After the sermons were over, hundreds of thousands accepted the invitation to leave their seats and rush forward to a large area in front of the stage-like altar.
According to Cho, God told him he was "going to send revival to the seaside city of Pensacola, and it will spread like a fire until all of America has been consumed by it.
"[4] On Father's Day June 18, 1995, a Sunday, the revival began, evangelist Steve Hill was the guest speaker, having been invited by Kilpatrick.
Later, Hill and Kilpatrick, told of "a mighty wind" that blew through the church, an account that quickly spread across the Pentecostal community.
In time, the church opened its doors for Tuesday-through-Saturday evening revival services to accommodate the thousands of people who arrived and waited in the church parking lot before dawn for a chance to enter the packed sanctuary, some even camping overnight waiting for the doors to open .
[2] By 1997, it was common to have lengthy and rapturous periods of singing and dancing and altars packed with hundreds of writhing or dead-still bodies from a variety of ages, races and socioeconomic conditions.
In Steve Hill's words, "We're seeing miraculous healings, cancerous tumors disappear and drug addicts immediately delivered.
In 1997, the leaders of the revival—Hill, Kilpatrick, and Lindell Cooley (Brownsville's worship director)—went to several cities (Anaheim, Dallas, St. Louis, Lake Charles (Louisiana), Toledo, and Birmingham) and held like meetings.
[2] Thousands of pastors visited Brownsville and returned to their home congregations, leading to an outbreak of mini-revivals that helped the Assemblies of God recover from what some saw as a denominational decline.
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.
[13] The newspaper revealed that a videotape of the Father's Day service that sparked the revival showed it was far less dramatic than later claimed.
The series won George Polk awards from such groups as National Headliner, the Scripps-Howard Foundation, and the Society of Professional Journalists.