Walking in the Footsteps of David Wilkerson

by Charles Simpson

  The giant problem of urban gang violence in the 1950s and 60s.

  A skinny preacher from Pennsylvania had the audacity to believe that through him, God could save the likes of Nicky Cruz, the notorious leader of the Mau Maus gang in Brooklyn.

  The giants of heroin, crack, alcohol, and other life-controlling addictions.

  Teen Challenge, now with over 1,100 centers in 110 countries, is by far the most successful drug rehabilitation program in history. Just as King Saul’s entire army shook in their boots over the thought of going against Goliath, the “experts” in the 1950s considered heroin addiction insurmountable.

  The giant need to lead many people to Christ during the Jesus People and Charismatic movements.

  Traveling with the singing group Dallas Holm & Praise, David Wilkerson conducted evangelistic services throughout the country, helping to launch the Charismatic movement in Catholic and Episcopal churches. He led countless hippies and other young people to the Lord.

  The giant need for a strong and consistent word from God to an anemic American church.

  For decades, hundreds of thousands of believers eagerly anticipated the arrival of David Wilkerson’s timely, powerful, convicting newsletters in our mailboxes.

  The huge need for a Gospel witness in Times Square, the crossroads of the world, which had become a cesspool of sin and filth in the 1980s.

  Times Square Church, now over twenty-five years old, was miraculously birthed through the faith and vision of Pastor Dave. This congregation has stood as a beacon of truth and righteousness for this city and for the Body of Christ worldwide. Truly, fruit that remains.

  The slaying of one of these five giants would probably qualify someone to be listed in an updated “Faith Hall of Fame,” found in Hebrews chapter 11. For God to use one man to accomplish so much, surely it’s worthwhile to take a closer look at his unique life and amazing walk of faith.

  On many occasions, Pastor Dave told me I was like a son to him, and he was certainly a spiritual father to me. However, with privilege comes responsibility. Have I lived up to the responsibilities of being one of his many spiritual sons? I hope so. Like Pastor Dave, I came from a small town to the dangerous neighborhoods of New York City. However, walking in the faith-filled steps of Father Abraham doesn’t mean that we all must live as tent-dwelling patriarchs in the deserts of the Middle East! Following in David Wilkerson’s footsteps refers more to how we live our Christian lives than to what we accomplish for the Lord. Even though we might not be called to build international ministries like Pastor Dave did, we all still have our God-appointed giants to conquer.

  After Pastor Dave was suddenly promoted to glory in April 2011, I felt compelled to write down what I learned from this man of God before many of his edifying words spoken personally to me would begin to fade from my memory. I wrote almost non-stop for a number of weeks and then put this manuscript on the shelf for a few years. When I shared it with one of my Bible school students last year, he couldn’t stop telling me how much it encouraged him. I asked one of David Wilkerson’s relatives to read through it, and she felt that it was definitely worth sharing with others. So, I took it off the shelf and decided to have it published. One of the greatest lessons we can learn from Pastor Dave is the fact that God can take an ordinary person and teach him or her how to walk in extraordinary faith. As his brother Don once said, “David’s life shows us that God can use anyone to save anyone.” In other words, a country preacher armed with faith in God can reach hardened gang members who seem to be unredeemable. How can we also walk in that same type of faith? As I share my journey and how Pastor Dave deeply impacted my life, I’ll endeavor to answer that important question.

  My dad died when I was sixteen and he was sixty-one. When I wrote about Dad years later, some of my older siblings hardly recognized the gentle, mellow father I had come to know and love. Likewise, the six years I worked closely with David Wilkerson are only one slice of the whole pie. I daresay the David Wilkerson of the 1960s was a very different man than the one with whom I worked. Every chapter title is a quote from Pastor Dave. However, this book is not a full biography of his life but rather a journey through mine, emphasizing his constant and positive influence upon me.2 May what I have written inspire you to rise up and become a conqueror of the giants in your personal life and in your generation!

