Steve Wiggins was just the guy who happened to own a guitar.

“Let me try to truncate as much as I can because there’s just so much drama,” Steve tells me with a laugh. “I was just one of those kids that grew up around church, I became a Christian when I was in college and was going to a Bible study one day with some guys that were trying to disciple new believers, and they just asked a question, does anybody know any Jesus music?”

The year was 1988, and Steve was running track in Arkansas. There was no local Christian radio playing anything that felt relevant. “There was just no Christian radio that played any kind of music that I ever wanted to listen to… It was the age of MTV and the whole thing, and there just was nothing for us. Then they said, does anybody own a guitar? And I literally was the guy that owned a guitar. And I started writing songs about what we were studying in the Bible just as a group of college guys.”

Those simple songs made their way to Ardent Studios in Memphis— the legendary studio where Led Zeppelin, Aretha Franklin, and ZZ Top recorded. And by God’s timing, Ardent was going through a spiritual revival of its own. “A guy got saved… and they convinced the owner to tithe, to give 10% of his studio time to something that would lift up the Lord.”

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That act of obedience opened a door. “I just ended up being the guy they found… we made some demos and they shopped them. I had a record deal on Sparrow Records that released in 1990, and then that just kind of came and went, didn’t really sell any records.”

That record didn’t take off, but what came next couldn’t have happened without it.

Steve reconnected with Spence Smith, a high school friend studying at nearby Harding University. “He says, we know some guys here that know your songs, and why don’t you come down, hang out with us… and it was just magical. It’s like, oh, that’s what was missing.”

With a group of new bandmates and demos in hand, Steve headed to South Africa for a tour that would evolve into something bigger than he ever imagined. “We made a custom record just to sell in South Africa called Steve Wiggins and Big Tent Revival.” But behind all that momentum was something deeper—a love story.

“We met in December of ’91… at a Bible study,” Misti recalls. “We really didn’t connect with each other until about six months later… A mutual friend of ours said, hey, you guys need to get together and work. Y’all need to write together.”

They swapped numbers. Steve called six months later. “I kind of had forgotten giving him my number,” Misti admits. “Now you probably wish you hadn’t,” Steve jokes. Misti smiles: “I don’t think so. It was the best decision of my life.”

The two began writing music together—but Steve was already falling hard. “I was already like, I’m in love with this girl. I didn’t know how she felt about me necessarily.”

As Steve waited for a ride one day to meet up with Misti’s band—who were recording in the engineering program at the University of Memphis—he did what he’d always done: he wrote a song.

“Every relationship you have before you get married ends in a breakup. That’s just the way it works. And so it’s like, I don’t want this to go that way,” Steve says. “We were both fairly new Christians, you know, maybe a couple of years into it, very young. And so it’s kind of like, can I trust the Lord with this… with this relationship?”

What came out was “Two Sets of Joneses.”

“I wrote a song about two couples, both on the same starting line, and one of them continues in the Lord, and the other one never seeks the Lord and just goes off what the world says is successful.”

He didn’t even have time to record it properly. “I had a scrap of paper in my hand with lyrics on it… I said, don’t play the radio because I’ll lose it… I walked into that studio at the University of Memphis and I said, do you have tape ready to roll?”

They hit record. Steve played the entire thing through—raw, unfiltered, and straight from the heart.

“I looked up and everybody was just looking at me like… like a calf looking at a new gate, like, what do we do? It was like, oh, this must be really bad. And they were like, dude, that is incredible.”

Misti was floored. “We were absolutely floored,” she says. And looking back, Steve knows where it came from. “I think that there’s times in life when the Lord is like “I’m going to give you something you never saw coming.”

That song, born of fear and faith, would become the turning point.

“She’s sang with me on that and all of the Big Tent Revival albums,” Steve says. “She’s sang all the… if you hear a girl, it’s her.”

But success came fast—and hard. “When Two Sets of Joneses hit, it was like a full-on marathon for seven years,” Misti says. “We were doing at least 3 or 4 shows a week.”

“We went from doing almost nothing… to 20 shows in one month.” Steve remembers.

They earned a reputation: “The hardest working band in CCM,” Misti recalls. “They were gone nonstop. It was awesome. It was exhausting.”

Eventually, Steve realized something had to change. “Misti said to me one time… you were at church with us only six times last year.”

That simple observation hit him harder than any tour schedule or chart position.

“I went and said to the agents, the management, and the band “I only want to be gone six [Sundays] next year,” Steve recalls. “It was difficult because everybody makes a percentage off of you.”

At the time, Big Tent Revival was a full-blown operation. “We had 14 people on payroll… we owned a tour bus… a semi… all our production,” Steve says. “We had, like, 401K… investing and retirement… Stuff I never thought was going to happen 3 or 4 years ago.”

But what once felt like calling began to feel like machinery.

“Sometimes I’d step on a platform and I’d think that this feels more like feeding time for this machine than… a divine appointment where the Lord’s got us here.”

