The Cross and the Switchblade

We were having a cup of tea together in the kitchen before I set out for my grandfather’s farm. “I think you need to feel you’re a part of some great tradition, and not out on a limb all by yourself. I think you want to get in touch with the past again, and furthermore I think you are right. Reach back as far as you can, David. That’s what you need just now.”

My grandfather was seventy-nine years old and as full of vinegar as ever. Grandfather was known all over the country in the early days. He was of English-Welsh-Dutch descent, and he himself was the son and the grandson, and perhaps the great-grandson, of a preacher. The tradition is lost in the early history of the Protestant Reformation in Western Europe and the British Isles. As far as I know, since the days when clergymen first started to marry in the Christian Church, there has been a Wilkerson in the ministry. and usually in a fiery ministry, too.

It was a long drive from Philipsburg to the farm outside Toledo, Ohio, where Grandpap was resting in his retirement. I spent most of the drive “getting back in touch with my past,” as Gwen said. It was a lively set of memories, especially when Grandfather came into view.

Grandpap was born in Cleveland, Tennessee. By the time he reached his twenties he was already a preacher. It’s a good thing that he was young, because his life was rigorous. Grandfather was a circuit rider, which meant he had to spend a good part of his ministry in the saddle. He’d ride Nellie from one frame church building to another, and usually he was preacher, choir director and sexton all in one. He’d be the first one at the church: he’d light the fire and sweep out the mouse nests and air the place. Then the congregation would arrive, and he’d lead them in some old-time singing, like “Amazing Grace” and “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” And then he’d preach.

Grandpap’s preaching was very unorthodox, and some of his convictions shocked his contemporaries. For instance, when my grandfather was a young preacher, it was considered sinful to wear ribbons and feathers. The elders in some churches carried scissors on cords at their side. If a penitent lady came forward to the altar wearing a ribbon in her hat, the scissors went to work, along with a lecture titled, “How Will You Get to Heaven with All the Ribbons on Your Clothes?”

But Grandpap changed his mind about this kind of thing. As he grew older, he developed what he called “The Lamb Chop School” of evangelizing.

“You win over people just like you win over a dog,” he used to say. “You see a dog passing down the street with an old bone in his mouth. You don’t grab the bone from him and tell him it’s not good for him. He’ll growl at you. It’s the only thing he has. But you throw a big fat lamb chop down in front of him, and he’s going to drop that bone and pick up the lamb chop, his tail wagging to beat the band. And you’ve got a friend. Instead of going around grabbing bones from people, or cutting feathers off them, I’m going to throw them some lamb chops. Something with real meat and life in it. I’m going to tell them about New Beginnings.”

Grandpap preached at tent meetings as well as churches, and to this day, when I go around the country, I hear tales of the way old Jay Wilkerson used to keep those meetings hopping. One time, for instance, he was preaching in a tent in Jamaica, Long Island. He had a good crowd because it was the Fourth of July weekend and a lot of people were on holiday.

That afternoon, my grandfather had been visiting a friend in the hardware business. Grandpap’s friend showed him some new sparkler material that snapped and sparkled and smoked when you stepped on it. He hoped this would be a big item for the Fourth. Grandpap was intrigued and bought some; he put it in a paper bag, then stuck it in his pocket and forgot all about it.

My grandfather talked about the New Life in Christ, but he also talked about hell, and he was sometimes pretty vivid in his descriptions of what this place was going to be like. Grandpap was talking along these lines that July night when his hand happened to wander to his coat pocket and felt the sparkler stuff. Very quietly he picked up a handful of the powder and let it drop behind him on the platform. Then, with perfect dead-pan expression, pretending he never noticed a thing, he continued to talk about hell, while the smoke billowed up behind him and the platform crackled.

People at first expected my father to be the same maverick Grandfather was. But my father was quite different. He was a minister more than an evangelist. With Grandpap preaching all around the country, my father grew up missing the security of a settled home, and this was reflected in his career. He had only four churches during his entire ministry, whereas Grandpap was in a new church every night. My father built solid, stable churches where he was beloved and sought out in times of trouble.

“I guess it takes both kinds of preachers to make a church,” my father said to me one day, when we were living in Pittsburgh. “But I do envy your grandfather’s ability to shake the pride out of people. We need it in this church.”

Dad’s church was in a fashionable suburb of Pittsburgh, among the bankers and lawyers and doctors of the city. It was an unusual setting for a Pentecostal church, because our services are likely to be a bit noisy and undignified. But in this case we’d toned them down out of deference to our surroundings. It took my grandfather to show us we were wrong.