  1

  “Every piece will still love you.”

  FROM DEEP WITHIN THE SANCTUARY, LOUD AND DESPERATE SCREAMS were heard: “Stop that man! He just stole a purse from one of the choir members! Stop him!” Mark and I were both standing at the front door of the church, the only way out. We could easily have prevented that guy from getting past us if we had had a few seconds to process what was happening. We should have at least tried to trip him as he flew past us. He tucked a large leather purse under his shirt like it was a football and ran down the street, darting around people and poles and cars. He crossed Seventh Avenue and disappeared down the subway steps. Mark and I looked at each other, nodded in agreement, and took off after him.

  After all, we were in charge of security in the new church. It had been going for only a few months, but already hundreds of people were attending. How was that possible? David Wilkerson announced Times Square Church’s opening through his mailing list many months before starting in Town Hall. He rented those facilities for Sunday morning and Tuesday evening services. A few weeks after a very successful launch, the church outgrew that space and moved into the Nederlander Theatre on 41st Street, right in the middle of busy Manhattan. The services were packed, dynamic, and filled with spiritually hungry people from across the Tri-State region.

  David Wilkerson, the author of the best-selling book (and movie) The Cross and the Switchblade, heard from God that he was to raise up a church in Times Square of all places! Surely God had not written off New York City, as many people in the Body of Christ had been feeling for the past few years. The mass exodus to the suburbs had officially ended. The Lord still had great plans for this city! The enthusiasm and expectations were so high that everyone involved was extremely excited, including me and Mark. We were both in our twenties and felt so blessed to be on staff. Along with Wally and Alex, we actually lived in the theater, and our duties were to maintain the facilities and handle security issues. Sometimes we found homeless people hiding in the bathroom stalls or in the closets after church services were over. A few times, we discovered the door to the roof opened, apparently because someone was intending to come back in the middle of the night to take whatever they could carry out.

  We never actually had anyone come into the building in broad daylight and steal anything, not until the purse snatcher. The female choir members left their purses on the front row seats when they went up to the theater’s stage to rehearse. The shady character walked right into the church and slowly made his way down the aisle. (Everyone must have assumed he came for an audition.) All the women’s purses were in plain sight on the front row, right where they could keep an eye on them. That guy took the first purse he came to and took off like a late freight train. Mark and I noticed as we came to the top of the subway steps that he didn’t anticipate anyone following him. There he was, on the bottom step, casually rummaging through the large purse as though it was his! He saw us coming and darted across the subway station, heading toward another stairway exit. We somehow reached that exit first and cornered him against a wall. I grabbed the purse from his trembling hands. (He must have been a drug addict.) Then I declared in my most authoritative voice, “How dare you walk into a church and steal a purse…from a choir member!” I looked up the steps in the direction of the church, realizing it actually looked more like a theater than a house of worship.

  When my eyes glanced back upon our little criminal, I saw his face grimacing as though he was exerting all his strength. Before I realized what was happening, he pulled out a long, razor-sharp screwdriver and plunged it toward my stomach. A second before it reached its target, Mark’s hand came poun
ding down on his wrist, and the screwdriver fell to the ground. The addict reached down for it but suddenly decided against that course of action. He lifted himself up, took one last defiant look at us, and ran up the steps and back into the hustle and bustle of the city streets, never to be seen by us again.

  Mark and I just stared at each other, soaking in all that had happened in the past three and a half minutes. He picked up the weapon and almost touched the tip of that screwdriver, but he decided against it because of its sharpened, razor-thin point.

  “Thank you so much, Mark!” I exclaimed.

  “Thank God, Charles. Thank God.”

  We soon noticed that the lady whose purse was stolen (and recovered) was nervously waiting in front of the church. On our way back, Mark jokingly repeated my remarks: “How dare you walk into a church and steal a purse from a choir member! Boy, Charles, you sure convicted him!” We broke out into hearty laughter, both because it was quite silly of me and because we were so relieved that things turned out OK.

