Story and Photos by Amelie Fawson
Every Monday just after 11 a.m., Stephen Brock arrives at the heart of UNC-Chapel Hill, where the Pit swells with the movement of student life. The space hums with overlapping voices: students in line for the dining hall, a club leader shouting about a fundraiser, friends calling out study plans.
Brock, 55, in his worn UNC sweatshirt and Desert Storm veteran’s cap, stands quietly under the awning of the Undergraduate Library, letting the rhythm of campus unfold around him. His glasses perch squarely on his face, his posture upright and assured. In his hands are gospel tracts with titles chosen like bait, not bombs: “What Happens When We Die?” and “The Mystery of the Heart.”
“Morning,” his voice soft as creek water as a student walks by. She glances down, then reaches for the paper Brock offers with a tired nod before disappearing into the current.
“You won’t reach people without humility and compassion,” Brock says, watching the blur of backpacks and AirPods pass by. “We want to be peacemakers out here.”
Where other street preachers thunder about eternal damnation, he leans into gentleness. Where some seek spectacle, he looks for small, human interactions. But this same man who whispers kindness in the Pit will, by Tuesday morning, stand on a hill in Raleigh screaming “They crush babies’ skulls here!” at women entering an abortion clinic.
“I know that what we do, open-air preaching, is controversial,” Brock said. “I don’t look at people’s sin. I look at their soul, and that’s what matters.”
The Legacy of the Pit Preacher
To understand Brock’s presence in the Pit is to reckon with the legacy he has inherited. For more than four decades, the space was dominated by Gary Eugene Birdsong, a brash, theatrical preacher who shouted jarring accusations and invited controversy across college campuses in the United States for over 50 years.
Birdsong raged against feminism, Islam, evolution, interracial marriage and more, often sparking angry debates with students. He was banned, heckled, even arrested. For many, he turned “Pit preacher” into a phrase that triggers shivers of disgust down students’ spines. Birdsong died Feb. 27, 2025. He was 81.
On Mondays in the Pit, Brock joins two other regulars: Joseph Toy, who mostly stands in silence, pressing tracts into passing hands. The other is an older preacher known simply as Daniel, a preacher of the old-school mold who reads scripture aloud with a booming baritone. Students often pause, drawn by the volume if not the message. Some roll their eyes or whisper to friends as they hurry past. Stephen watches from a few feet away. Where Daniel’s voice demands attention, Brock’s presence invites conversation. Booming thunder beside gentle rain.
“We’re just trying to love on people,” Brock said. “We’re not out here to shout anybody down.”
After all, Brock’s path to the Pit wasn’t fueled by a thirst for attention. It was shaped by something quieter, older and deeper.
The Calling
It was hot inside the Quaker Oats rice cake plant in Asheville on July 21, 1996, the kind of heat that makes shirts cling and the air taste like salt and steam. Fluorescent lights hummed over the line, fans pushed warm air in tired circles. Brock was nearly 30, bone-tired and running on coffee and regret. Home wasn’t easy. He was drinking. He felt like a different person than the one he meant to be.
Two men walked in that afternoon and started talking with the guys on shift. Nothing showy, no sermon, just a few questions and steady eyes. When they reached Brock, he surprised himself by listening.
“I didn’t come to the Lord that day,” Brock said. “The Lord came to me. He saved me from myself.”
The men invited him to a service. He went. He remembers the light of that church, warm and whole, and a looseness in his chest he hadn’t felt in years. He calls that day his second chance, the hinge on which his life swung the other way.
That moment carried the weight of what came before. Brock says he was nearly aborted, and as a small child, beaten so badly doctors told his family he might never speak. Adopted at 6 by Bible-believing parents, he grew up hearing scripture but feeling only resentment. How could a loving God fit the life he had lived? And yet the boy that doctors once said might never speak now spends his life sharing God’s words.
By April 2000, Brock was behind a pulpit for the first time in a nursing home — “gold mine ministries,” he calls them. On weekends from the plant, he sat with residents who craved company more than sermons, learning how to talk with people instead of at them.
Around the same time, Brock joined fellow preacher Charles Parker ministering inside the Haywood County Prison. For seven and a half years he walked through locked gates and cinderblock corridors, speaking to men and women whose faces and stories reminded him that faith mattered most when hope was in short supply.