Dad shrugged his shoulders and had to agree. And then he made his mistake. He asked Grandpap to preach for him the following Sunday night.

I was at that service, and I’ll never forget the look on Dad’s face when the very first thing Grandpap did was to take off his dirty overshoes and place them right smack in the middle of the altar rail!

“Now!” said Grandpap standing up and staring out over the startled congregation. “What is it that bothers you about dirty overshoes on the altar rail? I’ve smudged your beautiful little church with some dirt. I’ve hurt your pride, and I’ll bet if I’d asked you the question, you’d have said you didn’t have any pride.”

“I want you to go around and open all the windows. We’re getting ready to make some noise, and I want those bankers and lawyers sitting on their porches of a Sunday night to hear what it’s like to be glad in your religion. You are going to preach a sermon tonight—to your neighbors.”

Then Grandpap said he wanted everybody in the house to stand. We all stood. He said he wanted us to start marching around the church clapping our hands. And we marched and we clapped. He had us clap for fifteen minutes, and then when we tried to quit he shook his head and we clapped some more. And then he started us singing. Now we were marching and clapping and singing, and every time we slowed down a little Grandpap went and shoved open the windows another inch. I looked at Dad and I knew he was thinking:

The next day Dad got the first reactions from the neighbors. He went down to the bank on business and, sure enough, sitting behind a big desk with no papers on it, was one of our neighbors. Dad tried to turn away, but the banker called him:

“Say, Reverend Wilkerson.” The banker invited him behind the swinging rail and said, “That was some singing at your church last night. Everyone’s talking about it. We heard that you people could sing, and all this while we’ve been waiting to hear you. It’s the best thing that ever happened in this neighborhood.”

For the next three years there was a real spirit of freedom and power in that church, and with it I learned a tremendous lesson. “You’ve got to preach Pentecost,” said my grandfather when he was talking to Dad later about the service-of-the-muddy-boot. “When you strip it of everything else, Pentecost stands for power and life. That’s what came into the church when the Holy Spirit came down on the day of Pentecost.

“And,” continued Grandpap, pounding the back of his fist into his palm, “when you have power and life you’re going to be robust, and when you’re robust you’re probably going to make some noise, which is good for you, and you’re certainly going to get your boots dirty.”

To Grandpap, getting your boots dirty meant not only getting the soles messed up from walking out where the mud and the need is, it also meant getting the uppers scuffed from kneeling.

Grandpap was a man of prayer, and in this his whole family was like him. He raised my father to be a praying man, and Dad in turn passed this on to me.

It seemed a peculiar question at first, but when Grandpap pressed me on it, I discovered that he was driving at something important. I thanked God often for the good things that came my way, certainly, like parents and home, or food and schooling. And I prayed, generally and evasively, that the Lord would some day in some way choose to work through me. But to pray for specific help, that I rarely did.

“David,” said Grandfather, looking at me—for once—without the suggestion of a twinkle in his eye, “the day you learn to be publicly specific in your prayers, that is the day you will discover power.”

I didn’t quite understand what he meant, partly because I was just twelve years old, and partly because I was instinctively afraid of the idea. To be publicly specific, he had said. That meant saying, in the hearing of others, “I ask for such and such.” It meant taking the risk that the prayer would not be answered.

It was by accident that I was forced, one dreadful day, to discover what Grandpap meant. During all of my childhood, my father had been a very sick man. He had duodenal ulcers, and for more than ten years he was not free of pain.

One day, walking home from school, I saw an ambulance tear past, and when I was still more than a block away from home, I knew where it had been heading. From that distance I could hear my father’s screams.

A group of elders from the church sat solemnly in the living room. The doctor wouldn’t let me in the room where Dad was, so Mother joined me in the hall.

Just then Dad gave a particularly loud cry of pain and Mother squeezed my shoulder and ran quickly back into the room. “Here I am, Kenneth,” she said, shutting the door behind her. Before the door closed, however, I saw why the doctor wouldn’t allow me in Dad’s room. The bedclothes and floor were drenched with blood.

At that moment I remembered Grandfather’s promise, “The day you learn to be publicly specific in your prayers is the day you will discover power.” For a moment I thought of walking in to where the men sat in the living room and announcing that I was praying for my father to get up from his bed a healed man. I couldn’t do it. Even in that extremity I could not put my faith out where it might get knocked down.

Ignoring my grandfather’s words, I ran just as far away from everyone as I could. I ran down the basement stairs, shut myself up in the coal bin, and there I prayed, trying to substitute volume of voice for the belief that I lacked.

