The Work
The Cross and the Switchblade was first published by Bernard Geis Associates (New York) in 1963, written by David Wilkerson with John and Elizabeth Sherrill. It runs to approximately 220 pages and narrates in first-person memoir form the events of 1958-1961: Wilkerson's decision to leave his small Pennsylvania Assemblies of God church to minister to New York City gang members; his early failures and arrests; his encounters with gang leaders Nicky Cruz, Israel Narvaez, and others; the mass conversion meetings held in rented venues; and the founding of Teen Challenge as an ongoing ministry to drug addicts and gang members.
The book was an immediate bestseller in evangelical circles. It was translated into more than thirty languages and has sold over fifteen million copies worldwide, making it one of the bestselling Christian books of the twentieth century. A film adaptation starring Pat Boone as Wilkerson and Erik Estrada as Nicky Cruz was released in 1970. Nicky Cruz's own memoir, Run Baby Run (1968), provided the converted gang member's perspective on the same events.
Biblical Engagement
Mark 16:15 - 'And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature' - is the Great Commission that Wilkerson understands as addressed to him specifically and literally. His sense of divine calling to go from rural Pennsylvania to New York City is framed as obedience to this command: the 'all the world' of the Commission includes the gang territories of Bedford-Stuyvesant and Fort Greene. The book's theology of calling is Pentecostal in its directness: God speaks, the obedient person goes, and God confirms the call through results.
Luke 4:18 - 'The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised' - is Jesus's reading of Isaiah 61 in the Nazareth synagogue, which Wilkerson reads as the program for his ministry: the poor are the gang members and drug addicts; the captives are those bound by addiction and violence; the bruised are the teenagers whose lives have been destroyed by the conditions of mid-century New York. The church's mission, for Wilkerson, includes the people that polite society has written off.
2 Corinthians 5:17 - 'Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new' - is the doctrine that the book's narrative embodies. Nicky Cruz's conversion - from violent gang leader to Christian speaker - is the book's central testimony to the power of regeneration. The 'new creature' of Paul's letter is not a rhetorical figure for Wilkerson but a literal description of what he witnessed: men and women whose characters were transformed by the Holy Spirit.
Ezekiel 11:17 - 'Therefore say, Thus saith the Lord GOD; I will even gather you from the people, and assemble you out of the countries where ye have been scattered, and I will give you the land of Israel' - is the passage Wilkerson reads in his study the night he decides to go to New York, connecting his sense of call to the prophetic tradition of gathering the scattered. The use of a passage about Israel's return from exile as a prompt for urban mission is characteristic of the Pentecostal tradition's typological reading of Scripture: Old Testament promises to Israel become templates for contemporary divine action.
Author and Context
David Wilkerson (1931-2011) was born in Hammond, Indiana, into a Pentecostal family - his father and grandfather were both Assemblies of God ministers. He attended Central Bible College in Springfield, Missouri, and was pastoring a small church in Phillipsburg, Pennsylvania, when he was moved to minister in New York. His background was rural, his church small, and his resources minimal; the narrative presents his entire enterprise as dependent on divine provision.
The 1950s context was the era of New York City gang culture - the West Side Story generation - and also the era of early rock and roll and the beginning of the drug epidemic in American cities. Wilkerson's ministry emerged precisely at the intersection of these social forces, and his book gave a generation of conservative evangelical Christians a narrative of engagement with urban poverty rather than retreat from it.
John and Elizabeth Sherrill, who co-wrote the book, were journalists at Guideposts magazine and subsequently co-wrote The Hiding Place with Corrie ten Boom. Their journalistic skill shaped the book's readability and narrative drive.
Teen Challenge
Teen Challenge, founded by Wilkerson in 1960, became the longest-running and most widely evaluated Christian addiction recovery program in the world. Studies by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (1975) and subsequent research have consistently found its success rates with drug addiction to be significantly higher than comparable secular programs - a finding that Wilkerson and his supporters attribute to the transformative power of genuine religious conversion. Teen Challenge now operates in over 100 countries.
Critical Reception
Within evangelical and Pentecostal circles, the book was received as a missionary classic: an account of the Holy Spirit's power in hostile circumstances. It inspired thousands of young Christians to consider urban ministry and contributed to the development of evangelical engagement with inner-city poverty. Outside evangelical circles, the book was read with curiosity and some skepticism: the miraculous elements (divine guidance through specific Scripture passages, the speed of conversions) were received differently by readers with different frameworks for assessing such claims.
Theological Significance
The book's theological contribution is its demonstration that Pentecostal theology - with its emphasis on the immediate, transformative power of the Holy Spirit - could engage with the most challenging social environments of American modernity. The gang territories of New York City were not, in the conventional evangelical imagination of the 1950s, fertile ground for the gospel; Wilkerson's book challenged that assumption and created a tradition of urban Pentecostal ministry.
The book also embodies a theology of divine call: the ordinary Christian, obedient to a specific prompting, can undertake extraordinary ministry. This democratization of prophetic call - not the ordained minister alone but any Spirit-led believer - is characteristically Pentecostal and has been enormously influential in mobilizing lay Christians for ministry.
Legacy
The book is estimated to have inspired more people to enter Christian urban ministry than any other single text of the twentieth century. Its influence on the development of Christian social ministry in inner-city America, on the global expansion of Teen Challenge, and on the Pentecostal and charismatic movements' engagement with social need is incalculable. Nicky Cruz's subsequent ministry, which has touched millions worldwide, is itself a legacy of the events the book describes.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should study Luke 4:16-21 (the Nazareth manifesto), Mark 5:1-20 (the Gerasene demoniac: a violent outsider transformed), 2 Corinthians 5:14-21 (new creation and the ministry of reconciliation), and Acts 2:38-47 (the first conversions and the community that formed).
Further Reading
- Nicky Cruz, Run Baby Run (1968) - Cruz's own account of the same events from the gang member's perspective. - David Wilkerson, The Vision (1974) - Wilkerson's subsequent prophetic warnings, showing the development of his ministry. - Grant Wacker, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (2001) - the best scholarly account of the Pentecostal tradition in which Wilkerson stood.