After a few decades, life's rivers all flow together so that it is difficult to remember what came from where. Such is the case with a second key element I as a 13-year-old gleaned from David Wilkerson's The Cross and the Switchblade.
When the skinny young preacher arrived in the ghettoes of New York City in 1958, all passionate about helping the urban gangs, Wilkerson had no earthly idea what he was doing. He really didn't even have a heavenly one, except that he wanted to do something to help. After making a public relations mess at the courthouse during a murder trial, he was left to wander the Big City's grimy streets on his weekly escapes from his country parish in Pennsylvania. In those days, nobody had a clue, least of all him, what to do about the gangs, their violence and the new threat of drugs.
So in lieu of a plan or a program, Wilkerson just started walking the streets, seeing what he could see, until he wound up connecting with the gangs, in no small part due to his photo getting blasted in the media for crashing that trial. As he connected with the gangs, he actually involved their input as to how best to reach out to them. They became partners in planning their own rescue and, as they became followers of Jesus, they joined him in ministering to other gang members.
A little over a decade after I read The Cross and the Switchblade, David's son, Gary, and I plotted together on ministering to high school and university students. Our ministry ways eventually parted, though I continued to flesh out these ideas, particularly around the Apostle Paul's missionary methodology, something I've been field testing for years and I am finally putting into print with Night Shift to be released later this year.
What I saw in Wilkerson was an "on the street" approach that now seems almost ordinary. But back in the late 50s and early 60s it was revolutionary. These events, after all, took place before the spiritual and cultural convulsions of the 60s and 70s that would shake up every area of society, not least the church.
What especially stuck with me was his simple practice of walking the streets in his new environment. After I launched out in my own work, first in pioneering student ministry stateside and then in serving in Asia, I took to walking each new cityscape as my first item of business. No contacts, no connections, no problem. Just get out and observe the place up front and personal, and out of that start get a feel for how life moved. It was part of the exercise of prayer I talked about in my last post. But it also led to an understanding of how a particular neighborhood or campus or a certain city functioned and flowed. And through that walking engagement, I would invariably discover the human activity hubs where I could meet people in their own natural environments.
I am not a cold turkey kind of guy. I don't mind meeting a stranger, but I need some kind of natural connection to get past "hello." Like buying vegetables in Asia's open markets or picking up my mail at the nearby shopping center. I like to warm up to people and let them warm up to me. As one fruit-seller in China said to his friends about me one day, "He's just an old face." And the networking was on.
Wilkerson isn't a cold turkey guy either – he may be an evangelist and a prophet, but he is no gregarious salesman. He didn't just go up to these gangs and start talking to their members. They discovered him first – all because he'd made a fool of himself in the papers. He disarmed them with his innocence and a lack of ulterior motive other than to love them through Jesus, something sorely lacking in many Christian encounters with culture in our day and age.
Which is why I think he served as such a helpful model to me. I wasn't from the world, let alone the streets, and neither was Wilkerson. And, no offense to him, I felt that if he of all people could succeed "out there," well, I could too.
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