David Wilkerson (1931—2011)
Country of Origin
-
United States
Countries/Regions of Ministry
- United States
Traditions
- Pentecostal
Ministries
- urban missionary
David Wilkerson began as a naïve, small-town Assemblies of God pastor in Pennsylvania. Browsing Life Magazine, late one night in 1958, he saw a courtroom sketch of seven New York City gang members on trial for murdering a fifteen-year-old polio victim in the park. He immediately felt God calling him to take the gospel to those hardened, bitter teens.
He drove into the city on his day off with no strategy for getting started. The Cross and the Switchblade recounts how he tried to meet the seven defendants but was unsuccessful. Blocked by court officials, he walked dangerous streets, prayed for guidance, observed the devastation of heroin usage, and struck up several conversations. One of the most dramatic was the day, in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene area, when he first encountered Nicky Cruz, vice-president of the vicious Dragons gang:
I remember thinking, as I looked at him, that’s the hardest face I have ever seen.
“How do you do, Nicky,” I said.
He left me standing with my hand outstretched. He wouldn’t even look at me. He was puffing away at a cigarette, shooting nervous little jets of smoke out the side of his mouth.
“Go to hell, Preacher,” he said. He had an odd, strangled way of speaking and he stuttered badly over some of his sounds.
“You don’t think much of me, Nicky,” I said, “but I feel different about you. I love you, Nicky.” I took a step toward him.
“You come near me, Preacher,” he said, in that tortured voice, “I’ll kill you.”
“You could do that,” I agreed. “You could cut me in a thousand pieces and lay them out on the street and every piece would love you.”
With persistence, the toughest like Nicky began softening to Wilkerson’s message of grace and forgiveness. David and his wife, Gwen, resigned their comfortable pastorate and moved to New York City with their three young children to found the ministry known as Teen Challenge. One of their aids turned out to be Nicky Cruz. A local board came together, starting with Wilkerson’s Assemblies of God colleagues but adding Baptists, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians. Denominations came together to pray for the light of Christ to break through the gloom of drug addiction and violence. Some of them even asked their business friends for funding help; as a result, a large house on Clinton Avenue was purchased, cleaned up, and turned into a center for hope and recovery.
Recovery ministry was difficult, however, and more than a few times, a young man would set out to follow Christ, move into the center, go through detoxification, but return to the lifestyle. As Wilkerson interviewed those in the program who had made it over the hump, he made a startling discovery:
I spoke to Nicky, who had been taking goof balls [capsules that combine barbiturates with amphetamines] and smoking marijuana. I asked him when it was that he felt he had victory over his old way of life. Something tremendous had happened to him, he said, at the time of his conversion on the street corner. He had been introduced at that time to the love of God. But it wasn’t until later that he knew he had complete victory.
“And when was that, Nicky?”
“At the time of my baptism in the Holy Spirit.”
I called in David and asked him the same thing. When did he feel that he had power over himself? “Oh, I can answer that,” said David. “When I was baptized in the Holy Spirit.”
Again and again I got the same report.
This dimension of inner power caught the attention of an another important visitor--a Jesuit priest from Fordham University came for a day. He heard testimonies from city youth who had changed. “We still get tempted,” one of them said, “but now we always run to the chapel and pray.” A Teen Challenge Training Center was subsequently opened 150 miles outside the city, providing a five- to eight-month intensive residential plunge into Bible study, prayer, and Holy Spirit overhaul. A 1976 independent survey of Teen Challenge graduates showed 71 percent were still “clean” when interviewed—a far higher number than secular or government programs were seeing. Wilkerson wrote:
Certainly we cannot claim a magical cure for drug addiction. The devil which hides in that needle is so deadly strong that any such claim would be folly. All we can say, perhaps, is that we have found a power which captures a boy more strongly than narcotics. But that power is the Holy Spirit Himself which, unlike narcotics, does a strange thing for our boys: He captures only to liberate.
The Cross and the Switchblade lit flames of curiosity far beyond New York. Students at Duquesne University read it and became hungry for the kind of spiritual dynamic it described. Out of this came the first Catholic Charismatic prayer meeting in 1967, from which an entire movement was born. Teen Challenge Centers opened in Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and other needy cities. When the best-selling book was made into a movie in 1970, featuring Pat Boone as Wilkerson and Erik Estrada as Nicky Cruz, it was a box office success and translated into thirty other languages.
David Wilkerson’s ministry expanded over the next decades as he traveled widely, speaking and writing approximately fifty books. In 1987, he turned his focus again to New York City, working with his brother Don to plant Times Square Church in a theater just off Broadway. His serious tone never changed. Nicky Cruz affirmed that his mentor was always "a straight shooter … who never danced around anything.” By this he meant that Wilkerson did not coddle, rationalize, or soft-pedal the need for radical conversion, holy living, and Holy Spirit power. Only these, he believed, would set men and women free from every evil trap and help them escape the kind of addiction, helplessness, and grief he worked with first-hand throughout his life.
Further Reading
- The Cross and the Switchblade.