David Wilkerson

David Wilkerson was pastoring a small Pennsylvania church in 1958 when he saw a magazine photograph of seven teenagers on trial for murder in New York and could not get their faces out of his mind. He sold his television, drove to the city, tried to speak to the boys in court, and was thrown out - with his picture in the papers, which is how the gangs on the street knew who he was.

He began preaching on corners in Brooklyn, where a gang leader named Nicky Cruz threatened to cut him to pieces and heard him answer that every piece would still love him; Cruz became a preacher himself. Out of it came Teen Challenge, a drug-recovery work that spread to more than a hundred countries, and a book that sold in the tens of millions. In 1987 he came back to New York and started a church in a Broadway theater on Times Square. He was killed in a highway crash in Texas in 2011.