The Rev. David Wilkerson, an evangelical minister and author who founded the Times Square Church to minister to the downtrodden in one of Manhattan’s seedier precincts, but whose later writings included apocalyptic predictions for New York City and beyond, died on Wednesday in an automobile accident in Texas. He was 79 and lived near Tyler, Tex.
Mr. Wilkerson’s car veered into oncoming traffic on a highway near Cuney, about 110 miles southeast of Dallas, and was hit by a tractor-trailer, a spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Public Safety told The Associated Press.
His wife, Gwendolyn, was seriously injured but is expected to recover, Mr. Wilkerson’s brother, the Rev. Donald Wilkerson, said on Thursday.
David Wilkerson was known to a broad readership through his many books. His most famous, “The Cross and the Switchblade” (1963), chronicled his ministry among gang members in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, where he had arrived as a young preacher in the late 1950s.
Written with John and Elizabeth Sherrill, the book has sold tens of millions of copies and has been translated into more than 30 languages, according to its current publisher, Chosen Books.
“The Cross and the Switchblade” was made into a feature film of that name, released in 1970. It starred Pat Boone as Mr. Wilkerson and Erik Estrada, in his first film appearance, as a member of his flock.
Mr. Wilkerson was also widely known for his work with teenage drug addicts. He was the founder of what is now Teen Challenge International, begun in Brooklyn in 1958. The organization comprises about 200 religion-based residential drug treatment centers throughout the country and many overseas.
Through World Challenge, the umbrella organization for his ministerial activities, based in Lindale, Tex., Mr. Wilkerson founded the Times Square Church in 1987. Originally in Town Hall on West 43rd Street, it now occupies the former Mark Hellinger Theater, an ornate palace of lavish moldings and draperies at 217 West 51st Street, near Broadway.
The Times Square Church is a nondenominational Protestant church whose worship style draws on the Pentecostal tradition. Services typically include gospel singing and the opportunity for congregants to approach the stage for healing and salvation.
Today, the congregation of more than 5,000 spans the social spectrum, including drug addicts, homeless people and well-heeled professionals. The church also attracts many out-of-town visitors. Mr. Wilkerson was its senior pastor before retiring and moving to Texas about a year ago.
David Ray Wilkerson was born on May 19, 1931, in Hammond, Ind.; his father, Kenneth, was a Pentecostal minister, as was his paternal grandfather. David Wilkerson studied at Central Bible College in Springfield, Mo., affiliated with the Assemblies of God.
After his ordination in 1952, Mr. Wilkerson took a pulpit in Philipsburg, in central Pennsylvania. In 1958, he read in Life magazine about a group of teenagers, members of the Egyptian Dragons gang, then on trial in New York for murder.
As he later said in interviews, the article impelled him to go to New York to help the gang members. There he entered the courtroom and, with the trial in progress, asked the judge for permission to speak with the defendants about their salvation. The judge ejected him.
Not long afterward, Mr. Wilkerson settled in New York and began working with young addicts and juvenile delinquents in Brooklyn, assisted by his brother Donald.
In the mid-1980s, Mr. Wilkerson began his church in Times Square, then one of the city’s most notorious neighborhoods.
“It was the summer of 1986, right after basketball star Len Bias died,” Mr. Wilkerson told The New York Times in 1988. “I was walking down 42nd Street and people were selling drugs, saying, ‘I’ve got the stuff that killed Len Bias.’ It broke me down. Things had reached such a low. I felt something had to be done.”
After renting the Mark Hellinger in 1989, Mr. Wilkerson bought the theater in 1991 for a reported price of at least $15 million.
In later years, Mr. Wilkerson became known for his often dire public predictions on subjects including the stock market and race relations.
In an interview with The Morning Call of Allentown, Pa., in 1994, for instance, he said, “We are on the brink of a race war in New York between blacks and Koreans and blacks and Jews that will see more than 1,000 fires burning — worse than the Los Angeles riots.”
In 2009, in a post on his blog, David Wilkerson Today, Mr. Wilkerson wrote: “An earth-shattering calamity is about to happen. It is going to be so frightening, we are all going to tremble — even the godliest among us.” The post goes on to warn of coming “riots and fires in cities worldwide.”
Besides his wife, the former Gwendolyn Carosso, Mr. Wilkerson’s survivors include two sons, Gary and Greg, both ministers; two daughters, Debbie Yonker and Bonnie Hayslip; his brother Donald, a former minister at the Times Square Church who directs the Brooklyn branch of Teen Challenge; another brother, Jerry; a sister, Ruth Harris; and 11 grandchildren.
