The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Church Under Fire & Into All the World
David Wilkerson
1931–2011AmericanPentecostal
A country pastor who sold his television, drove to New York to help teenage killers, and started a recovery network that circled the world.
Summary
- Lived 1931–2011, American.
- Stood in The Church Under Fire & Into All the World (1930–today).
- Hangs on The Revivalists.
- Tradition: Pentecostal / Assemblies of God.
The life
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.
What was happening while he lived8 moments · 1930–today
- May 1934The Barmen DeclarationOne hundred thirty-nine delegates met in a church hall in Barmen, a district of Wuppertal, while the German government was busy fusing the Protestant church to the Nazi state. Their six short theses, drafted mainly by the Swiss theologian Karl Barth, said the church listens to one Word, Jesus Christ as Scripture presents Him, and to no other lord, event, or leader.
- October 1945The Stuttgart Declaration of GuiltGerman church leaders, Niemöller among them, admitted before the world that they had not resisted enough, not prayed enough, not believed enough. It is one of the rare times a national church has said plainly that it failed.
- 1948–1964Richard Wurmbrand's fourteen yearsA Romanian Lutheran pastor of Jewish descent, converted at thirty, was seized off the street in February 1948 and spent fourteen years in communist prisons, about three of them alone in an underground cell where he kept his mind by preaching a sermon every night to no one. He was released in 1964 under Romania's general amnesty for political prisoners and left the country in 1965, after Western Christians paid for his exit.
- 1949–1955China's long night beginsAfter the communist victory, foreign missionaries were pushed out within a few years and churches were pressed into a single state-supervised body. Wang Mingdao, a Beijing pastor who had refused Japanese pressure a decade earlier, refused this too, and was arrested in August 1955. He signed a confession under interrogation, could not live with it, took it back, and served roughly twenty-two more years.
- 1958The widows go backElisabeth Elliot, with her toddler daughter Valerie, and Rachel Saint, Nate's sister, went to live in the Waorani settlement, among the men who had done the killing. Years later two of those men baptized Nate Saint's son and daughter in the same river.
- 1966–1976The Cultural RevolutionRed Guards closed the last open churches, burned Bibles, and sent pastors to labor camps. Watchman Nee, imprisoned since 1952, died in a camp in 1972. Public Christianity in China effectively ceased, and the faith moved into kitchens and back rooms, where it was never counted.
- July 1974The Lausanne CongressAbout 2,700 Christians from 150 nations met in Switzerland at Billy Graham's invitation. The Anglican John Stott drafted the resulting covenant; the missiologist Ralph Winter's address put "unreached peoples" on the map; and Latin Americans like René Padilla and Samuel Escobar pressed the point that preaching and mercy are not rivals.
- Autumn 1989Candles in Leipzig, and the wall comes downMonday peace prayers had gathered for years at the Nikolaikirche under pastor Christian Führer. On October 9 about seventy thousand people, the figure the city's own contemporary reports give, walked out of that neighborhood carrying candles past armed police, and not a shot was fired. The Berlin Wall opened a month later, on November 9.
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search David Wilkerson at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Told the gang leader who threatened to cut him into a thousand pieces that every piece would still love him - and the man believed him.
Hangs on The Revivalists: The men and women of the outpourings, Wales, Azusa Street, and the streams that followed.
Standing beside himThe Church Under Fire & Into All the World · 37 on this stretch of wall
Hid Jews behind a false wall in her family's watch shop, survived Ravensbrück, and went back to Germany to forgive.
Stepped out of the Auschwitz line and asked to be starved to death in place of a man he had never met, who lived another fifty-four years.
The Oxford atheist who came in kicking and struggling, then explained the faith to a whole century.
Signed the confession his interrogators wanted, could not live with it, took it back - and paid for that with twenty-two more years.
Gave up his best Olympic event rather than run on a Sunday, won a different one in world-record time, and died in a prison camp teaching other people's children.
Built China's house churches, then spent the last twenty years of his life in a labor camp for it.