NEW YORK — Though he died in April 2011, the voice of Christian evangelist David Wilkerson still echoes loudly inside a well-kept neo-Federal style home at 416 Clinton Avenue in Brooklyn’s Clinton Hill Historic District.
City records show the home was first designed in 1919 by R.I. Markwith for Miss Clara Van Vleck at a time when the wealthiest people in town built their stately homes along the tree-lined boulevard.
By December 1960, however, Wilkerson, who would later author the bestselling book, The Cross and the Switchblade, and start Times Square Church in Manhattan, purchased the house designed for Ms. Van Vleck and made it the home of a now international addiction recovery program called Teen Challenge.
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In early 1958, Wilkerson said he felt called by God to come to New York City to minister to gangs after seeing a photograph of seven teenage gang members in Life magazine. The teenagers were being prosecuted for the murder of a crippled boy named Michael Farmer. All but one of the teenagers were convicted.
Before their convictions, Wilkerson, who was then a small-town preacher from Pennsylvania, traveled to the courthouse where the teenagers were being tried and asked the judge for permission to talk with them. The judge responded by throwing him out. A photo of Wilkerson at the courthouse would eventually get published in newspapers and he became known as the “Bible preacher who interrupted the gang trial.”
Wilkerson left the city embarrassed, but that encounter would ultimately lead him, with the help of his younger brother, Don Wilkerson, to start a street ministry in 1958 targeting young drug addicts and gang members in New York City, which became Teen Challenge.
Nearly 70 years later, there are now 1,400 Teen Challenge centers around the world with more than 35,000 beds for individuals seeking “freedom from addiction and other life controlling issues” through the power of faith in Jesus Christ.
And inside the building where the first one was started, Wilkerson’s vision to save addicts with the Gospel is still thriving as the Brooklyn Adult & Teen Challenge with a graduate of the ministry at its helm.
The program
It was a wet and overcast spring morning when the ministry’s executive director, Paul Burke, who has been running the Brooklyn operation since 2020, gave The Christian Post a tour of the house at 416 Clinton Street. Burke is charismatic and passionate about the ministry and his faith.
He explained that the home, which has 58 beds, dedicates more than half of them to men who commit to the one-year addiction recovery program free of charge. It’s a regimented deal in which participants learn how to do life better with regular prayer, Bible study, and church attendance. Some 60% of participants fail to complete the program but those who do, said Burke, usually find success in overcoming their addiction.
“We’ve kept the mission and the focus the same with being a Christian discipleship program,” Burke told CP. “We focus more on the discipleship part, less on the addiction part. [We believe] the addiction part takes care of itself when somebody fully embraces their walk with the Lord. I always say sobriety is a byproduct of a healthy spiritual person.”
Burke also noticed that the students who succeed in the program usually have no other options available for help.
And 19-year-old Noel Casillas, who works as an intern guiding students at the ministry, agrees.
Prior to joining the ministry as a 17-year-old, he had been grappling with serious “family issues” which led to him being placed in a mental institution. He declined going into the details behind the issues he faced but told CP that his family “felt like that was the best thing to do for me.”
He said an aunt connected him with Teen Challenge and the program quickly became a lifeline for him despite it being challenging at first. During the program, he said he had a “breakthrough moment.”
“I cried out to God. I just said, ‘I need you, if you’re there, just help me. I can’t do this. I’m weak,’” he said. “I felt like I had nobody.”
He admits that if he had failed to complete the program he wouldn’t have had anywhere to go.
“I was not able to go back to my mother’s, my uncles, if I had left the program, nor to my dad’s,” he said. “I would have been homeless, sleeping in abandoned apartments. … So I took this and I rode with it because it was my best option.”
Despite being forced to finish the program due to his lack of options, Casillas believes it was God’s design.
“God used my circumstances to keep me here,” he said.
Pastor Michael La Pietra, a graduate from the 2016 class of New York Teen Challenge, who now working as the Brooklyn center’s public relations and advancement coordinator, said before he agreed to try the Christian program to help with his addiction struggles, he had gone “through the trap door at the rock bottom to the very rock bottom.”
“I was going through secular programs over and over and they weren’t working for substance abuse,” he told CP. “I was using prescription pills, drinking, smoking pot, the whole nine yards, it wasn’t having much success with my life.”
La Pietra is now a married licensed minister and father thanks to the stabilizing effect of Teen Challenge.
Everything inside and outside the building at 416 Clinton Avenue looks refreshed. The more than 100-year-old building recently completed a multi-year renovation process Burke said. The ministry only resumed operations at the location in February after a number of relocations while the work was being done.
One of the first rooms you encounter as you enter the building is the Wilkerson Memorial Library, which is still under construction. In honor of Wilkerson, the ministry is replicating the courtroom scene from the time the late evangelist founder tried to engage the teenagers who were tried for murder.
Down the hallway opposite the entrance is the Nicky Cruz Assembly Room where students of the program gather for meals and other activities. A sober quote from Wilkerson summarizing what they do at Brooklyn Adult & Teen Challenge is mounted on a wall inside.
“Certainly we cannot claim a magical cure for addiction. The devil which hides in the needle, the pills and the powder is so deadly strong that any such claim would be foolish,” the quote says. “All we can say is that we have found a power that captures a person more strongly than narcotics but he captures only to liberate!”
As a 2009 graduate of the program who struggled with 18 years of addiction before getting his life together, Burke is a poster child for the program’s success, but he embraces it with grace and temperance. He is also extremely grateful for the life God has given him. He is a married father whose wife is also a graduate of Teen Challenge.
“I always tell people that I’m still in the program,” he said when asked how he managed to stay grounded as a former addict inside his office that used to be Wilkerson’s apartment.
Although there is no cure for drug addiction, according to the Mayo Clinic, Wilkerson has always argued that faith in Jesus is an effective option for people looking to be free. Burke understands this and explained that working in the ministry helps to keep him humble about his 17 years of sobriety
“Working in this environment keeps me grounded because, number one, I don’t forget where I came from and how deadly addiction is and how lost I was and how empty life was walking through those doors,” he said.
“I struggled for 18 years on and off. Now, I’m at 17 years of sobriety. So, 35 years around addiction, I know how deadly it is. I’m not fearful of addiction, but I respect that if I don’t stay committed to my devotional life with the Lord, if I don’t stay committed to growing and learning and still being teachable, there’s nobody that is beyond falling or failure again,” he insisted.
“I have to be as intentional about my own spiritual life and recovery as I was while I was a student in the program. And seeing these guys and the brokenness that they come in with, it keeps me broken before the Lord, knowing that that would have been me if it was not for the Lord.”
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