The first time I encountered David Wilkerson, I was 12. When he spoke at a national conference in Long Beach, California, someone announced he’d be at a table in the exhibition hall signing his book, The Cross and the Switchblade. I visited the table with my mother, and though I never saw him there, I picked up a copy. It was a seminal read for me.
The book was the story of his adventures – and misadventures – as a country pastor reaching out to youth gangs in New York City. By the time I heard him at that convention in ‘67, Wilkerson had become well known for his work in establishing Teen Challenge, an outreach to inner-city gangs and young people living with addictions.
What struck me most in his book was how his own life had been changed through prayer. He’d grown up a PK (pastor’s kid), was from a family of preachers, had become a believer at a very young age, and had begun preaching as a teenager – all like me.
As an adult he started pastoring small churches in rural Pennsylvania. Until, that is, he was gripped by the conviction to shut off his TV and start praying.
One day while praying he was drawn to a Life magazine picture of gang members on trial in NYC for murdering a man in a wheelchair. He felt compelled to go to the City to see if he could talk with them and wound up being ejected from the trial, labeled a country bumpkin by the press.
Thwarted from connecting with those gang members, he kept going back to the city every week. With no idea what to do once he got there, he just walked around in tough neighborhoods, praying as he walked. Eventually the trial fiasco led to unbelievable opportunity to meet gang leaders and his ministry took off.
Teen Challenge became a worldwide outreach. Wilkerson then went on to launch a separate global operation called World Challenge. In the late 80s he returned to New York City to found Times Square Church.
I finally met Wilkerson when, as a twenty-something, I connected with his World Challenge ministry based in East Texas. Bob Rogers, on his staff, was the son-in-law of my pastor while I was studying at Baylor. Wilkerson’s son, Gary, and I teamed up on several outreach projects to high school students, a ministry that was a forerunner of a program called Youth Alive. Through these contacts, I saw beyond the legend to glimpse the heart of the man.
Wilkerson was reaching outside denominational boundaries in a time when Pentecostal and evangelical churches were much more denominationally defined. He had immense influence on both the Jesus Movement and the Charismatic movement in the 60s and 70s.
When he moved his base to Texas, the area around Garden Valley near Lindale quickly became a hub for ministries such as Keith Green’s Last Days, the Second Chapter of Acts, Winkey Pratney, Dallas Holm, and Leonard Ravenhill. Wilkerson would later sell his Twin Oaks Ranch to YWAM for pennies on the dollar.
Once while visiting Twin Oaks, Gary and I went to check out a water ski tournament at a nearby lake. Someone recognizing Gary came up to him, babbling on about how God was raising up the area as a New Jerusalem of ministries. Gary politely found a way to move on and said to me as we left, “Nah, just cheap land.”
Like Gary, his father was a no-pretense – and no-nonsense – kind of person. Wilkerson certainly worked hard to not let his notoriety go to his head. The directions he chose in his ministry were not the most popular and he intentionally walked away from what could have made him even more famous. His streak of prophetic independence often led him to say and do things others were not sure how to take. And he was criticized for preaching too negatively.
When the TV evangelist scandal broke in the late 80s, Jimmy Swaggart claimed to have had a vision of seven farming combines reaping the world’s harvest fields. Swaggart said those seven combines were his and others’ huge ministries, such as Jim and Tammy Baker’s PTL Club and New Orleans Pastor Marvin Gorman. In the dream, Swaggart saw six of those seven combines suddenly disappear. Swaggart said that was a sign all these other ministries would be swallowed up by his.
When Wilkerson heard that, he responded that Swaggart had misinterpreted the dream. It wasn’t a prophecy that Swaggart would be the last evangelist standing. It was a warning from God that Swaggart should divest himself of all the myriads of ministries he’d been growing and get back to the one thing God had called him to do.
Swaggart didn’t take kindly to Wilkerson’s admonition. But just as in Wilkerson’s interpretation of the dream, Swaggert’s operations started collapsing in the heat of the scandal.
This prophetic role of Wilkerson’s often got him into trouble. He preached and wrote about where we as a world were heading. When he warned of coming catastrophe, his printed messages sizzled. His vision could turn dark, very dark, and yet God’s glory was always ultimately in view.
Even when he preached on grace, he had a way of coming off intensely. Even so, the point of his messages was always that God was in control and that God loved you and wanted to separate you from what was going to destroy you.
For many listeners, his talk about God’s love was compelling. Yet others were repulsed by the darkness Wilkerson saw coming down the road. At one point, Wilkerson’s support dropped off significantly. People were less generous with his prophetic ministry than they were with his evangelistic outreach. Funds generated through his public messages were supporting a lot of ministries to those who were hurting. So, when the donations fell, the outreach work suffered.