He remembers praying with a woman in jail, the pair separated by a thick pane of glass, their hands cradling black phones that bridged the gap between them. Seeing that woman smile confirmed the weight of his calling. When she thanked him, any doubt about his path dissolved.
“I didn’t get a job,” Brock said. “I got a calling. I don’t have to. I get to. And I want to.”
If he were going to answer that calling properly, Brock knew he needed more than enthusiasm. His wife and two children supported his decision to pursue formal training, even when it meant years of grueling schedules and financial uncertainty. So, he enrolled at Trinity Baptist Bible College in Asheville, not because he wanted a degree, but because, “If I’m going to preach this book, I ought to know it.”
Those years were brutal. Twelve-hour plant shifts, a 30-minute drive to school, classes until 10 p.m. On lunch breaks he unwrapped sandwiches beside stacks of worn index cards, each scrawled with Bible verses.
“It was very, very difficult,” Brock said. “But I didn’t go to get a degree, I went to learn more about the Bible.”
The Road to Salem
Brock loved his work in prisons and nursing homes, but he felt restless, as if something more was waiting for him. In 2007, Brock prayed for direction. One night he woke up certain that he was meant to be a missionary in Salem, Massachusetts.
It took nearly three and a half years to get there. Brock crisscrossed the South, speaking in more than 36 churches, raising the support he needed to uproot his family. On April 18, 2010, they packed everything they could into a van and drove north. For the next decade, he preached at True Gospel Baptist Church, while also taking his message into the streets of Salem and the campuses of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University.
“The North prepared me for what I do now,” he said. “Today, my heart still beats fast when I hear about that city.”
What stands out most from those years in Salem, Brock says, isn’t the heckling or the threats, nor the spitting or the shoving, but a woman named Patricia.
He met her at a nursing home in nearby Beverly. She wore black, was “goth-looking,” and told him she was a head priestess in a Wiccan coven. Over time, Brock says she admitted she had even paid people to curse him and his family. Still, she welcomed his visits. Every Monday they talked. Patricia loved the hymn “Amazing Grace,” so Brock practiced until he could sing it well enough by her bedside.
After four or five years of conversations, Patricia told him she wanted to know Jesus.
“I’ve seen something in you over the years,” she said. Brock brought her a Bible. They ate lunch together, sang together and became unlikely friends.
The last time he saw her was March 9, 2020. They sang “Amazing Grace” once more. She cried and thanked him. His last words to her were “I love you.” She said them right back. Patricia died of COVID-19 a few weeks later.
Brock and his family remained in Salem for almost a decade, knocking on some 64,000 doors in Salem and surrounding towns, offering faith, prayer and food to anyone who would open the door. But the city, steeped in tourism, spiritualism and high costs of living, was a hard place to raise a family on a missionary’s income. In 2020, at the height of the pandemic, the Brocks decided it was time to return to Seaboard, North Carolina.
“God shut one door and opened a wider one,” Brock said. Back home, he found that the fields were just as ripe, and the work just as urgent.
The Hill
On Tuesdays, Stephen Brock’s day begins long before sunrise. At 4:45 a.m. he slips on a Carolina blue athletic shirt, a gray baseball cap and a black wristwatch worn soft at the edges. He prays. Prays that today, maybe, one child’s life will be spared.
From his garage, he hauls a black, rolling tote packed with the tools he thinks he’ll need: bottled water, flyers, gift bags, an umbrella. Signs half as tall as he are wedged awkwardly into the back seat of his car, one showing a smiling baby on her stomach, the other a premature infant held in gloved hands above a red biohazard bag. One says, “All Life Matters,” the other, “EXPOSE THE DEEDS OF DARKNESS.”
The drive from his home to Raleigh is nearly two hours. Brock spends it in prayer. He parks in a Food Lion lot across the highway from an abortion clinic and doesn’t get out until he feels, as he puts it, that God’s hand rests on his shoulder. When he finally hoists the tote from the trunk, he grunts with effort, balancing the massive signs against the handlebar.
“I call this hill Murder Hill,” he says, chuckling as he begins the climb to the clinic.