  As we approached the theater, Mark read aloud from a poster taped on the inside of one of its advertising windows: “Come hear David Wilkerson, the author of The Cross and the Switchblade.” Mark then held up the screwdriver and joked, “Hey Charles, maybe one day you’ll write a book called The Cross and the Screwdriver!” Again, another round of laughter as we entered the sanctuary and secured the doors behind us. For years after this incident, Mark would occasionally ask when I was going to write my book The Cross and the Screwdriver. I passed it off as a foolish notion. But for the next six years, I did my best to soak in all I could from Pastor Dave, who was such a great example of a man of God to all who received from him, either through his sermons or newsletters (regularly sent out to over a million homes) or by working alongside him. In the churches and Bible schools that I’ve pastored and taught in since, people have been blessed when I’ve shared bits and pieces of what I experienced and learned directly from him. Many times have I heard these words: “I just love it when you share your stories about David Wilkerson!” I will do my best to share everything exactly as it occurred, starting in Tennessee, thirty-nine years ago.

  Cleveland, Tennessee, is where the Church of God was birthed and where David Wilkerson’s grandfather was from. This was where I experienced a spiritual rebirth as a teenager in 1978. It was such a peaceful little town, located about thirty miles northeast of Chattanooga. We moved there from Waverly, Tennessee, in the middle of my junior year of high school, right after Dad’s funeral. One day I went to an art exhibit in the Cleveland mall. I was standing in front of a huge nine-foot by nine-foot painting of a dried-out dandelion flower that was ready to be plucked and blown away by the wind. I was still deeply grieving, still in shock over the passing of my father. At the suggestion of my concerned mom, I went to try to get my mind off my constant grief and on other things.

  A tall man quietly walked over to the same painting and started thinking out loud: “Isn’t it amazing,” he began, as he kept his eyes glued to the painting, “with all those seeds, only one-fourth of them will find good soil. One-fourth will be trodden down and eaten by birds. Some will spring up on rocky soil, and others will be choked by weeds. Only a portion of these many seeds will actually produce anything.” I had been reading the New Testament constantly, so I knew he was referring to Jesus’s parable of the sower. I almost proudly replied, “I know, the parable of the sower…Matthew chapter 13.” He turned to me and said, “It doesn’t matter how many Scriptures you know. You can know the entire Bible and still not know God and die without Christ and go to hell.”

  “Oh my gosh,” I thought to myself, “how does this guy know I spend my spare time reading the Bible? He must be some sort of prophet, like Jeremiah or Daniel. He sure has my attention!” For the next few minutes, I stood there completely mesmerized as this guy spoke about the pain of losing loved ones, the torture of adjusting to too many new things at one time, and the blessings in becoming a born-again Christian. As he continued speaking about God, Heaven, and eternity, I could somehow feel the authenticity of his words. Pure authenticity is hard to describe if you’ve never heard it before; it’s like describing the color blue to a person born blind.

  “Everything you see, everything will one day burn up, but our souls are eternal. We will live eternally with or without God…with Christ or without Christ.” For the first time in my life, I felt the presence of God. I wanted to fall on my knees right there in front of Radio Shack and say, “How do I become born again?” Instead, I gave in to my fears and told this prophet guy, “See ya,” and I rudely and quickly walked away.

  A few months later, our paths crossed again! This time he asked assertively, “Would you like to come to my church next Sunday morning?” This twenty-something-year-old guy named Charles Thompson sure was kind. But as far as I could remember, I had never in my life gone to a church service or even entered a church building. As I finally answered, my voice got fainter and slower until I was nearly whispering. The words were that painful. “I’m still in high school, and my mom doesn’t drive, and my dad died, and…I don’t know.” As a self-absorbed, hurting teenager who wasn’t sure about Christianity, I imagined he was thinking, “What a loser” and that he’d just walk away. Instead, he put his right hand on my shoulder and replied compassionately, “Don’t worry, man. I’ll pick you up,” speaking with a cheerfulness that was foreign to my world.

