David Ray Wilkerson (born May 19, 1931; died April 27, 2011) was an American Pentecostal preacher, author, and founder of Teen Challenge, World Challenge, and Times Square Church in New York City.
He is best known for The Cross and the Switchblade, the bestselling memoir of his 1958 mission to New York’s gang members, including a Brooklyn warlord named Nicky Cruz.
Wilkerson spent over five decades preaching against sin and apostasy, built one of the largest addiction-recovery networks in the world, and died in a head-on car crash in East Texas at age 79.
David Wilkerson at a Glance
| Personal | |
|---|---|
| Full name | David Ray Wilkerson |
| Born | May 19, 1931, Hammond, Indiana, USA |
| Died | April 27, 2011 (age 79), near Cuney, Texas, USA |
| Nationality | American |
| Spouse | Gwendolyn “Gwen” Wilkerson, née Carosso (m. 1953; d. July 5, 2012) |
| Children | Debbie (Jonker), Bonnie (Hayslip), Gary, Greg (4 children) |
| Father | Kenneth Wilkerson, Pentecostal minister |
| Siblings | Don Wilkerson, Jerry Wilkerson, Ruth Harris |
| Education | |
| Bible College | Central Bible College, Springfield, Missouri |
| Ordained | 1952, Assemblies of God |
| Ministry | |
| Title | Founder and Senior Pastor |
| Church | Times Square Church, New York City |
| Denomination | Pentecostal background; Times Square Church is non-denominational |
| Founded Teen Challenge | 1958 |
| Founded World Challenge | 1971 |
| Founded Times Square Church | 1987 |
| Career | |
| Best-known book | The Cross and the Switchblade (1963), 15+ million copies sold |
| Total books | 30+ |
| Net worth | Not publicly documented; ministry finances were never disclosed as personal wealth |
Early Life and Background
David Wilkerson was born on May 19, 1931, in Hammond, Indiana. He grew up in Barnesboro, Pennsylvania, in a house he later described as full of Bibles.
His father, Kenneth Wilkerson, was a Pentecostal minister, and so was his paternal grandfather. Preaching wasn’t a career choice in that house. It was the family business.
He was baptized in the Holy Spirit as a boy and started preaching around age fourteen. After high school, he enrolled at Central Bible College in Springfield, Missouri, a school affiliated with the Assemblies of God. He was ordained in 1952, at 21 years old.
In 1953, he married Gwendolyn Rose Carosso. Gwen would stand beside him for the next 58 years, through small-town pastorates in Scottdale and Philipsburg, Pennsylvania, and through everything that came after. Their life looked settled. It would not stay that way.
The Life Magazine Photo That Changed Everything
In February 1958, Wilkerson was a rural pastor with a two-hour daily prayer habit and no connection to New York City whatsoever.
Then he opened a copy of Life magazine and saw a photo of seven teenagers on trial for the murder of a disabled boy named Michael Farmer. Something in him would not let it go.
He felt compelled to drive to New York and speak to the boys. When he showed up at the courthouse, the judge had him removed.
He went home. But over the next several months, from March to June 1958, he made the 350-mile drive from Pennsylvania to New York almost every week, walking the streets, praying, and looking for a way in.
That search led him to Nicky Cruz, the warlord of a Brooklyn gang called the Mau Maus. Cruz beat him, spat on him, and threatened to kill him. Wilkerson kept coming back with one message: I love you, and Jesus loves you too.
Cruz later said it was the one approach he had no idea how to fight. A knife, he could handle. Pleading, he could mock. He had never met someone who simply refused to leave.
One hot July night at a crusade rally, Nicky Cruz surrendered his life to Christ. He went on to Bible college, returned to New York, and became the first director of the ministry Wilkerson was about to build.
Founding Teen Challenge
Wilkerson’s work with gang members and drug addicts in New York became the foundation for what he called Teen-Age Evangelism, later renamed Teen Challenge. It opened as a residential home for teenagers and addicts trying to get free of drugs and violence.
The model was simple and, at the time, unusual. Instead of clinical detox alone, Teen Challenge combined Bible-based discipleship with structured community living. It worked well enough that it grew far beyond that first New York home.
By the time of Wilkerson’s death, Teen Challenge had expanded into a global network with hundreds of centers across the United States and well over a thousand worldwide, reaching tens of thousands of people a year.
