Criticism
The meetings were criticized by some Christians and by the local news media. The Pensacola News Journal ran a series of investigative articles which focused on the donations raised during the meetings and where those funds went, as well as the claims of miraculous healings at the services and the spontaneity of the revival's beginnings. For example, the News Journal revealed that a videotape of the Father's Day service that sparked the revival showed the service went rather badly for Hill.
The News Journal had initially written favorable reports about the revival from the time it started but began a four-month investigation after former members told reporters that all was not as it appeared at the church. The series won George Polk awards from such groups as National Headliner, Scripps-Howard Foundation, and Society of Professional Journalists. Brownsville Assembly of God responded the paper's allegations by publishing a paid advertisement (thus shielding them from a response from the paper) in the News Journal entitled, "The Facts of The Brownsville Revival".
Hank Hanegraaff, author of the book Counterfeit Revival, criticized the revival for "serious distortions of biblical Christianity" in the meetings, comparing the physical manifestations to pagan practices. Kilpatrick responded by issuing a prophecy aimed at Hanegraaff, claiming "within 90 days the Holy Ghost will bring you down." This prophecy proved to be false.
J Lee Grady, editor for Charisma Magazine, was critical of the excesses and personal divisions that had grown within leadership. He also suggested that numerous former attendees were now at local Baptist churches after the traumatic events.
Read more about this topic: Brownsville Revival
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“Like speaks to like only; labor to labor, philosophy to philosophy, criticism to criticism, poetry to poetry. Literature speaks how much still to the past, how little to the future, how much to the East, how little to the West.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
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