An old preacher responded by saying that Wilkerson didn’t understand that, unlike evangelists and pastors who are to be supported by the church, God alone provides for prophets – a la Elijah who was fed by God-sent ravens. This divine arrangement was so that the prophets’ messages wouldn’t be diluted by the fickle winds of the masses. If Wilkerson was going to continue to exercise his prophetic role, he’d have to accept that it would affect his support.
This hiccup was a reminder to Wilkerson that he had long been called to trust in God, not in others for approval. His trust in God is what enabled him to fulfill his calling to the borderlands in the first place – and it was to the borderlands that he kept returning, as when he moved back to NYC to found Times Square Church.
Border agents are often misunderstood by others because they tread into territory unfamiliar and uncomfortable to less adventurous folks. Wilkerson tread into a lot of unfamiliar and uncomfortable territory. In so many ways, he went where others had not gone before.
I had pastor friends who didn’t like the dark tones they heard in Wilkerson’s preaching. To them, he came off harsh and condemning, even when he was preaching grace.
However, his emphasis on holiness was not what we used to call clothesline preaching, as in telling people what they should wear, for example. Holiness was calling people to be fully devoted to God. Wilkerson believed that the only way to follow God was to be wholly devoted.
I remember a story I heard from Gary of when his father interviewed a gang member who had just been converted. When Wilkerson asked the convert why he’d given his life to Jesus, the guy replied, “Life is s*t.” I don’t know if Wilkerson lost hold of the mic, but it certainly was a mic drop moment. The comment may have offended listeners, but the convert was as genuine as he could be.
Wilkerson was not above getting down in the mud to rescue those the rest of the church had ignored. But he also knew that God had called each and every one of these rescued people to a life of high calling. Under the power of the Spirit, raw was transformed into royal.
I count Wilkerson as a border agent for yet another reason.
As I dove into my decade-long research on race relations in the Assemblies of God,1 I came to uncover how he had played a key role in diversifying the Pentecostal and evangelical world, especially the Assemblies of God.
Today the denomination is one of the most ethnically and racially diverse national church organizations in the U.S. Yet it has not always been so. Although this home denomination of his had been born out of the racially diverse Pentecostal movement, the movement quickly became racially separated by the 1920s.
The Assemblies of God conformed to 20th century American evangelicalism and solidified as a nearly exclusively white denomination, with the exception of distinct language districts such as the Spanish Eastern. Hardly any Black Americans were to be found in the church’s pews let alone in its pulpits by 1960.
Yet, the gang members Wilkerson reached in the late 50s and early 60s were a diverse lot – Hispanic, black, and white. As he visited churches across the nation sharing his ministry, he took his young converts with him. In most churches, Teen Challenge was the white congregants’ first experience seeing black and Hispanic people in their services, let alone ministering on their platforms.
Reactions were mixed. Many of these churches had long resisted opening their doors to persons of color. But most Pentecostals also had a soft spot in their hearts for reaching the lost. In such circles, evangelistic success had a way of overpowering other preferences.
While Wilkerson countered the racial mores of his time, I never sensed he was a public crusader against racism per se. Yet his actions spoke volumes. He refused to allow the racist regulations of the day to get in his way. He had no time for people whose unbiblical preferences impeded fulfillment of the Great Commission.
He certainly had no time for churches that had no room for his diverse lot of converts. These young believers had led problematic lives, including when it came to messed up marriages. When churches refused to ordain people who had been divorced, Wilkerson found a way to let them fulfill their God callings in other organizational settings.
In presenting academic papers at academic meetings, you expect hardball questions. That is, after all, the value of peer review. I remember presenting my research on church-based racism at a Society for Pentecostal Studies meeting in Costa Mesa. I noted two preachers who did much to open the Assemblies of God to racial diversity – Billy Graham and David Wilkerson. Someone challenged that assumption, stating that Wilkerson’s influence was accidental, not intentional and thus not significant.
True, racial diversity may not have been the core of his preaching, but it was core in his practice. He had been called to the borderlands of the inner city and among those he was reaching were people whose color precluded them from finding a place in the church. When doors shut on his converts because of their color or their past decisions, he found other avenues for their ministry.
I stand by my theory that Wilkerson did much to open the door to diversity in the church. The parade of persons of color redeemed by God broke down barriers wherever Wilkerson went.
Wilkerson retained his borderland ministry until the day he died in a car accident just shy of his 80th birthday. For the country preacher who had seen the world, his heart remained with those outside church doors.
For more borderland stories, check out Story (howardkenyon.com).
- The dissertation, A Social History of the Assemblies of God (Baylor, 1988), was expanded and turned into a book, Ethics in the Age of the Spirit: Race, Women, War, and the Assemblies of God (Pickwick Publications, 2019). ↩︎