Biography
David Ray Wilkerson was born on May 19, 1931, in Hammond, Indiana. His father and grandfather were Pentecostal preachers, and religion was part of the household long before David had a pulpit of his own. He studied at Central Bible College in Springfield, Missouri, and was ordained in the Assemblies of God in 1952. He served small congregations in Pennsylvania, including a church in Philipsburg. In those years he was the pastor of people who lived far from the streets of New York City. Nothing about the size of his congregation suggested that he would soon be known for working among urban gangs and young people struggling with addiction.
The change began in 1958 when he read a report in Life magazine about seven New York teenagers accused in a murder case. He later described being troubled by their faces and feeling compelled to do something. The circumstances are familiar through his own book and later retellings, but their importance lies in the decision that followed. He left the security of his ordinary pastoral work and travelled to New York to try to speak with the young men. His attempt to approach the defendants in court was unsuccessful and drew attention from reporters. A first effort that seemed embarrassing or fruitless became the beginning of a long association with the city.
Wilkerson returned to New York. He began going into neighbourhoods where youth gangs were active, trying to speak with young men who regarded preachers and outsiders with suspicion. He was still a rural Pennsylvania minister learning how to move through a city that was strange to him. His early accounts describe hostility and fear alongside conversations that developed into relationships. He did not invent the social problems around him. Poverty, racial division, inadequate housing and the availability of narcotics were already pressing upon many families. His response was strongly evangelical: he believed young people needed both the message of Christ and people who would remain with them after a public expression of faith.
Among the people he met was Nicky Cruz, a young gang leader who later became a preacher himself. The confrontation and friendship became one of the best-known parts of Wilkerson's story. Readers should remember that the scenes have come to us largely through memoirs and later testimony, in which details can be compressed or shaped by memory. The relationship itself is well established. Cruz's later ministry is part of the evidence that Wilkerson's work was not limited to one dramatic meeting. It involved young people who continued to make decisions and build lives after the preacher had moved to another street or congregation.
In the following years Wilkerson helped establish Teen Challenge in Brooklyn, developing a residential approach for people seeking freedom from drug addiction and destructive patterns of life. Histories give differing dates for the work's earliest meetings and for the opening of its first residential centre. Its own organisational history places the first centre in 1960, while other accounts point to ministry activity in 1958 or 1959. Those distinctions should be preserved rather than hidden. The work combined Christian teaching, close supervision, personal support and practical attempts to provide a different daily life. It grew beyond New York and eventually reached many countries, although statistics supplied by the organisation require attribution and cannot by themselves demonstrate every participant's long-term outcome.
In 1963 his experiences appeared in The Cross and the Switchblade, written with John and Elizabeth Sherrill. The book gave a wide readership an account of the early street ministry, including the dangers, the unexpected friendships and the conversions that Wilkerson believed he had witnessed. It became one of the best-known evangelical books of its generation and was made into a film in 1970, with Pat Boone playing Wilkerson and Erik Estrada playing Nicky Cruz. The book's reach brought prominence to a minister who had first entered the city without influence or connections. It also fixed a particular narrative of those early years in the Christian imagination, making it especially important to distinguish his recollections from independently established urban history.
Wilkerson's work did not remain confined to Teen Challenge. He travelled to preach, wrote further books and addressed pastors and congregations about holiness, prayer and the need for an undivided commitment to Christ. In 1971 he established World Challenge, a ministry that developed international relationships and helped support both evangelism and practical assistance. His later messages could be stern. He spoke against what he saw as the church's willingness to substitute religious success, entertainment or prosperity for repentance and dependence upon God. Listeners who valued that seriousness found in him a minister willing to name problems that other speakers avoided. Others questioned his interpretations and his tendency to warn of approaching national or spiritual calamities. Both responses formed part of his public ministry.
The place of prayer in his life was not a theme added after his name became familiar. In his telling, the original journey to New York began after he decided to give time formerly spent watching television to prayer. His later writings repeatedly returned to dependence on God rather than confidence in programmes alone. He nevertheless became responsible for substantial organisations, budgets, employees and buildings. A full life account must allow that tension to remain. The man who challenged churches about institutional busyness also spent many years leading institutions that tried to address pressing human needs. Their successes, difficulties and changes should not be reduced to a single heroic sentence.