Rise to Prominence: The Cross and the Switchblade
In 1963, Wilkerson published The Cross and the Switchblade, co-written with journalists John and Elizabeth Sherrill. The book told the story of his first years in New York, his standoff with Nicky Cruz, and the birth of Teen Challenge.
It sold more than 15 million copies in over 30 languages and became one of the defining books of the American charismatic movement.
In 1970, the story was adapted into a film starring Pat Boone as Wilkerson and Erik Estrada as Nicky Cruz. Christianity Today later ranked the book No. 32 on its list of the top 50 books that shaped American evangelicalism.
A skinny, 120-pound country preacher had, almost by accident, written the entry point for an entire genre of Christian redemption literature.
World Challenge and Times Square Church
Wilkerson didn’t stop at one organization. In 1971, he founded World Challenge, Inc. as an umbrella for his crusades, conferences, and international evangelism.
Through World Challenge, he expanded his reach well beyond New York, preaching in cities across the country and eventually around the world.
In 1987, he founded Times Square Church, planting a non-denominational congregation in a converted Broadway theater in a part of Manhattan that was, at the time, known for X-rated theaters, strip clubs, and open drug dealing. He served as senior pastor there until his death, building a congregation that grew past 8,000 members.
He also had a specific concern for pastors themselves. In 1999, he founded the Summit International School of Ministry and, from 1999 to 2008, held international conferences aimed at strengthening church leaders around the world.
Sermons and Publications
Wilkerson wrote more than 30 books over his lifetime, including The Vision, Set the Trumpet to Thy Mouth, America’s Last Call, I’m Not Mad at God, Have You Felt Like Giving Up Lately?, and Knowing God by Name. None matched the reach of The Cross and the Switchblade, but several stayed in print for decades.
His sermons had a reputation for being blunt. “A Call to Anguish,” one of his most circulated messages, took direct aim at what he saw as apostasy inside the American church.
He rarely softened his language, and he never seemed interested in being liked by everyone in the room. He was interested in being clear.
Theology and Ministry Philosophy
Wilkerson came out of the Assemblies of God and never fully left his Pentecostal roots, but Times Square Church itself was intentionally non-denominational. He avoided sorting Christians into competing camps. What mattered to him was holiness, repentance, and total reliance on God, not which denomination’s letterhead a believer used.
He preached hard against what he saw as comfortable Christianity. Having watched addiction and violence destroy lives up close, he never treated sin as an abstract theological category.
One of his more quoted lines summed up his whole approach to ministry: you can’t do everything, but you can do something. He built two international ministries and a Manhattan megachurch on that single idea.
Wilkerson’s Prophecies and Warnings
Starting in the early 1970s, Wilkerson began publishing warnings about what he believed was coming for the United States. In 1973, he wrote about an approaching “worldwide recession caused by economic confusion.”
Over the following decades, he returned to similar themes: economic collapse, riots, and moral decline, often tied to a recurring vision he described in a 1992 sermon of over a thousand fires burning across New York City at once.
His most widely discussed prophecy came on March 7, 2009, when he posted an “urgent message” to his blog and mailing list, warning of what he called an earth-shattering calamity and predicting riots and fires spreading through major American cities. The message spread quickly through Christian media and drew coverage from outlets like Christianity Today.
Some of what Wilkerson warned about, in general terms like economic strain and urban unrest, echoed real events in the years that followed. Other specific predictions, including a nuclear exchange with Russia on American soil, did not come to pass.
Supporters point to his broader track record and call him a modern watchman. Critics note that vague, repeated warnings about coming judgment are easy to read into whatever happens next. Both views show up regularly in discussions of his legacy.
Personal Life and Family
David and Gwen Wilkerson were married for 58 years. Friends and ministry colleagues often described Gwen as steady and intensely private, someone who supported decades of crusades, relocations, and public scrutiny without seeking any of the spotlight herself.
They had four children: Debbie (later Debbie Jonker), Bonnie (later Bonnie Hayslip), Gary, and Greg. By the time of David’s death, the family had grown to include eleven grandchildren.
Gwen battled cancer for most of her adult life. She was first diagnosed at age 32 and underwent numerous surgeries over the following decades. Both of the Wilkerson daughters, Debbie and Bonnie, later became cancer survivors as well. Gwen wrote about her experience in her book Abiding in His Strength.
