Gospel singer Delia Knox hadn’t walked in 22 years when she stood from her wheelchair, lifted one knee, then the other, and took careful steps across the front of a Mobile, Ala., civic center in August.
Knox leaned heavily on her husband and the pastor hosting the service, former Brownsville Revival leader John Kilpatrick, as she moved feet she hadn’t felt in decades, stopping on occasion to rest and crying all the while as the congregation shouted and leaped.
“It’s overwhelming,” she told the Mobile Press-Register after walking again in a service the following week. “It’s a God thing. I can’t even put words on it.”
Knox’s experience, captured on video and widely viewed on YouTube, is just one of dozens of healing testimonies that have come out of revival services that began in Mobile in July.
The meetings, held four nights each week, are led by British evangelist Nathan Morris and Kilpatrick, pastor of Church of His Presence in Mobile and former pastor of Brownsville Assembly of God in Pensacola, Fla., where a five-year revival began in 1995. Thousands have attended the Mobile services, which have some wondering whether another long-running revival has begun. Attendees have testified to healing from chronic back pain, a brain tumor, heart problems and more.
“I think this is a season that God is going to begin to pour out His healing presence and show out and show off in these last days,” Kilpatrick says of what is being called the Bay of the Holy Spirit Revival, a reference to its location near Mobile Bay. “I don’t believe it’s just going to happen here; I believe it’s going to start happening all over.”
Knox, who leads Living Word Christian Center in Mobile with her husband, Bishop Levy Knox, still used her wheelchair in the weeks after she took those first steps. But her husband says her experience was miraculous. “I mean, to walk like she has with no use of her legs in the lower part, what can we say? It’s God,” he told the Press-Register. “To God be the glory.”