In 1986 Wilkerson became deeply concerned about what he saw in the Times Square district of Manhattan. The area was known for commercial sex, pornography businesses, drug use and other forms of exploitation. He resolved to help establish a congregation there. Times Square Church began its public meetings in October 1987, bringing together people from different backgrounds in a city centre undergoing profound change. The congregation later worshipped in the former Mark Hellinger Theatre on Broadway. Its founding made a new stage of his ministry visible: after decades of travelling and speaking to people from many churches, he again carried responsibility for a local body of worshippers.
His letters and sermons from this period spoke often about spiritual compromise, fear, endurance and the promises of Scripture. He encouraged churches to minister to the poor and warned against measuring divine favour merely by wealth or size. World Challenge continued supporting outreach in different countries, and he organised pastoral conferences between 1999 and 2008. He also founded a ministry school intended to prepare workers for service. Some of his messages attracted criticism because of sweeping predictions or severe judgments about the spiritual condition of his nation. They should be presented as his warnings and interpretations, not as historical facts made certain by his conviction.
His wife Gwendolyn, usually called Gwen, shared almost six decades of married life with him. They raised four children, and members of the family later took part in the ministries he had helped build. The public record tells much more about David's travels and sermons than about the ordinary costs of those years at home. It would be wrong to invent either a perfect household or private failures unsupported by direct evidence. His son Gary later wrote a tribute remembering a father who worked tirelessly and preferred prayer and ministry to public honours. The tribute is a son's grateful testimony, valuable precisely because it can be identified as such.
On April 27, 2011, Wilkerson died in a road accident in East Texas, aged seventy-nine. Gwen survived the crash with injuries and died the following year. Contemporary reporting confirmed the accident and the continuing work of the institutions he left behind. The circumstances of his death were sudden, but the main outline of his life had long been visible: a small-church pastor had gone to New York because he could not forget the faces of troubled young men, and his response grew into ministries that continued beyond him. He is remembered for the streets as well as the pulpit, for a book read around the world, and for the conviction that Christian preaching should lead to sustained care for those whom society had learned to overlook.
Sources and references
- World Challenge, David Wilkerson historical biography
- Times Square Church, official ministry legacy
- Contemporary independent Los Angeles Times obituary, April 30 2011
- Teen Challenge Southern California organisational history
- David Wilkerson, first-person Times Square Church start notice (1987)
- Son Gary Wilkerson's family tribute, 2012
- Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center obituary source catalogue
Sources
“A true prayer life begins at the place of anguish.”
“All true passion for Christ comes out of a baptism of anguish.”
“There is a great difference between anguish and concern.”
“Prayer creates unity.”
“To have a secret closet means simply to be shut in with God anywhere, anytime.”
“Prayer closet means prayer habit.”
“The kind of prayer I’m talking about has to do with intimacy with God, aloneness with Him.”
“There is absolutely no power in haphazard on-again-off-again praying.”
“When you go in to seek your Father in prayer, shut the door so that nothing and no one can enter in.”
“Being in the closet means coming before God for only one purpose: to pour yourself out.”
“The power of the secret closet is power over all confusion and disorder.”
“Those who are shut in with God will have power, authority, spiritual strength, food for soul and mind.”
“They bring their own fire, a fire ignited in the secret closet of prayer.”
“When your mind departs from your praying, all that’s left is a worthless carcass. Your prayers have no life.”
“In every age, God had stationed intercessors on the very front lines to do battle against Satan’s principalities and powers.”
“There is a reason they are called prayer warriors.”
“Those who believe when there is no evidence of an answer to prayer are blessed.”
“People who don’t believe in miracles shouldn’t pray for them.”
“True faith is born in the secret closet of intimate prayer.”
“In these last days God is going to pour out a spirit of prayer and supplication.”
“God is looking for individuals who will wait on Him until the Holy Spirit is poured out.”
“In the secret closet God wants to replenish us and give us His covenant of peace.”
“The drink offering can be poured out only in the secret closet of prayer.”
“The Holy Spirit is a spirit of truth, and truth has to overwhelm all our feelings.”
Archives
A Call to Anguish - David Wilkerson
Contents
A Pentecostal Family
David Ray Wilkerson was born on May 19, 1931, in Hammond, Indiana.
He grew up inside a Pentecostal ministerial family.
His father preached.
His grandfather preached.
The language of revival, prayer, the Holy Spirit and divine calling therefore belonged to Wilkerson’s childhood long before his own ministry became known.
The family later lived in Pennsylvania.