Wilkerson’s son Gary Wilkerson went on to lead World Challenge as its president following his father’s death and became lead pastor of The Springs Church, which he helped launch in 2009. Gary later wrote a biography of his father, David Wilkerson: The Cross, the Switchblade, and the Man Who Believed.
The Wilkerson Family Tree
David Wilkerson’s ministry name extended into a second, related branch of the family that is easy to confuse with his own line. His cousin, Rich Wilkerson Sr., became a well-known evangelist and school-outreach speaker before founding Trinity Church in Miami with his wife, Robyn.
Rich Wilkerson Sr. and Robyn had four sons: Jonfulton (JF) Wilkerson, Rich Wilkerson Jr., Graham Wilkerson, and Taylor Wilkerson. That makes all four David’s second cousins rather than his sons or grandsons. Rich Wilkerson Jr. is the best known of the group, having gone on to co-found Vous Church in Miami and officiate the 2014 wedding of Kim Kardashian and Kanye West.
David also had two brothers, Don Wilkerson and Jerry Wilkerson, and a sister, Ruth Harris. Don worked alongside David in the early Teen Challenge years and later led the ministry’s New York operations himself.
Death and the Car Accident
On April 27, 2011, Wilkerson was driving eastbound on U.S. Highway 175 near Cuney, Texas, with Gwen in the passenger seat. His car crossed into the westbound lane and collided head-on with a tractor-trailer. He was pronounced dead at the scene. He was 79 years old.
Gwen was wearing her seatbelt and survived the crash, though she suffered serious injuries and spent time in critical condition before recovering. The truck driver, 38-year-old Fredrick Braggs, suffered lacerations after his rig went off the bridge into a dry riverbed below.
Texas Department of Public Safety officials said it was unclear what caused Wilkerson’s car to drift into the oncoming lane. No further public findings about the cause have been released beyond the collision itself, and no confirmed medical explanation, such as a health episode behind the wheel, has ever been officially documented. Speculation circulated online in the days after his death, but none of it was substantiated by authorities or the family.
David Wilkerson’s Last Words
Wilkerson posted to his blog on the morning of April 27, 2011, hours before the crash. The post addressed grief and unanswered prayer directly, closing with a line that many later read as strangely fitting: hold fast to your faith, stand fast in his Word, there is no other hope in this world.
He had spent the prior weeks writing about hopelessness and the limits of human strength, themes that were not unusual for him. He had preached and written about anguish for over 50 years. His final post continued that same lifelong thread rather than departing from it.
Gwen Wilkerson’s Death
Gwen Wilkerson outlived her husband by just over a year. She died on July 5, 2012, at age 81, after decades of recurring cancer. Her children wrote that she had longed to join David in heaven ever since his death and passed with what they described as peace and anticipation rather than fear.
Influence and Legacy
Wilkerson’s fingerprints are still visible across three distinct areas of American Christianity. In addiction recovery, Teen Challenge remains one of the largest faith-based rehabilitation networks in the world, still built on the residential, Bible-centered model he pioneered in a single New York apartment in 1958.
In publishing, The Cross and the Switchblade helped launch a whole category of Christian redemption memoirs, paving the way for later bestsellers that followed real people through crisis and conversion.
In church planting, Times Square Church became a model for urban, non-denominational ministry in a city many assumed was too secular for it to work.
Assemblies of God General Superintendent George O. Wood called him a giant of the faith at the time of his death, and tributes poured in from across denominational lines, an unusual show of unity for a man who never tried particularly hard to be diplomatic.
Criticism and Controversy
Wilkerson’s prophetic warnings drew consistent criticism throughout his ministry, particularly his repeated predictions of economic collapse and urban destruction that did not materialize on the timelines he suggested.
Some observers within the broader evangelical world questioned whether his sense of urgency, sustained across four decades, amounted to a pattern of unfulfilled prophecy rather than genuine foresight.
His defenders argue that Wilkerson never claimed infallibility and that the broad strokes of his warnings, moral decline and economic instability, tracked with real trends over his lifetime. This remains one of the more contested parts of his legacy, and both readings are common in writing about him today.
Net Worth and Financial Information
No reliable, sourced figure exists for David Wilkerson’s personal net worth. Several websites publish specific dollar estimates, but they conflict with each other by tens of millions of dollars and cite no verifiable source.
World Challenge and Times Square Church were structured as ministry organizations, and Wilkerson’s personal finances were never a matter of public record the way a business executive’s would be. Any specific number circulating online should be treated as unverified.
