David Wilkerson

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David Ray Wilkerson (May 19, 1931 - April 27, 2011) is an American Christian evangelist, well known for his book The Cross and the Switchblade. He is the founder of the addiction recovery program, Teen Challenge, and founder of a non-denominational Times Square Church church in New York City.

Speeches widely distributed by Wilkerson, such as "Calls to the Dreads," are known for being direct and honest against apostasy and are serious about making a commitment to obey the teachings of Jesus. He emphasizes Christian beliefs like God's holiness and righteousness, God's love for humans and especially the Christian view of Jesus. Wilkerson tries to avoid grouping Christians into different groups according to the denominations they come from.

Wilkerson was killed in a car crash in Texas on April 27, 2011. He was 79 years old.

Video David Wilkerson

Initial years

David Wilkerson was born in 1931 in Indiana. He was the second son of the Pentecostal Christian preacher's family, and he grew up in Barnesboro, Pennsylvania, in a house "full of the Bible". His father and father's grandfather, Kenneth, was the minister. According to Wilkerson's own testimony, he was baptized with the Holy Spirit at the age of eight.

Young Wilkerson began preaching when he was about fourteen. After high school, he entered Central Bible College in Springfield, Missouri. The school is affiliated with the Assemblies of God. In 1952 he was ordained a minister.

Ministry

Wilkerson married Gwen in 1953. He served as a minister in small churches in Scottdale and Philipsburg in Pennsylvania, until he saw a photograph in Life Magazine in early 1958 of seven teenagers who were members of the gang in New York is known as the "King of Egypt". He then wrote that he felt the Holy Spirit move him with compassion and was interested in going to New York to preach to them. On his arrival, Wilkerson went to court where the teenagers were put on trial. He entered the room and asked the judge to give permission to tell them something, but the judge drove him away. After leaving, someone took a picture of Wilkerson, who came to be known as a Bible preacher "who had disturbed the gang trial". Soon after this, he started street service for drug addicts and young gang members, which he continued into the 1960s. He founded the Teen Challenge in 1958, an evangelical Christian addiction recovery program in Brooklyn affiliated with the Assemblies of God, with a network of social work centers and Christian evangelization.

Wilkerson gained national recognition after he co-authored The Cross and the Switchblade in 1962 with John and Elizabeth Sherrill about his ministry on the streets. This book became a best-seller, with more than 50 million copies in over thirty languages, and was included in the Christianity Today ' s "The Top 50 Evangelical Books." In the book, Wilkerson tells of the conversion of gang member Nicky Cruz, who later became his own evangelist and wrote the autobiography of Run Baby Run. Nicky was once the leader of the "Mau Maus" gang, and he and his friend, Israel Narvaez became Christians after hearing Wilkerson preach. In 1970, The Cross and the Switchblade changed into a Hollywood movie starring Pat Boone as Wilkerson and Erik Estrada as Cruz.

In 1967, Wilkerson started the Youth Crusades, an evangelistic ministry directed at adolescents whom Wilkerson called "goodnik" - an uneasy and bored middle-class youth. The goal is to prevent them becoming heavily involved with drugs, alcohol, or violence. Through this service, CURE Corps (Collegiate Urban Renewal Effort) was established. In 1971, Wilkerson moved his ministry headquarters to Lindale, Texas. On 22 September he founded the World Challenge, an organization that seeks to promote and spread the Gospel throughout the world.

Wilkerson states that in 1986, when walking on 42nd Street in New York City at midnight, the Holy Spirit called him to return to New York City and to set up a ministry in Times Square. He founded and became the pastor of the Church of Times Square, which opened its doors in October 1987. The church first rented a rented auditorium in Times Square and before moving on to the historic Mark Hellinger Theater in 1989, that.

Wilkerson does not preach in the name of a particular denomination. Instead, he focuses on biblical preaching with the aim of encouraging people to seek God through personal and deeper knowledge of Jesus Christ and the experience of the Holy Spirit. He says:

I am not preaching some denominational doctrines, this Church does not belong to any denominations. We are not Assemblies of God, we are not Baptists, we are not Methodists, we are not Catholic. We are only people of the Holy Spirit who believe in this book [the Bible].

Throughout his ministry, Wilkerson has been in contact with many other prominent Christian ministers, including Leonard Ravenhill, his friend, and Ray Comfort, whom Wilkerson met in 1992 after hearing a message called Hell's Best Kept Secret.

From the 1990s, Wilkerson focused his efforts to encourage pastors and their families around the world to "renew their zeal for Christ".

Wilkerson and his wife Gwen moved to New York City at the beginning of the Church of Times Square in 1987, and in 2006 began dividing their time between New York and Texas. They have four children and eleven grandchildren.

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Prophecy

Wilkerson claimed to have received a vision in 1973 about the future of the United States, which was later published in a book called The Vision. Some of the key areas of this prophecy are: "The global recession caused by economic confusion"; "Nature suffers from labor pains"; "Flood of dirt and baptism of land in America"; "Rebellion at home"; and "The madness of the persecution of Spirit-filled Christians truly loves Jesus Christ".

On March 7, 2009, Wilkerson posted a message to his personal blog entitled 'Urgent Messages' in which he reiterated his earlier forecast on New York: "For ten years I have warned about a thousand fires coming to New York City. will swallow the entire megaplex, including the territory of New Jersey and Connecticut. "Major cities across America will experience unruly riots and fires." Wilkerson points out that this will be part of the "earth-destroying disaster" that affects the whole earth, brought on by God's wrath in judgment against "the sins of America and the raging nations." Regarding the timing of this event, he said: "I do not know when these things will happen, but I know it's not far away."

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Death

On April 27, 2011, while driving east on Route 175 of Texas in Texas, Wilkerson crossed to the west path and collided head-on with a tractor trailer. He was declared dead on the scene, more than a month since his 80th birthday. (According to Texas Department of Public Security representative, Wilkerson did not wear a seat belt at the time of the accident.) His wife Gwendolyn was wounded.

Source of the article : Wikipedia