Wilkerson attended Central Bible College in Springfield, Missouri, an Assemblies of God school, and was ordained in 1952.
He married Gwendolyn Carosso in 1953.
They eventually had four children.
Nothing in the first years of marriage suggested that David Wilkerson would become one of the best-known American Pentecostal ministers of the twentieth century.
He served small churches in Pennsylvania.
He preached to ordinary congregations.
His world was rural and local.
Then one magazine page disturbed the direction of his life.
The Small-Town Pastor
Wilkerson was pastoring in Philipsburg, Pennsylvania, when he began spending part of his evening time in prayer rather than entertainment.
In his later telling, this was the setting in which he picked up an issue of Life magazine in 1958.
The magazine carried a courtroom sketch and story about seven New York City teenagers charged in the killing of Michael Farmer, a fifteen-year-old boy with polio.
The crime was brutal.
The young defendants belonged to the gang world of New York.
Wilkerson had never worked with street gangs.
He had no social-work training.
He did not know the boys.
Yet he found himself weeping over the image.
The thought came with unusual force: go to New York and help them.
He argued with it.
The idea made little practical sense.
He was a small-town preacher hundreds of miles away.
New York had courts, police, churches and social agencies that understood the city far better than he did.
Still, he went.
The Life Magazine Page
The magazine story has sometimes been told as though Wilkerson instantly knew a complete ministry plan.
He did not.
He knew only that he felt compelled to go to the trial.
That distinction matters.
Much of his later work grew from steps taken before he understood what they would become.
He drove to New York.
The city was unfamiliar.
He entered the courthouse where the teenagers were being tried.
He hoped to speak to them.
His first effort ended in embarrassment.
The Courthouse Failure
At the end of a court session Wilkerson moved toward the judge’s bench and asked for permission to speak with the boys.
Court officers removed him.
Reporters photographed the young preacher holding up his Bible.
What felt like failure became public.
Newspapers now had an image of a country preacher who had come to New York to reach gang members and been thrown out of court.
Wilkerson was humiliated.
He had not helped the seven defendants.
He had made himself look foolish.
But the publicity gave him an unexpected form of recognition on the streets.
Teenagers who had seen his picture knew who he was.
The failed courtroom intervention opened conversations he had not been able to arrange deliberately.
Wilkerson began spending time in neighbourhoods where gangs operated.
Gang Streets and an Unexpected Opening
New York in the late 1950s was not the simplified city of later Christian films.
Gang violence, heroin addiction, poverty, racial division and neglected housing were real.
So were strong families, churches, neighbourhood organizations and residents who disliked outsiders reducing their communities to danger.
Wilkerson entered this world as an outsider.
He made mistakes.
He also stayed.
He attended gang meetings.
He spoke in streets and auditoriums.
He met young people affected by addiction and violence.
His Pentecostal theology shaped the message.
Christ could forgive.
The Holy Spirit could give power for a changed life.
Prayer mattered.
Conversion should produce visible transformation.
This approach attracted some young people and failed to reach others.
No single evangelist “solved” New York gang violence.
But a ministry began to take shape around people whom ordinary church structures were often not reaching effectively.
Teen Challenge
Teen Challenge emerged from the street ministry.
The work sought to provide more than brief evangelistic meetings.
Young people with addiction and destructive patterns needed housing, discipline, Christian teaching and long-term support.
Residential centres developed.
The ministry eventually expanded beyond teenagers and beyond New York, which is why many branches later adopted the name Adult & Teen Challenge.
Its growth became one of the most visible legacies of Wilkerson’s early New York years.
The program was explicitly Christian.
It did not present itself as religiously neutral treatment.
Prayer, Scripture, worship, personal discipline and community were central.
Supporters pointed to dramatic transformations.
Critics of faith-based recovery have reasonably asked how success should be measured and how testimony-based claims compare with modern clinical standards.
A responsible record need not resolve every treatment debate.
It can say what Teen Challenge actually was.
Wilkerson believed addiction involved the whole person and that spiritual transformation in Christ could not be separated from recovery.
The ministry built its program around that conviction.
Nicky Cruz and The Cross and the Switchblade
Among the young gang leaders associated with Wilkerson’s early ministry, Nicky Cruz became the most famous.
Cruz had been involved with the Mau Maus, a violent Brooklyn gang.
His conversion became a central story in Wilkerson’s ministry and later in Cruz’s own preaching.
