HARTSELLE, Ala. (BP)—Junior Hill, a sought-after evangelist among Southern Baptists for more than 50 years, died Jan. 3 at his home in Hartselle, Ala. He was 87.
Hill conducted more than 1,800 revivals and preached at pastors’ conferences, state conventions and evangelism meetings across the country. He also spoke in various camp meeting, seminary and college settings and engaged in numerous overseas campaigns.
In 1989, he was elected as first vice president of the Southern Baptist Convention at the SBC annual meeting in Las Vegas. The first of his many messages at the Southern Baptist Pastors’ Conference was in 1981 in Los Angeles.
In his 2005 autobiography, They Call Him Junior, Hill noted that the “most delightful joy of life on the road is the overwhelming honor of seeing so many precious souls come to faith in Christ.”
Yet, he never tallied the number of professions of faith during his 68-plus years of ministry, writing, “Only the dear Lord in heaven knows those facts, and I am perfectly content to await his final report.”
Hill entered full-time evangelism in 1967, after 11 years in pastorates at three Alabama churches and one in rural Mississippi.
At the Alabama Baptist Pastors Conference in November 2021, Hill was honored with the inaugural Fred Wolfe Lifetime Pastoral Ministry Award, named for a longtime Mobile-area pastor and former president of the SBC Pastors’ Conference who had died from COVID-19 complications earlier in the year.
Hill’s rise to SBC-wide recognition began with his preaching at the 1980 Alabama Baptist Pastors Conference when he met Bailey Smith, who had been elected SBC president in June. Smith subsequently invited Hill to preach at his church in Del City, Okla., and at the Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma’s evangelism conference.
The invitation to the 1981 Southern Baptist Pastors’ Conference was extended by its president, Jim Henry, then-pastor of First Baptist Church in Orlando, Fla., who had been one of Hill’s classmates at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.
Soon came invitations to preach to additional thousands at the Texas Baptist Evangelism Conference and First Baptist Church in Dallas, followed in the mid-1980s by the annual evangelism conference of First Baptist Church in Jacksonville, Fla.
Ministered to pastors
From the outset, Hill promised never to preach about money and never to solicit funding from any church member after a revival. Widely known as a “pastor to pastors,” that dimension of Hill’s ministry emerged from the trauma of being fired in 1962 as pastor of the Mississippi church he had led for 18 months while a seminary student.
Asked during a men’s Sunday School class whether Black visitors should be welcomed, Hill said all churches should be open to anyone regardless of race or color. He then noticed “a strange somberness in some of their faces.”
The church’s deacons voted mid-week to fire Hill, who didn’t learn about the action until returning the following Saturday.
“I can still remember how humiliating it was to walk past those laughing men, go back to the car, and sadly tell Carole what had happened to us,” Hill wrote in his autobiography.
Yet, “one of the sweetest and most far reaching of all the lessons God taught me … was the importance of loving his preachers,” Hill wrote.
Hill recounted that “after having my own heart so deeply crushed and broken, I immediately began to sympathize with other pastors who were going through similar dark valleys. … I wrote them letters, called them on the phone, and went out of my way to befriend and encourage them. … I sensed that they knew I loved them, understood how they felt, and that I was not talking down to them nor accusing them of failure.”
Even before his first sermon in April 1955, Hill had sensed a call to evangelism since coming to faith in Christ a year earlier. Nearly 19 years old and the youngest of five children, he set forth 18 points “with a pitiful absence of Biblical content,” as he described it.
Even so, his parents, William Lawton and Fannie Velma Hill, who had never talked about God in their home, responded to the invitation to turn to Christ, as did his older sister, Ruth.
Hill, whose given name was William Junior Hill, wrote 20 books largely of anecdotes and lessons from his ministry. After graduating from Samford University in Birmingham where he played two years of football, he earned a Master of Divinity degree from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary in 1962, later receiving an honorary doctorate from Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va.
Hill calculated for his 2005 autobiography that he had been on the road 20-plus years, accepting 40 to 42 engagements a year. He regularly returned home each week, and he called daily, sending the family’s phone bill soaring.
His wife Carole never downplayed the challenges that she, their daughter Melanie and son Mark faced over the years, but once wrote to an aspiring evangelist, “… were it not for the hand of God constantly holding our right hand, we could not have made it. The blessings far outweigh any trouble, heartache and inconvenience we’ve encountered.”
In addition to his wife of 66 years and two children, Hill is survived by five grandchildren.