  Every Sunday he did what he said he would do: he took me with him in his old backfiring Pinto to Keith Street Church of God of Prophecy. Our trips back and forth were somewhat awkward. I didn’t know what to say. I secretly wondered why he wanted to be friends with a shy, hurting kid who wasn’t even sure if God existed. “Maybe it’s all a myth,” I’d often say to myself, parroting my older siblings’ opinions. Besides, it all seemed too good to be true, like a well-written fairy tale—delightful to hear, but not grounded in real life. The love expressed in the Bible seemed too unreal to me, too disconnected from real life, too much for my heart to believe…until Testimony Sunday.

  Testimony Sunday was a quarterly occasion at the church. On that particular day, the preacher shared for only a few minutes, and then he opened the floor for whoever wanted to testify. Charles Thompson was the second one to stand, and he waited for the usher to hand him the microphone before beginning. He said, “God’s been dealing with me lately about walking in love. I witnessed to this teenager a few months ago.” He paused and looked down at me, sitting beside him. “I offered to give him a ride to church. He accepted, and I’ve been doing it ever since. I never told him that I live on the other end of Bradley County and that I have to get up earlier on Sunday mornings now than I ever imagined I would…or could.”

  Everyone seemed to laugh and clap their hands—everyone except me. I was thinking, “Where’s he going with this?” He continued, “But how could I tell him that God so loved the world that He sent His Son all the way from Heaven to earth to die for us, and that that same God now lives in my heart, and then tell him that he lives too far for me to pick him up?” He looked down at me again with an expression that said, “I hope this hasn’t embarrassed you.” I looked up and saw the compassion of Christ looking down at me through him, and I saw God’s love in him. I suddenly knew that it was all real and true and that this man was reaching out to me because Jesus Christ lives in him. Jesus Christ, the resurrected Son of the living God, was actually reaching out to me through him!

  The following day, as soon as I had a chance to be alone, I repented of my sins and asked Jesus to be the Lord of my life. The immediate and overwhelming peace that flooded my soul assured me that my prayer had been answered! The first one to call was my new friend, Charles Thompson. He was thrilled and immediately asked if I would like to spend next Sunday morning in church with him, and the rest of the day as well. I knew Mom wouldn’t mind so I accepted his offer. Charles Thompson was excited about my spending an afternoon with him and “the guys.” For weeks, he’d been sharing with me a
bout the Christian ministry he was in. Previously, he had given me some literature regarding the dramatic conversion of the Charismatic director of Reality of Life Ministries, Mike, a man who had been the leader of a gang in the South Bronx called the Young Aces in the 1960s.

  One humid New York City summer, the police were hot on Mike’s trail and determined to put him behind bars for good. He accepted an invitation from relatives to visit them in Cleveland, Tennessee. While there, he encountered the resurrected Lord at a Church of God camp meeting. He was immediately and completely delivered from his heroin addiction. The first thing Mike did was to return to the city and report to his parole officer. He had broken parole by leaving the state without permission. The dumbfounded officer demanded a urine sample, which came back negative. Soon afterward, a blood test provided remarkable evidence of Mike’s conversion and deliverance. His blood showed no evidence of any drug use ever and was actually as pure as a newborn baby’s. The parole officer was deeply touched by Mike’s change of heart and the physical manifestation that accompanied his spiritual new birth.

  The parole officer wasn’t the only one impacted by Mike’s conversion. Within the period of about a month, Mike was able to lead over half of his former gang members to a salvation experience. The other half of those angry Young Aces collected enough money among themselves to hire a professional hitman to kill their former leader. When a hitman named Eddie knocked on Mike’s South Bronx apartment door, he had a loaded and cocked .357 Magnum revolver hidden in his leather jacket.

  The door opened wide, and Eddie asked him, “Are you Mike?”

  “Yes, I am,” Mike responded with a smile. “And you, you have been mad at God ever since your father died when you were six years old.”