The relationship between Wilkerson and Cruz helped give a human face to what might otherwise have remained a general story about street evangelism.
In the early 1960s Wilkerson’s experiences were published in The Cross and the Switchblade.
The book became an international bestseller.
It was later adapted into a film.
The book introduced millions of readers to a New York ministry they would never see in person.
It also created the normal problems of memoir and popular religious storytelling.
Events were shaped into narrative.
Conversations were reconstructed.
A complex urban environment was compressed around a few representative people.
The book should therefore be read as Wilkerson’s ministry memoir, not as a police transcript of every scene.
Its broad historical claims—the move to New York, gang outreach, Teen Challenge, the conversion of figures such as Cruz—are well established.
Its literary form should still be remembered.
From Street Work to a Worldwide Ministry
Wilkerson’s public reach expanded rapidly.
He preached across the United States and internationally.
Teen Challenge centres multiplied.
Books, sermons, newsletters and recorded messages circulated widely.
In 1971 he founded World Challenge, which became the organizational home for a broad range of ministries.
The work included literature, evangelism, conferences, relief, support for churches and assistance to vulnerable communities.
This stage changed the scale of Wilkerson’s responsibilities.
The young pastor who once drove alone into New York now lived inside organizations requiring boards, staff, money and leadership systems.
The transition is significant.
Christian ministries born in personal burden eventually have to survive without depending entirely on the founder’s personality.
Teen Challenge developed separate leadership and denominational connections.
World Challenge developed its own staff and international work.
Wilkerson remained influential, but the ministries became larger than one man’s daily control.
Prayer, Holiness and the Burden of the Preacher
The better-known Wilkerson became, the more his preaching developed a severe note.
He warned against prayerlessness.
He preached repentance.
He attacked materialism and religious compromise.
He spoke often about the condition of ministers.
His language could be urgent enough to sound almost apocalyptic.
One of the messages most closely associated with his later preaching was “A Call to Anguish.”
The burden was not merely that Christians should become emotionally intense.
Wilkerson was attacking a form of religious concern that could discuss suffering without being moved enough to pray or act.
He believed genuine burden before God should precede ministry.
That conviction linked his later sermons to the magazine page that first sent him to New York.
He had been moved by people he did not know.
The danger, as he saw it, was that professional ministry could eventually allow a preacher to handle need without being personally affected by it.
Warnings, Visions and the Need for Discernment
Wilkerson sometimes spoke in explicitly prophetic language.
His 1970s book The Vision presented warnings about economic instability, moral change, persecution, media, sexuality, natural disasters and the future of the church.
Some admirers later claimed that large portions had been precisely fulfilled.
Others noted that broad warnings can be interpreted after the fact and that not every prediction developed as readers expected.
This part of his ministry requires restraint.
Wilkerson clearly believed he sometimes received warnings from God.
Those claims belong to his own testimony and Pentecostal framework.
Historical writing should not convert every prediction into an independently verified prophecy.
Nor should it dismiss his warnings merely because they came in prophetic language.
Many concerns he raised—commercialized religion, sexual exploitation, social fragmentation, economic fear—were observable trends as well as spiritual judgments.
The responsible distinction is simple.
The record can say what Wilkerson believed and preached.
It should not claim divine verification where history cannot provide it.
Returning to New York
By the mid-1980s Wilkerson’s attention returned intensely to New York.
Times Square in that period had a reputation for pornography, prostitution, drugs and crime alongside its theatres and commercial life.
Wilkerson later described walking there at night and becoming overwhelmed by what he saw.
Again the burden took the form of a demand.
He believed God was telling him to establish a church in the area.
The call resembled 1958 in one important way.
The answer to his prayer for someone to act was that he should act.
Times Square Church
Times Square Church began in 1987.
The congregation first met in rented venues.
It quickly became large, multicultural and international in character.
In time it occupied the historic Mark Hellinger Theatre on West 51st Street.
A Broadway theatre became a church building without losing the architectural character that made it distinctive.
The location carried symbolic force.
Wilkerson had not established the church in a quiet suburb and named it after Times Square.
The congregation was physically inside Midtown Manhattan.
Its ministries reached people from radically different social worlds: office workers, immigrants, theatre employees, homeless people, recovering addicts, tourists and long-term New Yorkers.
Wilkerson shared leadership with other pastors.
His brother Don had long experience in Teen Challenge.
Carter Conlon eventually became senior pastor, allowing Wilkerson to step away from carrying the entire local congregation.
