From the Streets to the Sanctuary
Andrew Wilson was eleven years old the first time he was locked up.
He didn't have much of a childhood before that. Raised by a single mother who worked nights, Andrew and his brother largely raised themselves. Andrew father wanted nothing to do with them between the ages of six and eighteen. Men came and went. The family went to church not out of faith, but out of a mother's desperate hope that she might find a good man to be present in her sons' lives. Instead, Andrew experienced sexual abuse as a young child and carried the weight of it largely alone, convinced it meant he could never become a real man. Suicidal thoughts came early. The courage to act on them, thankfully, did not.
By the time he was twelve, Andrew had found a different kind of family in the streets. Gang life gave him belonging, identity, and eventually a livelihood in drug sales. By his early twenties, he was addicted to cocaine and crack cocaine and building a reputation that made people nervous to cross him.
At twenty, he picked up a serious charge in Colorado connected to a drive-by shooting. The case would take years to resolve. And in the middle of all of it, right at the edge of one of the darkest moments of his life, something happened at a Taco Bell that Andrew still can't fully explain.
He was sitting in his car, planning to kill another person. No one knew what they were up to, not even the person in the car with him. Two strangers walked out of the restaurant and knocked on his window. They looked scared. They told him: "Jesus just told us you're about to do something you're going to regret the rest of your life."
Andrew drove away from that moment that shifted the trajectory of his life. To get away from it all he left town to start fresh in a new place.
It was there where he met his wife, Bianca. He tried to straighten out. He headed to the oil fields, thinking that distance and hard work and real money -- $3,000 a week -- might finally be the fresh start he needed. It wasn't. The money went to trucks and built debt that would take him nearly twelve years to pay off. His income collapsed to $200 a week. His marriage was falling apart. Andrew made a plan to take out a life insurance policy and end his life so Bianca could collect the payout. He had it mapped out. He just wasn't sure he had the courage.
Then came the dreams.
His late father, who had briefly re-entered his life when he was 18-years-old but died of cancer soon after, appeared in one of his dreams. He told Andrew he was going to become a minister and that he needed to go back to church. Andrew thought it was the biggest joke he had ever heard. But he went that weekend. And he never left.
There I felt my purpose, calling, and family. Not the gang or drug family. Church family.
He wanted to work with youth from the start. But he worried his record would close every door. Around the time of his baptism, his lawyer and the judge worked together to have his record expunged. Andrew started a Bible study with just five kids, all of them troubled, all of them recognizable to him. The group grew. When the church's youth pastor was let go, Andrew was already quietly filling the gap. He was even driving a school bus, getting written up for talking about Jesus on the route. A pastor asked him what he really wanted to do. Andrew said he wanted to be a youth pastor. Happy for him, the pastor offered to pay for his training through Urban Youth Workers Institute (UYWI).
Andrew filled out the paperwork and was initially rejected. The cohort was already full. He set it aside, disappointed but accepting. A week later, a spot opened up, and he took it without hesitation.
Soon after, the senior pastor called him in for a meeting. Andrew assumed he had done something wrong or that the ministry was getting shut down. Instead, the pastor told him he had met with a lot of people to fill the youth pastor position and no one fit. Andrew’s first thought was to put his boots on the ground to find the right replacement. The pastor slowed Andrew down and said, "No one loves these kids like you do or knows them like you do." He offered Andrew the position.
Andrew turned it down at first. Then he went home and talked to Bianca and his daughter. He wanted to respect his daughter’s personal space within the youth group. His daughter asked him: "Would that mean I could call my dad a pastor?" He said eventually, yes. She told him he should do it. Bianca was direct: "We've already been doing it for so long without anybody” and also encouraged him to take the position.
He prayed about it and he answered the call by accepting the position.
Today Andrew leads 716 Youth at Genesis Project in Fort Collins, Colorado, serving 40 to 50 young people consistently each week. He also leads a ministry at the local juvenile jail, the same facility where he was first locked up at eleven years old, to minister to 27 kids who remind him of himself.
He is currently completing UYWI's Whole Life Discipleship program, which he says has helped him build real strategy and not just good intentions. The book that has shaped his philosophy most is Lead Like Jesus, the idea that Jesus did ministry by simply walking with people. Andrew's team doesn't push Jesus. They cook home meals for kids who do not get them at home. They follow the ones who leave. They show up.
One of those kids is Deja Sanchez. Deja had been kicked out by a previous leader. She was sleeping at her boyfriend's house, doing everything she should not have been. Andrew kept following her and kept showing up. Today Deja is heading to college. Every Sunday she volunteers in the kids' ministry. Her entire family came to church because of her transformation.
Deja’s transformation is only by the glory of God. It wasn’t me.
He still struggles to feel like he knows what he is doing. He will tell you that directly. In reality, Andrew knows the kids in front of him, because he was one of them. He knows what it means to have nobody believe in you. And he has decided that the rest of his life will be spent making sure the kids in Fort Collins do not have to figure that out alone.
His vision is to open a full 716 Youth Center one day, a place built around deep, extended discipleship rather than a single Sunday program. A place where kids can belong before they believe. A place that looks a lot like what he needed and never had.
Twenty years ago, Andrew Wilson sat in a jail cell in Fort Collins as an eleven-year-old boy.
Now he walks back into that same building to tell the kids inside that their story is not over.
Andrew Wilson is one leader. But across the country, there are hundreds of young people in urban communities who need someone exactly like him, someone who has lived what they have lived, who will not flinch at their worst, and who will keep showing up long after anyone else would have walked away. UYWI exists to find those leaders, train them, and strengthen their leadership to reach and disciple young people within their urban communities.
When we invest in leaders like Andrew, we are not just changing one life, we are changing the trajectory of an entire community. That is the power of this work, and your partnership makes it possible. Thank you for your investment in urban leaders every single day."
TOMMY NIXON, CEO
Urban Youth Workers Institute
Pray for Andrew and the 716 Youth ministry as they continue to grow their team of leaders and expand their jail ministry in Fort Collins.
When you champion a leader, you're fueling a movement that reaches students, raises up disciples, and rebuilds communities across urban America.