The hill is steep. By the time Brock reaches the top, he’s breathing heavily, sweat collecting under his cap. The clinic comes into view, an alcove fenced with wood and neatly lined with bushes. Painted on the fence in purple are the words “Pray to end sidewalk bullying!”
Paula Brewington is waiting for Brock, a longtime volunteer with the pro-life group, Love Life. Brock calls her “the GOAT.” She wears a bright pink, safety vest, her hair tied neatly at the base of her neck. Soon they are joined by Porter, a 19-year-old N.C. State University student, and Michele, another Love Life volunteer. They bow their heads together in the wooded median, praying in silence as highway traffic hums past.
When the first van approaches the driveway, Paula leans toward the driver’s-side window and offers a pamphlet before the driver realizes she isn’t with the clinic.
“You cannot run away from your conscience,” Michele calls after them. “This will change you emotionally, mentally and physically.”
As the van pulls through the gate, Brock clears his throat. Bible in one hand, his other raised toward the windshield, his voice breaks, “True love wins. I promise you, we care.”
Not every moment is confrontation. Between cars, the group talks. Michele teases Brock that she writes down his jokes. He obliges with another, “I was in the ICU…I had peekaboo disease.” Nearby, an older man kneels clutching a rosary, his lips moving in silent prayer.
But when cars approach, Brock’s tone sharpens. His voice climbs over the fence, penetrating the walls of the clinic.
“You don’t have to do this,” he yells. His right hand forms a claw that stabs at the air, “They crush babies’ skulls here!”
By mid-morning, Daniel from the Pit has joined them, his baritone carrying the hymn “The Lord is my Shepherd” across the pavement. A woman driving past shouts, “Go to hell!” Paula answers calmly, “I love you.”
At 11:30, Brock packs the tote, folds the signs, and starts back down the hill, Daniel’s singing trailing behind him. No one stopped. No babies were “saved.”
The Question
On a gray August morning, Brock pulls into the GoRaleigh bus station with Daniel at his side. From the trunk of his car, they haul potato chips and bottled water, calling down from the parking deck, “Brother Joe!”
Below, Joseph Toy waits at a folding table stacked with tracts and Bibles. A man hugs Joe in passing, others drift over as soon as the food is set out. Brock hands a tract to a mother and son, then kneels beside Terry, who sits in a wheelchair, to pray for his strength before surgery. Within minutes, half the water is gone.
But when Brock takes the microphone, his demeanor shifts. “FOR GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD,” he bellows, Bible raised. “IF YOU DIE WITHOUT CHRIST, YOU WILL FIND YOURSELF IN THE PITS OF HELL. FOREVER, AND EVER, AND EVER.” His voice slams off the concrete walls, booming where just minutes earlier he whispered over a prayer.
His urgency, he explains, comes from his own story.
“You need the fear of the Lord. I had to be saved by fear.”
Then a man steps forward, Bible in hand. He reads from Isaiah 45: “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.” He gestures to a man with a failing catheter, urine dripping onto the concrete. “Your Bible says God creates evil. Why follow a God who creates suffering like this?”
For the first time all morning, Brock falters. He lowers his voice. “I don’t understand a lot,” he says slowly, “but I know salvation is real. You’ve got me interested. I’ll study that more.”
The man nods, satisfied, and walks away. Brock shakes his head, then returns to the table. He thumbs the edge of a tract, slips the headset back on, and begins again, warning of hell, calling for salvation. The theological challenge fades as quickly as it came, buried under the weight of his calling.
The Pit and the People
Back in Chapel Hill, students have their own reactions to preachers like Brock. Caroline King, a first-year student at UNC-CH, remembers the first time she saw the preachers in the Pit.
“It was like a Venus flytrap trying to win by showing its teeth,” King said. Though raised in the Baptist church, she now identifies as an agnostic.
Caroline doesn’t mind Daniel, who speaks kindly and calls her “ma’am.” She does mind the pamphlet he gave her, which tells her she is going to hell.
“He didn’t get a home run,” she laughs. “But he got to first base.”
To many students, the presence of men like Stephen Brock feels anachronistic, a relic from an America that increasingly exists only in memory. Loud preaching without digital outreach, small-group invitations or carefully tailored messaging, feels increasingly like an out-of-place spectacle.
“Pit preachers make me feel uncomfortable,” said Breiana Sisk, a Christian sophomore at UNC-CH. “I can only imagine how people who don’t believe feel.”