That transition helped Times Square Church survive its founder.
Poverty, Relief and World Challenge
Wilkerson’s ministry was never only preaching.
World Challenge increasingly supported relief and compassionate work.
The emphasis became especially visible in later decades through assistance to poor communities, widows, orphans and churches serving difficult areas.
After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Times Square Church participated in relief work near Ground Zero.
Wilkerson preached through the crisis with the same combination that marked much of his ministry: compassion for suffering joined to calls for spiritual examination.
That combination could be powerful.
It could also be uncomfortable.
In moments of public tragedy, preaching judgment requires extraordinary care so that victims are not treated as illustrations for a message.
Wilkerson’s instinct was to call the church to repentance before using disaster mainly to condemn outsiders.
Even readers who disagree with parts of his interpretation can see the pastoral concern behind it.
Pastors, Leaders and the Later Years
Wilkerson increasingly carried a burden for ministers.
He organized conferences aimed at pastors and Christian leaders.
He supported the Summit International School of Ministry.
He continued publishing newsletters and sermons.
His preaching remained direct.
He had little interest in presenting Christianity as a technique for personal success.
He warned against prosperity teaching and forms of religious culture that treated material increase as the measure of divine favour.
He also warned leaders about dependence on methods, reputation and crowds.
The irony was that he himself led large organizations and a famous church.
That tension was not necessarily hypocrisy.
It was the problem he believed every successful ministry faced.
The structure can grow larger than the inward life supporting it.
Family, Cost and Human Limits
David and Gwen Wilkerson raised four children.
The family lived through the demands of travel, public ministry and organizational responsibility.
Later family testimony often speaks warmly of him, but admiration should not erase the general reality of such a life.
A minister who travels extensively is absent extensively.
A founder carrying several ministries brings pressure home whether or not he intends to.
Wilkerson was also capable of intensity that could weigh heavily on coworkers.
Urgent people can make every problem feel immediate.
The same quality that moves a leader into neglected places can exhaust people who serve beside him.
No fair history should diagnose relationships for which the evidence is limited.
But neither should it present relentless ministry as cost-free.
Wilkerson himself increasingly emphasized dependence on grace rather than human strength.
The 2011 Crash
On April 27, 2011, David and Gwen Wilkerson were travelling in East Texas.
Their vehicle crossed into oncoming traffic and collided head-on with a tractor-trailer.
David died at the scene.
He was seventy-nine, only weeks from his eightieth birthday.
Gwen survived the crash with serious injuries.
She died the following year after illness.
The suddenness of the accident contrasted sharply with the long public life that preceded it.
There was no final ministry transition planned around an approaching death.
But leadership had already moved into other hands.
Teen Challenge was long established beyond its founder.
Times Square Church had another senior pastor.
World Challenge was led by the next generation.
The work continued.
What Remained at the Centre
David Wilkerson’s life can be remembered through several large institutions.
Teen Challenge reached far beyond New York.
The Cross and the Switchblade sold millions of copies.
World Challenge developed international reach.
Times Square Church became one of Manhattan’s best-known evangelical congregations.
But the institutional list misses the recurring movement beneath the life.
He saw people others had learned not to see.
A magazine image of teenage defendants disturbed him.
Addiction became personal because he knew names.
Times Square became more than an urban symbol because he walked its streets.
Pastoral decline troubled him because he knew ministers whose public work had outgrown their prayer life.
That burden sometimes pushed him into language that was too sweeping.
His prophetic claims require discernment.
His memoirs should be read as memoir rather than exact transcript.
His urgency could become severe.
Those limitations belong in the record.
So does the central insistence that prayer must become more than religious language.
Wilkerson did not believe anguish itself saved anyone.
Christ did.
He believed anguish mattered because a heart that had ceased to feel the condition of people around it would eventually find reasons not to act.
The small-town preacher did not go to New York because he possessed a strategy.
He went because one page became impossible for him to ignore.
Sources and references
- • David Wilkerson, The Cross and the Switchblade, read as ministry memoir alongside independent historical records. • David Wilkerson’s sermons, newsletters and World Challenge archives. • World Challenge institutional history and biographical records. • Adult & Teen Challenge historical records on the development of the ministry. • Times Square Church historical records on its founding, Broadway locations and leadership succession. • Contemporary reporting on Wilkerson’s 2011 death and the later history of the ministries he founded.