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Scripture for this chapter
For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day.
2 Corinthians 4:16 KJV
At a glance
Setbacks and relapses test the center's resolve, and the ministry learns to keep going after failure.
The center's willingness to receive people back after failure is itself an expression of grace.
UECF.NET summary
Not every story at the center ends in success, and this chapter is candid about relapse and disappointment — residents who leave, return to old patterns, or fall back into addiction or gang life after real progress. Rather than treating these as reasons to close the doors, Wilkerson frames them as the ordinary, painful cost of working with genuinely broken situations.
The chapter reaffirms the center's commitment to keep its doors open to people who fail and return, resisting a model of ministry that only has room for clean success stories.
Key points
- The book resists presenting the ministry's results as uniformly successful.
- Relapse and failure are treated as expected, not disqualifying, parts of the work.
- The center's willingness to receive people back after failure is itself an expression of grace.
Related Scripture
For reflection and discussion
- Why might an honest account of failure make a ministry more trustworthy, not less?
- How do you respond, personally, when someone you have invested in relapses into an old pattern?
- What would it look like for your own church or community to keep the door open after failure?
This page is an original UECF.NET study companion. It does not reproduce any text from The Cross and the Switchblade by David Wilkerson (with John Sherrill and Elizabeth Sherrill), which remains under copyright. Read the full chapter in a legally available edition of the book — see Further Reading & Legal Editions — or borrow the original 1963 edition via Internet Archive’s Open Library controlled digital lending.