The word on the Brooklyn streets in 1959 was that a crazy preacher from Pennsylvania was helping addicts find the power to kick heroin and gang members to trade their weapons for Bibles. ”” Reporter John McCandlish Phillips heard the talk in local churches and took the tip to his metro editors at The New York Times. This was more than a religion story, he argued. This was something truly new in urban ministry in a rough corner of the city.
The editors just didn’t get it.
“The New York Times could not see … validity of this approach to any issue as serious as addiction. Editors said, ‘You can’t put a few religious ideas up against something as real as addiction and expect any results,’ ” said Phillips, in a 2000 interview in Riverside Park.
The young preacher was David Wilkerson, whose story would eventually be told in the best seller “The Cross and the Switchblade.”
Read it all.
Terrry Mattingly–The life and Times of John McCandlish Phillips
The word on the Brooklyn streets in 1959 was that a crazy preacher from Pennsylvania was helping addicts find the power to kick heroin and gang members to trade their weapons for Bibles. ”” Reporter John McCandlish Phillips heard the talk in local churches and took the tip to his metro editors at The New York Times. This was more than a religion story, he argued. This was something truly new in urban ministry in a rough corner of the city.
The editors just didn’t get it.
“The New York Times could not see … validity of this approach to any issue as serious as addiction. Editors said, ‘You can’t put a few religious ideas up against something as real as addiction and expect any results,’ ” said Phillips, in a 2000 interview in Riverside Park.
The young preacher was David Wilkerson, whose story would eventually be told in the best seller “The Cross and the Switchblade.”
Read it all.