The Secret Place of David Wilkerson

David Ray Wilkerson was born on May 19, 1931 in Hammond, Indiana, to a family of Pentecostal ministers for whom the Bible, family worship, and the fear of the Lord were the frame of daily life. He grew up in Pennsylvania where small town churches taught him that prayer is not a decoration of the Christian life but its breath. Ordained young, he pastored in rural congregations of the Assemblies of God, preaching simply, visiting faithfully, and learning to kneel longer than he spoke. One winter night in 1958, paging through a national magazine after a late prayer time, he saw the photographs that would bend his life. New York City gang members were on trial for a murder that had horrified a nation. He sensed a mandate from the Lord to go to the city and speak to the boys. He sold a television to buy time for prayer, then drove to Manhattan with little more than a Bible and a burden. At the courthouse his effort to reach the defendants drew the attention of police and photographers and he was ushered out, but the seed had been planted. He returned to the streets, walked tenements, spoke in school yards, and preached Christ in youth rallies where contempt turned slowly into tears. What began as a pastor's impulse became a calling that would touch the world.

The city taught him to pray with new urgency. He found himself before knife scarred boys and heroin thin bodies, and he learned that no argument could reach a heart chained to fear. He began to fast often, sometimes for days, asking that God would grant authority in the Spirit to break chains. He partnered with believers in storefront churches and in borrowed halls. In those early years he met a Puerto Rican gang leader named Nicky Cruz, whose rage and emptiness had become legendary on the streets. The meetings between the preacher and the youth were not staged. They were moments of love and truth where a man who had been praying in hidden places told a frightened sinner that Jesus loved him and would never stop. The conversions that followed did not come cheaply. They were born in nights of pleading with God and in days of labor that felt like climbing a mountain with wounded sons on his shoulders. Out of that travail a house of refuge opened, then another, then a network that would be called Teen Challenge, a discipleship path for young men and women desperate for deliverance from addiction and violence and despair.

The years that followed were a river of gospel work fueled by prayer. He walked neighborhoods in Brooklyn and the Bronx, then crossed boroughs and crossed oceans, telling again and again the story of the cross in plain speech and summoning people to repent and to believe. He wrote the account of those early days with the help of John and Elizabeth Sherrill in a book that carried the title The Cross and the Switchblade. The narrative moved because it was true and because it had been prayed through. Its companion in testimony, Nicky Cruz's Run Baby Run, told the same truth from the other side of the knife. The books traveled around the world and many readers found themselves at altars because a pastor had first found himself on his knees.

In 1971 he formed World Challenge to strengthen a growing web of ministries and to keep the emphasis on intercession and repentance. In 1987 he returned to New York to found Times Square Church in a former Broadway theater, a congregation that became an altar for a city and a school of prayer for believers who had grown weary of religion without power. He refused to entertain a generation. He led them to seek God. Tuesday night prayer became the beating heart of the church, drawing thousands who knelt shoulder to shoulder, pleading for their families, their city, and the nations. From that sanctuary teams went into subways and shelters and back alleys with Scripture, soup, and the name of Jesus on their lips.

He spoke often of trembling before the Word of God and of keeping a clean conscience. He wept in the pulpit and wept more in secret, pleading that the Lord would not allow him to preach what he had not first prayed. He warned against showmanship and called for holiness. He could be sharp with sin because he was tender with sinners. He called pastors to rebuild the altar of prayer, urged young believers to fast wisely as a way to quiet their flesh and listen to God, and insisted that the only answer to the cruelties of the street is the love of Christ poured out through a praying church. In later years he lived simply in Texas and traveled to New York to preach, keeping the same dawn hour for Scripture and prayer that had marked him as a young man.

On April 27, 2011 he died in an automobile accident in Texas while traveling with his wife Gwen, who was injured and later passed away the following year. News of his death traveled quickly through mission homes, recovery centers, inner city churches, and prayer groups, and all remembered the same man. He had preached with fire, but he had prayed with tears. He had built ministries, but he had first built an altar.