Southern Baptist Evangelist Junior Hill, a “country preacher” known for leading more than 1,800 revivals across the South, died on Wednesday at his home in Hartselle, Baptist Press reported.

He was 87.

Hill was elected in 1989 to serve as first vice president at the Southern Baptist Convention when it met in Las Vegas. He preached at the Southern Baptist Pastors’ Conference in 1981 in Los Angeles.

He wrote an autobiography, “They Call Him Junior,” that recounted his more than 68 years in ministry.

He became a full-time traveling evangelist in 1967 after serving as a pastor for 11 years in Hartselle, Birmingham and Mississippi.

In 2021, Hill received the first Fred Wolfe Lifetime Pastoral Ministry Award, named for the former pastor of Cottage Hill Baptist Church in Mobile.

“Junior has been a powerful, evangelistic voice to Southern Baptists in our lifetime,” Wolfe had said of Hill. “No man has preached the Gospel more clearly and powerfully to saints and sinners than Junior Hill.”

Wolfe died on Jan. 3, 2021, three years to the day before Hill.

Hill considered himself a “pastor to pastors” after he was fired in 1962 as pastor of a Mississippi church that he had served for 18 months while he was a student at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.

Hill told a Sunday school class there that all churches should be open to all people, regardless of race. The deacons fired him during the week, but didn’t inform him until he returned the following Sunday.

“I can still remember how humiliating it was to walk past those laughing men, go back to the car, and sadly tell Carole what had happened to us,” Hill wrote in his autobiography.

As a traveling evangelist, Hill said he spent more than 20 years on the road, preaching at more than 40 churches a year.

Hill is survived by Carole, his wife of 66 years, two children, and five grandchildren.

Funeral arrangements are being handled by Peck Funeral Home in Hartselle.