Our house was heated by hot air, and the great trumpet-like pipes branched out from the furnace, beside the coal bin, into every room of the house. My voice was carried up those pipes so that the men from the church, sitting in the living room, suddenly heard a fervent voice pouring out of the walls. The doctor upstairs heard it. My father, lying on his deathbed, heard it.

So I was brought upstairs past the staring eyes of the elders and into my father’s room. Dad asked Dr. Brown to wait in the hall for a moment, then he told Mother to read aloud the twenty-second verse of the twenty-first chapter of Matthew. Mother opened the Bible and turned the pages until she came to the right passage.

So while my father lay limp on his bed, Mother began to read the same passage over and over again. She read it a dozen or so times, and while she was reading I got up from my chair and walked over to Dad’s bed and laid my hands on his forehead.

Dr. Brown looked down at my twelve-year-old earnestness and smiled a warm and compassionate and totally unbelieving smile. But that smile turned first to puzzlement and then to astonishment as he bent to examine my father.

“Something has happened,” he said. His voice was so low I could hardly hear. Dr. Brown picked up his instruments with fingers that trembled, and tested Dad’s blood pressure. “Kenneth,” he said, raising Dad’s eyelids and then feeling his abdomen and then reading his blood pressure again. “Kenneth, how do you feel?”

My father was able to get up from his bed in that miraculous moment, and in that same moment I was delivered of any doubts about the power of getting out on a limb in prayer. Driving down to Grandfather’s farm that day, so many years later, this was one of the memories I brought with me.

Grandfather, I was glad to see, was as alert as ever. He was a little slower in his movements, but as quick of mind and as full of penetrating wisdom. He sat in an old straight chair, straddling it backwards, and listened intently as I told him about my strange experiences. He let me talk for an hour, interrupting only to ask questions. I finished my narrative with a question of my own.

“I think,” he went on, “that that door’s slammed just about as tight as you’ll ever find a door shut, David. I don’t think the Lord’s going to let you see those seven boys for a long, long time. And I’ll tell you why. Because if you see them now, you may figure you’ve done your duty among the teen-age boys in New York. And I think there are bigger plans for you.”

“I mean all the mixed-up and frightened and lonely boys of New York who might end up murdering for kicks unless you can help them. I have a feeling, David, that the only thing you need do is expand your horizons.”

Grandfather had a way of putting things that left me inspired. From wanting to get away from the city as fast as possible, I suddenly found myself wanting to rush right back and get to work. I said something like this to Grandpap, and he just smiled.

“It’s easy to say that, sitting here in this warm kitchen talking to your old grandfather. But wait until you meet more of these boys before you start having visions. They’ll be full of hate and sin, worse than you’ve even heard of. They’re just boys, but they know what murder is, and rape, and sodomy. How are you going to handle such things when you meet them?”

“Let me tell you the answer to my own question, Davie. Instead of looking at these things, you’ve got to keep your eye focused on the central heart of the Gospel. What would you say that is?”

I looked him in the eye. “I’ve heard my own grandfather often enough on this subject,” I said, “to give him an answer from his own sermons. The heart of the Gospel is change. It is transformation. It is being born again to a new life.”

“You rattle that off pretty smooth, David. Wait until you watch the Lord do it. Then you’ll get even more excitement in your voice. But that’s the theory. The heart of Christ’s message is extremely simple: an encounter with God—a real one —means change.”

I could tell from the way my grandfather was getting restless that our interview was about to end. Grandpap unfolded himself stiffly from his chair and started walking toward the door. Knowing him for a dramatist at heart, I felt that the most important part of our discussion was only now to come out.

“Davie,” said Grandpap with his hand on the farmhouse door, “I’m still worried about you when you meet the raw life of the city. You’ve been sheltered. When you meet wickedness in the flesh it could petrify you.

“You know . . .” and then Grandpap started off on a story that didn’t seem to me to have any relation to his point. “Some time ago I was taking a walk through the hills when I came across an enormous snake. He was a big one, Davie, three inches thick and four feet long, and he just lay there in the sun looking scary. I was afraid of this thing and I didn’t move for a long time, and lo and behold, while I was watching, I saw a miracle. I saw a new birth. I saw that old snake shed its skin and leave it lying there in the sun and go off a new and really beautiful creature.

“When you start your new work in the city, boy, don’t you be like I was, petrified by the outward appearance of your boys. God isn’t. He’s just waiting for each one of them to crawl right out of that old sin-shell and leave it behind. He’s waiting and yearning for the new man to come out.