STEVE HILL: God’s Champion For Repentance and Holiness

Known worldwide for his fiery preaching at the Brownsville Revival, Steve Hill remained a passionate advocate of repentance and biblical values until his death last year from cancer.

During its five-year run from 1995-2000, more than 4 million visitors came to Brownsville Assembly of God, which resulted in some 200,000 conversions. This spiritual wave also prompted the formation of a school of ministry, which saw 1,000 students at its peak.

After his death, Steve Hill Ministries launched the $100,000 “Preserve the Legacy” project to digitally archive more than 1,500 of his messages from Brownsville and other evangelistic campaigns.

Despite many positives, Hill also sustained criticism regarding  an eventual saddling of the church with a multimillion-dollar debt.

Still, Regent University professor Cornelius Bekker says the revival’s long-term impact outweighs the negatives.

“What this brought to the church internationally was huge,” says Bekker, chair of Regent’s department of biblical studies and Christian ministry. “When this revival took place, I was living in Africa. I encountered numerous folks there (and in Europe) who would go there and come back with a focus on repentance (and) seeking to glorify God.”

As part of his message on repentance, Hill emphasized the need to embrace God’s holiness. In April of 2013, he wrote an article for Charisma warning of a coming “spiritual avalanche” of false teachings in the church.

Bekker echoes that sentiment, saying the presence of such heresies as extreme grace and unbalanced prosperity validate what Hill said.

“I think Steve was spot on with that,” Bekker says. “We can’t critique the core of his message. It was focused on Christ and the gospel.”—Ken Walker