The past few weeks I've been polishing off my manuscript for Night Shift, preparing to send it to my editor so he can chew it up and spit it out! A couple of times in this book I reference David Wilkerson's The Cross and the Switchblade.
I was 13 when I first read it. The summer before I'd been to California with my family for a national church conference where he spoke. I remember waiting for him to sign my copy, something that never took place. In the long run, it didn't matter. All the value needed was in what he'd already written inside.
The book, a best seller early on, chronicles his venture as a country preacher going to New York City to reach the urban gangs and founding what is today a worldwide organization called Teen Challenge. I did meet him years later and helped on some of his World Challenge projects. He became a long-term supporter of our work. At some point, the book was made into a movie, though I never could connect him with Pat Boone, who plays him on the screen.
A few short scenes from his book have had lasting impact on my life, influencing me at more than one turn in the road. It starts when he is still at his rural Pennsylvania parish. Watching late night TV, he decides to get rid of the tube and turn the time spent watching into praying. One night in prayer he's drawn to a copy of Life magazine where he becomes obsessed by a photo of some gang members on trial for murdering this guy in a wheelchair. On impulse he heads to their trial in the big city to try to help them. He makes a mess of that, winds up being thrown out of the courtroom and gets his photo in the papers, totally humiliated before the whole nation.
He has no idea why, but he keeps being drawn back to the city on a weekly basis and all he knows to do is walk the streets. After sleeping in his car one night, he wakes up to find some young kids jacking it up to steal his tires. Through those kids he meets their older brothers, gang members all. Everyone recognizes him as the one thrown out of that trial, a hero to every last one for being abused by the cops, and soon he's connecting with all kinds of gangs.
What struck me most from that story was how he prayed. I'm sure he prayed Pentecostal style when he knelt down in his country home, but when he walked the streets of New York trying to figure out what to do, it was eyes wide open, prayers going straight from his heart to heaven. It's a scene I've played over and over. Walking those streets, looking to find what God was calling him to. Slowly coming to see the inner city neighborhoods the way only God could have shown him.
"Prayer walks" mean all kinds of things these days – mostly structure and programs. For some, there's a whole technique to it. For Wilkerson back then, it was just plain ignorance mixed with just plain obedient faith.
I started mimicking him whenever I found myself in a new setting and not sure what to do. Working Texas campuses large and small as a campus pastor in my early 20s. Circuit-riding the nation in Campus 80s, praying for ministries to be started from New England to California. Settling in the Ozarks to pastor a campus group at SMSU (Missouri State). Reaching out to university students in Taiwan. Working with all strata of society in Northwest China. And now…
I never have bothered too much with style. I mostly just walk or ride a bike or sit and look out an urban vista or study faces passing by. People "harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd." The passage from Matthew 9:35-38 comes back every time, especially the part that follows the helpless sheep, where Jesus tells his disciples to ask the Harvest Master to send out workers to meet the needs they see – and then he sends them out in fulfillment of that very prayer. It's a prayer that never fails.
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