Reverend Credits Wilkerson With Deliverance From Street Life

04 May 2011

Jacqueline Strothoff, who graduated from David Wilkerson's Leadership Academy in 1977, said she owes much of her recovery from drug addiction to the Teen Challenge founder.
                                                    Courtesy Photo
By Raymond Billy | ResonateNews.com

In 1974, she was a drug addict and sometimes prostitute living in a psychiatric hospital. Today, she is the Rev. Jacqueline A. Strothoff, director of Women's Homes at Teen Challenge New England based in Providence, R.I., which helps women transition from the same lifestyle she escaped.

The change in Strothoff from who she was 37 years ago is in large measure the result of David Wilkerson's ministry, she said.

“David Wilkerson was critically important to my discipleship,” Strothoff, 62, said Sunday. “I wouldn't be who I am today if he wasn't who he was to me.”

Wilkerson's ministry — which centered on helping people out of drug addiction, gangs and prostitution through spiritual counseling — helped Strothoff years before she met him. While she was at the psychiatric hospital in Fairfax, Va., a friend of her father brought her the book “Please Make Me Cry!” by Cookie Rodriguez, who had come out of a life of prostitution and drug addiction with help from Wilkerson's Teen Challenge organization in Brooklyn, N.Y.

“I prayed that if this was true, God would do the same thing for me,” Strothoff said.

She had accepted Christ as her savior while at the institution. After being released, she enrolled in Rodriguez' Teen Challenge branch in Dover, Pa. After receiving Christian mentorship through that program, she enrolled in Wilkerson's Twin Oaks Leadership Academy in Lindale, Texas, the inaugural class of the program in 1977. The class included 18 men and 18 women who trained under Wilkerson's watchful eyes.

“David wasn't an instructor for the academy, but he was always there. He ate with the students and he was always available to pray with us,” Strothoff said. “He was just always there to speak into peoples' lives.”

Strothoff said Wilkerson's leadership style was no-nonsense.

“During the orientation period of the leadership school, I remember him telling students that some of them wouldn't make it through the school. He said some would go back to the street and die there,” she recalled. “He wasn't people pleaser. He only wanted to please God and he cared too much about people to spare their feeling by keeping the hard truth from them.”

Wilkerson was instrumental in the existence of the Women's Homes in Rhode Island, Strotfhoff said. He participated in fundraisers for the homes in the early 1990s before they opened in 1995. She also said that he encouraged her leadership as a woman.

“He never differentiated between men and women and what they could or couldn't do,” Strotfhoff said. “He made me know that if I trusted in God, he would fulfill the desires of my heart — and my past didn't matter,” she said.