He could feel the warning signs everywhere. “You started to see giants… the oaks of the Christian music world falling… and I look at, say, who are we compared to the sales or the impact or the force that these people are making?”

Steve was done. What came next was a painful but necessary letting go. “The hardest thing I ever had to do was to walk into a management meeting and say… I can’t do it anymore.”

The question that followed haunted him: “If you’re not a lead singer of a band and a songwriter, what are you?”

“I had to realize that it’s possible to be unemployed, but it’s impossible to be uncalled.”

That single realization changed everything.

“My job had been: write songs, be the lead singer of a band, record albums, do tours… That was my job. What is my calling then?”

He looked around at the people closest to him—his friends, his wife, his old manager—and asked, what do I do now?

“You’re a creative communicator,” they told him. “You’re a big picture person. You take complicated situations, boil them down into simple terms… That’s really what songwriting is.”

That led to an unexpected but divine new path. “I worked for Willow Creek Community Church… right when they were developing a thing called Multi-site church. Nobody had ever done it before.”

Soon after, Greg Laurie invited Steve and Misti to California. “We sold our house… we moved… I worked for Greg Laurie. Wrote songs for Greg… sermon series and crusade moments.”

It was there—offstage, behind the scenes, in the rhythm of the Word—that Groundworks Ministries was born.

“That’s when I started leading people day by day, chapter by chapter through the Bible,” Steve says.

He quickly saw a need few others were addressing. “There was like 2000 kids in their high school group… they had less than 100 people in their college group. And I thought, wow, that’s bizarre.”

So Steve did what he’d always done—he invited them in.

“Would you like to come to my house?” he asked strangers who looked college-aged. “Misti and I opened up our house… 10 or 15 people… musically oriented… I wanted to ask them one question: why don’t you go to the college group?”

The answers weren’t shocking—but they were sobering. “We don’t like the name of the group. Don’t like the day they meet. Don’t like the room they meet in. Don’t like the time… the teacher… the music… the people.”

“All consumer-driven answers,” Steve says. “There was no causality.”

Then came the real revelation. “None of them could name the Ten Commandments… Not that you have to know that to be a Christian, I just thought that was interesting. None of them had ever read the New Testament, much less the Bible. A lot of these kids had grown up in church their whole life.”

That’s when Steve had the idea. “Come next week. Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to start reading the Bible. And here’s my commitment to you: I’m going to read it too. I’m not telling you to read the Bible. I’m going to read it with you.”

Week after week, the group grew. From 10 to 30. Then 50. Then 150.

“I can show you photographs,” Steve says. “God was doing a thing. Mostly 18 to 25-year-old people. I wanted to put on a public discussion of the Bible in a place where nonbelievers could just stumble on it and see what would happen.”

But even then, he was cautious. “Let’s not get a bigger room… let’s get just another room… I started teaching people to teach the Bible.”

Eventually, Groundworks grew into more than a Bible study—it became a mission, a tool, and soon, a digital platform.

“What we’re working on now with Groundworks Ministries is a group making software,” Steve explains. “It allows people to go to our website and say, I want to start a Bible study… and then on the day that you launch, we start sending you daily Bible devotionals to help you in your Bible reading.”

“It’s not a thing where you’re doing the workout for them. You’re just spotting them in the gym. It’s your workout… It’s you and the Holy Spirit. I’m just setting the appointment every day.”

If this had existed in the heyday of 90s CCM?

“I bet the majority of monkey business that happened in our industry… would have gone away,” Steve says. “Because people would understand that this is discipleship.”

Now, decades after being that kid with the guitar, Steve Wiggins still believes in the same thing: transformation through the Word.

“We feel like there is a time when people can come out and they can just bear witness to what God’s doing in their life,” he says. “This is how we keep our marriage together. This is how we’re dealing with our children, our jobs, or other things. And by the way, how great is our God?”

So where do you begin?

Right where Steve and Misti did.

The Bible. Together.

Launching in 2026, the new platform will allow users to form and manage small group Bible studies through a secure, invite-only system. Each day, participants will receive Scripture and simple devotions—not theological essays, but honest reflections.

The platform is built on three principles:

  1. Christians read the Bible.
  2. The Bible transforms your heart.
  3. We grow by pouring it into others.

And that’s exactly what Steve hopes this next season is all about. “Go make disciples. Discipline to the word. Taught by the Holy Spirit for the purpose of knowing God and making him known,” he says. “And then turn them out to the fields which are white for harvest. And I think that has a soundtrack.”

“So, will there be more music?” Steve smiles at the question.

“If I try to do music to impress people and to grow a market, I’ve lost from the beginning,” he says. “But if I’m bearing witness to what the Holy Spirit has taught me… you’ll never have a loss of an audience.”

He’s not chasing relevance. He’s chasing truth.

“I’m not here to reach kids. If I could reach people that are my age, I’d be blown away.”

After all, the tent may be different—but the revival is still very much the same.

Check out Steve and Misti’s ministry at GroundworksMinistries.com

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