsville Revival was a series of meetings at Brownsville Assembly of God in Pensacola, Florida that began on Father's Day, 1995 and continued for five years. In2000 Hill moved to the Dallas/Fort Worth area in Texas to resume traveling evangelism. In 2003, he founded Heartland World Ministries Church in the Las Colinas section of Irving, Texas, a suburb of Dallas.
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[edit] Drug use and conversion
As a teenager, Hill got heavily into alcohol and illicit drugs. At the age of twenty-one due to the effects of drug abuse, his body began to shutdown one Saturday morning. For three days he suffered through extreme convulsions. On October 28, 1975 Hill's mother invited Hugh Mozingo, a Lutheran minister, to come see him. Monzingo said to him, "Steve, I can't help you, but I know someone who can. His name is Jesus." In desperation, Hill reports that he began to say the name, "Jesus", and instantly the convulsions stopped. He also says that at that moment every addiction he had to drugs and alcohol was immediately gone. Hill reports that as the day he gave his life to Christ and never looked back.
A few weeks after his conversion experience, Hill was arrested at his parents' home in Huntsville, Alabama and was facing 25 years in prison for drug trafficking. In a testimony at Garywood Assembly of God in Hueytown, Alabama in 2005, Hill told the congregation that he would have gone to prison if it were not for the mercy of the presiding judge who agreed to remand Hill to the Teen Challenge drug rehabilitation program instead of sending him to prison. Hill graduated from Teen Challenge and eventually became a staff worker for the program.
[edit] Ministry and revival
Hill went on to graduate from a two-year ministry training school run by Teen Challenge founder David Wilkerson. From there, he served on the staff with Outreach Ministries of Alabama, then as a youth pastor at several churches in Florida. In the mid-1980s, he and his wife became missionaries, holding crusades and planting churches in Argentina, Spain, and Belarus. Early in 1995, Hill went to London, England where a revival was happening at Holy Trinity Brompton Anglican Church. The pastor, Sandy Miller, prayed for Hill. A few months later, Hill stopped at Brownsville Assembly on Father's Day to preach one service before heading off to minister in Russia.
Some who attended that Father's Day service testify of having life-changing encounters with God that day. The decision was made to continue the meetings. Reports of what was happening began to rapidly spread across the Pentecostal community and in March 1997 gained mainstream media when the Associated Press wrote about it. The services continued for five years during which time millions were touched by the Lord.
[edit] Criticisms
The Pensacola News Journal ran a series of articles in 1997 about the Brownsville Revival and its leaders. It had written glowing reports about the revival when it first began, but began a four-month investigation after receiving word that all was not as it appeared. The award winning journalistic report cited financial irregularities and the four main ministers failure to provide to anyone on request the amount of money received and income derived from the revival, related arena meeting, and the sale of revival merchandise. Brownsville Assembly of God answered the News Journal's allegations by publishing a two-page spread entitled "The Facts of the Brownsville Revival".