Some students avoid the Pit altogether when they see the preachers. Others engage, if only briefly, out of curiosity.
“We don’t force anything on anybody out there,” Brock said. “Everybody’s got free will. All we can do is love on folks and give them the truth. What they do with it is between them and God.”
The Margins of Evangelism
Yaakov Ariel, Ph.D., a historian and professor of religion at UNC-CH, says today’s campus evangelism looks different than it did decades ago. It’s often led by student ministries like Cru, formerly Campus Crusade for Christ, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and Chi Alpha Campus Ministries, groups that prefer to use chocolate chip cookies and game nights instead of fire-and-brimstone sermons.
“Pit preaching is marginal,” Ariel said. “It attracts attention, not followers.”
Open-air preaching has deep roots in the history of evangelism. The Bible describes preaching outdoors, and revivalists like John Wesley and George Whitefield drew thousands to open-air sermons in the 18th century. In the United States, mass evangelism reached a zenith in the 1970s and ’80s through televangelists like Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart, figures who became infamous for scandal as much as for salvation. Today, that old style of street preaching survives only in pockets like the Pit, vestiges of a calling that has largely migrated indoors or online.
“Most evangelists now are relational,” Ariel said. “They work in small groups. They integrate faith with friendship. These preachers in the Pit? They live on the margins.”
Seth Collins, interim director of Chi Alpha at UNC-CH, has been in campus ministry for over a decade. He’s never had a student ask him about the Pit preachers.
“It’s hard to say if they’re connecting,” he said. “But I don’t want to assume they’re not.”
Chi Alpha operates with a philosophy of kindness and consistency: donut holes, bottled water, mission trips. “If you only have one shot to connect,” Collins says, “it better be authentic.”
Brock believes his approach meets that standard of authenticity. His tracts are, as he calls them, “paper missionaries,” each chosen with care. On one particularly sunny afternoon, he handed a tract to Max, a transfer student, who accepted it with a genuine smile.
Having spent two years at High Point, a Methodist-affiliated university where faith is weaved into campus life, Max found the religious presence in the Pit comforting.
“The tracts are a reminder of my faith,” he said.
Sowing Season
As the day heats up, the golden sun reflects off the red bricks in the Pit, casting long shadows attached to passing feet. Students fundraise, dance, shout, sometimes all at once. Flyers are pressed into hands or ignored. Discarded tracts swirl with fallen blossoms and paper coffee cups.
In the center of it all, Stephen Brock stands still beside the awning of the Undergraduate Library, watching people pass. He’s not disappointed when they don’t stop, but he beams when they do. While most don’t, some pray with him. Some return the following week.
He sometimes sees familiar faces, students who once took a tract months ago and now stop to chat. One shares that he started reading scripture again. Another asks if Brock remembers his name. He does.
“We’re not out here to win arguments,” Brock said. “We’re out here to reach the lost with the cross.”
At 3 p.m., Stephen Brock packs up his tracts and Bible. No stage to disassemble, no microphone to coil. Just a man preparing for another long drive home, carrying the weight of words spoken and unspoken.
On Tuesday morning, he’ll stand on Murder Hill, voice cracking as he shouts warnings at clinic windows. On Monday, he’ll return to the Pit, offering gentle smiles and paper missionaries to students who mostly look right through him. Two versions of salvation, two versions of Stephen Brock, both convinced they serve the same God.
“Some people don’t stop, but they heard something. They saw something, and that sticks,” Brock said.
Each conversation or tract is, in his view, a seed planted – a spark of curiosity, a glimmer of faith, maybe even the beginning of a relationship with God that could take root long after he’s gone. He measures second chances too, the kind he believes found him in a hot factory on a summer afternoon nearly 30 years ago.
Tomorrow, he’ll drive those hundreds of miles again, chasing moments that might last seconds, believing that somewhere between his whispers and his shouts, God is listening too.
And maybe, just maybe, a student who took a tract this morning will read it.
The rest, Brock says, is in God’s hands.
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Amelie Fawson is a junior at UNC-Chapel Hill studying Media and Journalism and Information Science. As Audio-Visual Editor at The Daily Tar Heel, she explores how words, sound, and image can make sense of what connects us.
