Messages spoken at various Camps Farthest Out by Horace Hilton.
The Rev. Horace Hilton was a Presbyterian minister from North Carolina who pastored the oldest church in Charlotte and later took a country church near Wilmington from thirty-five people to nearly two thousand. Before he was converted, on his twentieth birthday, he was a champion jitterbug who had spent six months traveling with Cab Calloway and his orchestra.
He found Camps Farthest Out in his mid-forties, when his faith had run dry. What he found there changed his ministry. He began speaking at camps up and down the East Coast and continued into the late 1990s, carrying the message of the living Christ back into Presbyterian churches, hospitals, Bible studies, and eventually the wider church.
Horace Harvey Hilton Jr. was born in Louisburg, North Carolina, in 1921. When he was about fourteen, his parents divorced, and he went to live with his grandmother and an unmarried aunt. “And here at 14 years old, I was to go to live with an 82-year-old grandmother and an old maid aunt.”
Nobody in the house went to church. Horace continued living with his grandmother while he went to college, commuting from her home. Her sayings stayed with him. One in particular became a line he quoted throughout his life: “But be with those who give to life.”
Horace planned to become a dentist. He also danced. The day before his twentieth birthday, he won the national jitterbug championship of North Carolina. He and his partner went on to win the eastern half of the country in Atlanta. “And for six months, she and I traveled with Cab Calloway and his orchestra, putting on dances wherever we were.”
Horace was converted on his twentieth birthday in June 1941. “I was saved on my 20th birthday.” He had been staying with the older sister of his dance partner, a young mother of four boys who had recently become a Christian. She told him he was going to hell.
He did not sleep for two nights. Then, standing alone on a street corner at a stoplight, he prayed. His father warned him that people who thought too much about religion ended up at Dix Hill, the state hospital in Raleigh. Years later, Horace wrote to the woman who had confronted him to thank her.
A college counselor also saw something Horace was not ready to admit. “Horace, you’re fighting the ministry, aren’t you?” The counselor sent him to a large Presbyterian church in Detroit as youth director for three months. “I went to stay three months. And I stayed nearly four years.”
In 1945, Horace married Tennie Boone Davis of Chattanooga, Tennessee. “When I saw my wife, she happened to be homecoming queen.” They had three sons, David, Jonathan, and Tim. Horace went to seminary and was ordained in 1950. He served Presbyterian churches in Kentucky, Tennessee, Michigan, and North Carolina.
By his mid-forties, Horace was pastor of Sugaw Creek Presbyterian Church in Charlotte, founded in 1755 and the oldest church in the city. He lived next door to the church. From the outside, he had everything a Presbyterian minister might have wanted. Inside, he was empty. “I was 45 years of age, pastor of a great historical church, and my heart became empty and dry and dead.”
He was considering leaving the ministry and going into teaching. He planned to take a degree in French, which he spoke as a second language. He liked to remember what he had been like at the time. “Now, you’ll have to remember that I was a dignified, chosen, frozen Presbyterian at that particular moment.”
Horace’s son David wanted to join the Coast Guard Reserve. When a recruiter came to Charlotte on Wednesdays, Horace went with him. While David filled out the papers, the recruiter looked up. He was a Christian. He had come to Christ at a Billy Graham meeting.
Then he asked Horace whether he had been baptized in the Holy Spirit. Horace had never heard the expression and wanted to leave. The recruiter invited him to lunch the following Wednesday. He called every Wednesday for a year. Two things about the man puzzled Horace. Jesus was real to him, and he was happy.
Horace went back to his Bible. He read Matthew 3:11 and the Gospel accounts, then went into Acts. Every time he came close to what the recruiter was talking about, something inside him shut the door. “And across that door in big letters is the word Presbyterian.” Horace later told the story as “The Coast Guard Recruiter”.
About that time, someone gave Horace a scholarship to a CFO camp at Kanuga. He drove there in a Volkswagen Beetle. “My Ruth Stapleton and Jim Brown were the two speakers.” He noticed three things during that week. The people had joy. They loved one another. And Jesus was real to them. He called Tennie and told her to come. She asked why. “I said, only God can tell you. I don’t know. I said, just come and find out.”
Some time afterward, Horace knelt alone and asked to be baptized in the Holy Spirit. Nothing dramatic happened. “I didn’t fall over. I didn’t start shaking. I didn’t start speaking in tongue. I just got up and went to bed.” But something had changed. He became hungry for Jesus. “I just wanted to eat, sleep, and talk Jesus. No wonder I became a fanatic on Jesus. I still am.”
Not long after he entered this new life, Horace faced major surgery. He had only recently come to believe that God heals. His congregation responded in a way that had never happened before at Sugaw Creek. “I had the oldest church in Charlotte, a great church, and for the first time in the history of that church, they set aside a whole day for fasting and prayer for my healing.”