Awards and Recognition
Wilkerson’s most lasting recognition came through his written work rather than formal awards. The Cross and the Switchblade was named No. 32 on Christianity Today’s 2006 list of the Top 50 Books That Have Shaped Evangelicals, a rare honor for a first-person ministry memoir written by a small-town pastor with no formal media training.
Interesting Facts About David Wilkerson
- He weighed roughly 120 pounds when he first walked into New York’s gang territory in 1958, a detail he and others referenced often given how little he physically resembled the tough-guy image people expected.
- He once drove a car up the aisle of one of his early Pennsylvania churches to make an illustrative point during a sermon.
- His book has been translated into more than 30 languages and remains a staple of Christian literature courses and homeschool reading lists more than 60 years after publication.
- His cousin’s family produced a second generation of high-profile pastors in Miami, meaning the Wilkerson name now covers two entirely distinct ministry dynasties.
- He held a two-hour daily prayer time as a young pastor in rural Pennsylvania, long before anyone outside his own church had heard his name.
David Wilkerson Timeline
- May 19, 1931 — Born in Hammond, Indiana.
- Circa 1945 — Begins preaching around age fourteen.
- 1952 — Graduates Central Bible College and is ordained in the Assemblies of God.
- 1953 — Marries Gwendolyn “Gwen” Carosso.
- February 1958 — Sees the Life magazine photo of the Michael Farmer murder trial.
- 1958 — Meets Nicky Cruz; founds the ministry that becomes Teen Challenge.
- 1963 — Publishes The Cross and the Switchblade.
- 1970 — The Cross and the Switchblade film releases, starring Pat Boone and Erik Estrada.
- 1971 — Founds World Challenge, Inc.
- 1987 — Founds Times Square Church in New York City.
- 1999 — Founds the Summit International School of Ministry.
- March 7, 2009 — Publishes his widely discussed “urgent message” prophecy.
- April 27, 2011 — Dies in a head-on car accident near Cuney, Texas, at age 79.
- July 5, 2012 — Gwen Wilkerson dies at age 81.
Frequently Asked Questions
What was David Wilkerson famous for?
He was famous for founding Teen Challenge and writing The Cross and the Switchblade, the bestselling account of his 1958 mission to New York gang members, including Nicky Cruz. He later founded Times Square Church and World Challenge.
What happened to pastor David Wilkerson?
He died on April 27, 2011, when his car crossed into oncoming traffic on a Texas highway and collided head-on with a tractor-trailer. He was pronounced dead at the scene at age 79.
What religion was David Wilkerson?
He was a Christian with roots in the Assemblies of God, a Pentecostal denomination. Times Square Church, which he founded, is officially non-denominational.
What did David Wilkerson say to Nicky Cruz?
He told Cruz, then a Brooklyn gang leader, that he loved him and that Jesus loved him too. Cruz later said it was an approach he had no idea how to fight back against.
David Wilkerson and Nicky Cruz: how did that relationship start?
Wilkerson pursued Cruz for weeks after arriving in New York in 1958. Cruz converted at a crusade rally that summer and became the first director of Teen Challenge.
Is David Wilkerson’s wife still alive?
No. Gwen Wilkerson survived the 2011 car accident that killed her husband but died of cancer on July 5, 2012, at age 81.
How many children did David Wilkerson have?
He had four children: Debbie, Bonnie, Gary, and Greg, along with eleven grandchildren at the time of his death.
How much was David Wilkerson worth?
No verified figure for his net worth is publicly documented. Ministry finances were not disclosed as personal wealth, and online estimates conflict widely with no credible sourcing.
What was David Wilkerson’s last prophecy?
His most widely circulated late-life prophecy was a March 2009 “urgent message” warning of economic calamity and unrest spreading through major American cities.
What was David Wilkerson’s age at death?
He was 79 years old when he died on April 27, 2011.
Is David Wilkerson related to Rich Wilkerson Sr. and Rich Wilkerson Jr.?
Yes, but distantly. Rich Wilkerson Sr. is David’s cousin, and Rich Wilkerson Jr., Taylor, Graham, and Jonfulton Wilkerson are Rich Sr.’s sons, making them David’s second cousins rather than his direct descendants.
Was there an autopsy for David Wilkerson?
Officials attributed his death directly to the head-on collision. No separate autopsy findings beyond the crash injuries have been made public, and no confirmed underlying medical cause has ever been officially released.
