When Frank Shivers graduated from New Orleans Baptist Seminary in the spring of 1974, he already knew what specific course his ministry would take. He settled that matter during his sophomore year at Baptist College at Charleston, now Charleston Southern University.
ShiversHe would be a vocational evangelist.
Now, for the past 35 years, Shivers has served Southern Baptists “without interruption through revivals, crusades, harvest days, camps and publications.”
Shivers, who lives in Columbia and is a member of Shandon Baptist Church, led his first revival as a vocational evangelist in Sumter the month after he graduated from seminary. His most recent revival was in Lincolnton, N.C., in November. The total comes to more than 500 revivals.
Shivers expanded his ministry in 1976 to include summer camps for students. After renting camp facilities for five years, in 1980 his Frank Shivers Evangelistic Association bought Camp Longridge in Ridgeway. To date, more than 20,000 students have attended the camps. There have been more than 4,000 professions of faith in Jesus at these summer events.
Shivers, who is the senior vocational evangelist in the South Carolina Baptist Convention, also is the author of 11 books dealing with evangelistic preaching and the invitation, as well as soul winning and basics of Christianity. He also has written books focusing on “heavy stuff” and “clear talk” for students.
His latest book is “Evangelistic Preaching 101: Voices of the Past and Present on Effective Preaching.” Fellow evangelist Junior Hill called it a “book every preacher should read.”
Shivers heard his call to the ministry when he was a junior at Lower Richland High School in Hopkins, near Columbia. It was at a Key Club meeting, and Shivers no longer remembers the name of the minister who spoke. “That night,” he recalled, “my mother called me aside and asked me if I was thinking about becoming a minister. She had no idea who I had heard speak earlier that night or the call I had received.”
Shivers preached his first sermon at the age of 16 and by the time he was 19, he was pastor of his first church.
The Columbia-based evangelist recalled the influence of pastor George Dye at Memorial Baptist Church in St. George, where Shivers served as a summer youth worker when he was a freshman at Baptist College. “His preaching and ministry were a great example to me,” he said of Dye.
In the fall of 1968, he was called as pastor of the Pregnall Baptist Mission, now Calvary Baptist Church, in Pregnall. He later was student pastor at Pine Grove Baptist Church, Salters, until he left for New Orleans Seminary.
Looking back and reflecting on his more than three decades in vocational evangelism, Shivers said, “I firmly believe in the place and the power of local church revival. My desire is to call churches back to this time-tested, proven means to reach the unsaved and to renew the saints.”