Allan Appel Photo
Steve Harvin with his friend Rev. John Cotten at Sunday's event.
The same God that protected Steve Harvin in combat in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993, as a soldier with the 75th Army Ranger Regiment, is continuing to protect — and heal — him in an ongoing battle with cancer.
Sunday evening Harvin raised his hand in praise, along with more than a dozen other cancer survivors in a moving, music and prayer-filled celebration inside a New Haven church billed as “Faith Over Cancer.”
Organized by the Hamden-based Mt. Calvary Deliverance Tabernacle church under the leadership of Pastor Robert L. Smith IV and First Lady Minister Kristen Smith, and convened at the Agape Christian Center on Goffe Street in New Haven, the event drew more than 200 family, friends, and supporters to listen to survivors’ testimonies. They heard from Dr. Andrew T. Putnam of Smilow Cancer Hospital Palliative Care and Hospice Medicine who spoke on the importance of early testing, and they networked about cancer education, and, most of all, partook in a faith-filled communal, emotional healing and restoration.
“Only God brought me out, where I lost a lot of friends,” Harvin recalled during a pause in the ceremonies, describing his time in combat. “You can’t go through combat and die from cancer! That’s why I’ve fought like hell.”
Hallelujahs, prayers, and balloons punctuated survivors' testimonies.
Harvin, who grew up in the Church Street South projects and graduated from Lee High School, served in the military from 1983 to 1999. Tours took him to Kuwait, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and parts of Africa.
Some of those assignments involved exposure to nuclear materials. That’s where he believes his bladder cancer originated. It began to assail him in 2006 and resulted in stomach removal the following year.
He went to church as a kid, he recalled, but his faith really didn’t click in until his experiences in war and combat.
That sense of being protected has stayed with him during his ongoing battles with cancer and in the taking care of close relatives, some of whom had cancer as well, while he was undergoing his own arduous treatments.
The faith Harvin developed to help him through combat, when bullets were ricocheting around, was of a different kind than when undergoing chemotherapy. Harvin told the large audience that filled the Agape Center’s balloon and flower filled hall, “the best testimony is that God is a healer.”
The Mount Calvary Deliverance Tabernacle also organizes the annual Breast Cancer Musical event, which in October will be held for the 12th time, according to one of the organizers for Faith Over Cancer Missionary Nakia Dawson-Douglas. In the past it had been restricted to breast cancer survivors, but after last year’s event, church member April Jones-Deans let it be known that there were many survivors of other cancers in the church family.
This included Jones-Deans’s mother Mae V. Jones, who passed in Jan. 2024. Because of her passing, the Jones family has gave permission to change the name of the annual event to The Mae V. Jones (Maevon) Faith Over Cancer Event and Rally!
The result: This year’s was the inaugural event of a celebration that recognizes survivors of a whole range of cancers and experiences which the honorees described in candid detail.
“I was stricken with lung cancer and then brain cancer,” said Wanda Dawson. “For those of you without faith in God, I urge you to get some.”
Valrica Fluellen said she has been fighting cancer — with four separate diagnoses — since 1996, including a bone marrow transplant: “I know He’s with me. He’s not leaving me.”
“Thank you for letting me come out of my shell and give my testimony,” said Adrianna Douglas. When she received her first diagnosis of liver cancer, she went into the bathroom and cried, she recalled. “Why has God let this happen to me?” Then she flipped that with faith and declared to herself, “God, why not me! With faith in my God I did not let that thing hold me prisoner.”
The other survivors, along with their families, who were honored for their battles included Robert Gallishaw, Cherrie Greene, Jessica Marks, Charisse McCotter, Ganyl Martin, Eric Rogers, Yul Watley, and Kali Williamson-Marshall. Diona Michael and Denzel Gethers were there in honor of Zoey Gethers, as was April Jones-Deans in honor of Mae V. Jones.
Sponsors for the event included Yale New Haven Hospital, Hartford Healthcare, Bereavement Care Network, Inc, and Hillhouse Alumni Cheerleader Association.
These days Steve Harvin is doing pastoral work with the New Bethel Church of God in Christ in Waterbury and continues to be sustained through a belief in God and in a greater purpose that gives him a faith that gets him through.
He termed the evening’s public recognition of survivors necessary and “magnificent.”