Some charismatic friends warned him that if he went ahead with the operation, he would never be able to pray for anyone again. He had the surgery anyway. His surgeon asked why everyone in town was talking about his healing. Horace gave him his answer. “I said, doctor, you can cut me open. You can rearrange and fix and sew me back up, but you can’t heal me. You can correct the situation, but Jesus does the healing.”
He was expected to spend nearly a month in the hospital and another two or three months recovering at home. “In one week, I was home. Two weeks, I was back to work and I’ve been healthier than I’ve ever been all my life.”
One December, Horace’s mother and Tennie’s mother both died of cancer, three weeks apart. “It was a hard time for us.” Soon afterward, at ten minutes past two one morning, Horace woke trembling. The room was filled with light. He knew it was the Shekinah glory. Then he heard the words: “Move out in the morning.”
He understood them as a command to tell his congregation what had happened to him. He got up and went next door to the church in the dark. “I laid hands on the wall. I laid hands on the pulpit. I laid hands everywhere.” When he reached the organ, he fell across it.
By Sunday morning he had talked himself out of doing what he had been told to do. Then the choir began to sing. The trembling returned. Horace stood up and gave his testimony instead of preaching his planned sermon. His account is preserved in “With, In and Upon”.
When he finished, the people told him they did not understand. But they loved him. “And God began to move.” It spread through the church. Tommy Tyson later told a Kanuga camp that Sugaw Creek had become a CFO. Horace had his own way of measuring how much had changed. “Now, I was 45 years old, had been a minister for 25 years, and I had never heard a person clap in a worship service.”
In 1976, at fifty-five, Horace went to Myrtle Grove Presbyterian Church near Wilmington. It was a little country church with plain wooden floors. “I went there with just myself and 35 people.” Under his pastorate, it grew to about eighteen hundred members. The church built a new sanctuary and a school through the eighth grade. Its worship orchestra had more than twenty players, most of them young.
John Hobbs belonged to Myrtle Grove and later called Horace his pastor emeritus. He also called him the Pope. John said Horace loved Jesus more than the Presbyterian church. “Actually, I know he does.”
Horace retired in 1986, and he and Tennie moved to Wrightsville Beach. The Eastern Carolina CFO met at a hotel three blocks from their house. Horace began leading a Bible study on the beach every Thursday night, with about fifty people attending. He described his retirement this way: “I have retired from a church to be re-fired for the church.”
He knew what pastor emeritus was supposed to mean. “But what it really means is, old man, sit down over there and be quiet. And if I need you, I’ll let you know.” He did not sit down. He spoke at CFO camps in Virginia, Tennessee, New York, West Virginia, Kentucky, and California. He taught Acts for two years alongside a Roman Catholic priest in Wilmington, preached at a Pentecost Mass, and spoke at E. Stanley Jones Ashrams. He never forgot where much of the vision for that wider ministry had come from. “I’m grateful to Glenn Clark, even though I never did know him, for the vision.”
When Horace was about twelve, a rat jumped into his shirt and bit him. He was terrified of rats for most of his life. Then one night he dreamed he was alone in an empty room. Someone brought in a cage containing a huge rat. The cage door opened.
The rat walked toward him like a little dog, put its paws on his knee, and climbed into his lap to have its stomach scratched. It took his finger in its mouth and let it go. Again and again, it did the same thing without ever biting down. Horace told the story in “The Rat That Became Gentle”. He woke Tennie and told her the Lord had healed him. “And to this day, I don’t like him. But I’ve never had that phobia. Never had that fear again.”
Horace preached a God who was present now. John Hobbs carried one of his lines to other camps: “I don’t serve a God who was or a God who will be. I just serve a God who is.” He took Psalm 118 seriously. “Did you realize that for the first time in all of eternity of time, that this day had never come before?”
He taught the baptism in the Holy Spirit to people from churches much like his own, and he did it with humor. “There are three things that scare Presbyterians to death. One is the front row, one is rain, and one is night air.” Even raising their hands in worship required getting over what he called Presbyterian arthritis. He believed the Lord’s Table belonged to everybody. “It’s the one table that should bring all of us, regardless of background, together.”
Horace Hilton died in Wilmington in 2006, at eighty-four. He had begun as a young man who danced his way across the country, became a Presbyterian minister, and eventually found himself preaching to Presbyterians about a God who was not merely the God of their past. He was the God who is.
*Note:
Many speakers lived before the days of the internet and many had very limited biographical information available. The information in these biographies came mostly from transcripts of their messages, and relies heavily on their own spoken words. Please contact us if you have any corrections.