David Wilkerson was born on May 19, 1931, in Hammond, Indiana, the son and grandson of Pentecostal pastors. He began preaching while still young and, in 1952, was ordained a minister by the Assemblies of God after studying at Central Bible College in Springfield, Missouri.
In 1953 he married Gwen Carosso and spent the following years pastoring small churches in rural Pennsylvania. That quiet routine changed in 1958, when a Life magazine story about the trial of a group of gang members in New York touched his heart in an unexpected way.
Feeling a call that seemed foolish, Wilkerson left his church and went to New York to try to speak with the defendants. He was removed from the courtroom by the judge and mocked by the press, which printed his photo holding a Bible, but he returned determined to reach on the streets the gangs and drug addicts that no one else wanted to approach.
The conversion of gang leader Nicky Cruz was one of the best known fruits of this work and helped establish the ministry that, in 1960, opened its first Teen Challenge center in Brooklyn: rehabilitating drug addicts and young offenders through faith, not therapy alone.
In 1963, Wilkerson published, together with John and Elizabeth Sherrill, the book The Cross and the Switchblade, recounting this story. The book sold more than 15 million copies in over 30 languages and, in 1970, was made into a film starring Pat Boone, becoming a classic of evangelical literature.
In 1971, he moved the ministry’s headquarters to Lindale, Texas, and founded the missionary organization World Challenge. In the 1970s, he also began writing about prophecy and the end times, as in The Vision, published in 1973, announcing imminent economic and natural calamities. Most of these predictions did not come true within the stated timeframe, and the book was criticized, including by other Christians, for its alarmist tone and for presenting as prophecy what was, to a large extent, bad news drawn from the events of its own time, a reminder that not all prophetic discernment is infallible.
In 1987, he left the Assemblies of God, the denomination in which he had been ordained, and founded Times Square Church in New York, an interdenominational church devoted to simple biblical preaching. One stated reason was to be able to ordain for ministry young men trained in his own programs, former addicts without theological degrees, who would not have been accepted under the denomination’s rules. He kept preaching and writing until age 79, always insisting that only God, not human methods, restores broken lives.
Wilkerson died on April 27, 2011, in a car accident near Cuney, Texas: his vehicle collided head on with a truck after crossing into the oncoming lane. He was not wearing a seat belt. His wife Gwen survived the accident but would pass away a little more than a year later, in July 2012. Teen Challenge today operates in more than a hundred countries, proof that a pastor willing to go where no one else wanted to go can transform millions of lives.