THE CALL OF GOD

I loved my years traveling with David Wilkerson as his Crusade Director. David had skyrocketed to fame as the founder of the Teen Challenge movement and the author of The Cross and the Switchblade. The book eventually sold somewhere beyond fifteen million copies. About a year after Carol and I moved to New York, production began on The Cross and the Switchblade movie, which was seen by nearly 50 million people worldwide. The success of the book and the movie definitely made it easier to draw crowds and fill auditoriums as we traveled conducting crusades.

One of the things I especially liked about traveling with David Wilkerson was the rather unorthodox way we went about doing the crusades. I’ll try to explain that as we take this unusual journey together.

When I first joined David in the traveling ministry, the entire crusade staff consisted of two people: David Wilkerson and me. And on the road I was the whole support staff. In the early days, about half our meetings were in large churches and the rest in auditoriums. We traveled hard and did a lot of one-night meetings but what kept us going was the large number of young people coming to the Lord. This was right in the beginning of the Jesus Movement when youth were turning to the Lord by the thousands, and David Wilkerson’s ministry was at the forefront of the evangelistic edge of this move of God.

Over the first couple of years, we began doing more crusades in larger auditoriums and arenas. The increase in auditorium meetings meant that the crusade staff needed to expand and we eventually grew by 33 percent. We added one person — a young musician named Dallas Holm. Dallas was a genuine gift from God, whose musical talent was and is unsurpassed. I was thrilled to have Dallas with us, as I was tired of being surprised by Crusade committees who thought that my request for music that would appeal to young people meant bringing in someone who played the musical saw. I kid you not! That actually happened.

Many things about David’s crusade ministry made it unorthodox and the small size of the crusade staff was just one. We were seeing as many people come to the Lord in our meetings as most evangelists who had teams of 10 or 15 full-time staff and spent much more than we did in advertising and promotion.

Another way our approach to crusades was unorthodox involved money and the local committees. I had been in Jacksonville, Florida, preparing for a crusade that was to be sponsored by a group of Spirit-filled churches. As I was waiting for the planning meeting to begin, I heard the pastors talking among themselves, and the drift of the conversation turned to the left-over bills from a previous crusade. The pastors did not seem noticeably upset; they just discussed ways they could help the much larger evangelical ministerial group pay off about $75,000 in unpaid bills from a crusade that had taken place a year earlier. The evangelist had received his honorarium and expenses and then had left the churches with unpaid bills from hotels, advertising, etc.

The next day I was back in New York and when I shared with Brother Dave what I had heard the pastors talking about, he paused for a moment and said, “David, whoever said that the churches should pay all the bills on a crusade? Let’s promise the sponsoring committee that if they do all they can to raise what is needed for the crusade, we will guarantee them that we’ll never leave an unpaid bill.” And right there, we formed a new crusade policy. In the eight years I was with David Wilkerson, as far as I know we never left an unpaid bill anywhere and we never left town without funds for our ministry.

Another unorthodox part of David Wilkerson’s crusade ministry was the subjects he preached on. When we would conduct a multi-day crusade, he often would preach on “The Call of God.” This was not a typical evangelistic, crusade-style message but, instead, was focused on how God calls people into their place in His service. Surprisingly, the response to this kind of preaching was electric and hundreds and hundreds of young people and adults responded when David asked those who were feeling the drawing of the Holy Spirit to come to the front for prayer.

To this day I still meet people whose lives were directly affected in those meetings when a message like that was preached. Just a couple of months ago a young man I met told me that his father, a pastor, had been called of God into ministry when he attended a David Wilkerson crusade in the early 1970's.

Evangelists are not just called of God to preach the gospel and win the lost. We read in Ephesians 4:11-12 that evangelists are also to participate in the "equipping" of the saints for the work of the ministry. God has called every believer into some phase of service. The word equipping that is used here is a Greek medical word that means to “set a bone that is out of place or broken.” In other words, the primary work of the pastor, teacher or evangelist is to help you find your “fit” in the body, your place of ministry. When you find that place, that “fit,” it will be a true “Eureka!” moment.

Being unorthodox does not always mean being out of the mainstream. Sometimes it means being the mainstream, and bringing the straying back to where they belong.