One of Andrew’s earliest desires was that his mom and dad lived in the same house. But his dad was addicted to drugs and alcohol and verbally abusive to his mom. By the time he was five years old, they divorced. He was sexually abused from the age of five to about eleven and as an only child, he didn’t have anyone to turn to. But he found comfort in sports.

In high school, Andrew found his identity in baseball and football. He also found and began smoking marijuana. In his junior year, he started using cocaine and lived the party life–high school sports, alcohol and drugs–and looked forward to playing sports in college. He was an all-city, all-area football player, middle linebacker and fullback. In baseball, scouts watched as he pitched with the Pittsburgh Pirates’ traveling team. But by eighteen, meth also became part of the picture and the expected scholarship never came.

“All my hopes, all my dreams vanished because I didn’t get a scholarship,” Andrew said. His parents had both remarried and started new families but Andrew had no desire to be involved. He moved out of his parents’ house and became a pizza delivery driver. But after eight months, he was fired over a penny. Uncertain what else to do, he decided to attend junior college, hoping that once again he would find his identity in school. He thought that would solve the problems he was going through. He relocated from the Central Valley to the coast, moved in with his mom, enrolled in school and joined the baseball team. But drugs continued to dominate his life.

“By the time I was twenty-one years old, I was a full-blown meth addict, full-blown alcoholic, I smoked two packs of cigarettes a day–and college was done.”

Washed up, he moved back to Bakersfield. But Andrew’s stepmom was a prayer warrior and she began to fast and pray.

“She fasted and prayed for ten days for me and that’s when all hell really broke loose in my life,” Andrew says. “I got arrested twice in the same weekend. I got arrested Friday. On the next day, I got out and was arrested again.”

The court ordered Andrew be placed on the PC-1000 diversion program for first-time offenders who have been arrested and charged with “personal use” drug offenses. Under the program’s rules, participants must attend one group meeting and one individual counseling session per week for twenty weeks and undergo random drug testing. But Andrew never showed up. He failed the program and his life took a turn for the worse.

Andrew’s probation officer told him, “Mr. Ferguson, if you don’t go to Teen Challenge, you are going to be in and out of prison for the rest of your life.” Andrew was twenty-three years old and the way he saw it, he was facing prison or Teen Challenge. His dad encouraged him to go to Teen Challenge so he reluctantly agreed.

“All hell broke loose that night too,” Andrew said. “The drug dealer almost stabbed a guy in my house, I hit a guy on the leg with a shovel handle. It was crazy that night. The next day, my dad came to pick me up and I said, ‘Dad, I’m not going. I’m always going to be a drug addict. This is the lifestyle that I want to live.’ And he just stormed out of the house.”

Then something inside Andrew told him he needed to call his dad. This time when his dad came back to pick him up, he brought the entire family. Andrew remembers his little half-sister, Lindsey, that day.

“You’ve gotta go to Teen Challenge,” she said. “You’re going to prison, Andrew!”

Initially he refused but another prompting inside told Andrew, “Get up. Get your stuff in that truck.” And he did. Today Andrew believes that was the best decision he’s ever made. He hopped in his dad’s truck and rode to the Teen Challenge Induction Center in Shafter.

“Those were the hardest two weeks of my entire life,” Andrew said. “I was going through withdrawals, I wanted a cigarette. Five days into it, I was dying for a cigarette. And one thing I remembered about my childhood, about being raised in my father’s home after he got custody of me was that my stepmom would always pray for me. If I got sick or wasn’t feeling well, she would lay hands on me and pray for me. So I went to the intern and asked, ‘Will you pray for me? Because I’m hurting inside.’ He would lay hands on me and would pray for me and those desires and those cravings would go away and I’d make it another day.”

Then two weeks after he’d arrived, inside the little white chapel on the grounds of the Shafter Teen Challenge center, Andrew heard the gospel.

“I went up to receive Christ, and that day my life was completely, radically changed. I was completely set free, completely liberated from the life that I was living.”

That was the moment Andrew found his identity again. He found his purpose and his calling. He fell in love with the Word of God and couldn’t put his Bible down. He regained his health and was feeling great about himself and who he was in Christ. Within four months, he completed his stay at the induction center and got ready to transfer to the Teen Challenge Christian Life Training Center in Riverside.

Then the phone rang. Andrew’s dad, only forty-eight years old, had a massive heart attack and died. Grief-stricken as he was, Andrew took comfort in the fact that his dad had seen the change in his son and as a result, had just committed his heart to the Lord.

Andrew received a leave of absence and went to the funeral–and he preached. He had only been a Christian for four months but that didn’t stop Andrew. At his father’s funeral he preached a sermon about Christ raising Lazarus from the tomb.

“I’m preaching my heart out there [at the funeral] and eight people got saved! People were coming to Christ. It was just a huge celebration. So I knew I’d been called to preach. I knew I’d been called to share the gospel.”

After he graduated from the one-year Teen Challenge program, he agreed to do an internship at the Shafter induction center, and while there, applied to attend the Teen Challenge Ministry Institute.

At TCMI Andrew began to understand the gifts of the Holy Spirit that God had birthed inside him. As a ministry team leader, he began to use those gifts out in the streets of downtown Los Angeles.

“I would go down to skid row and I would just preach my heart out. We evangelized and built relationships and built trust with the people down there for almost twelve months,” Andrew said. He also loved fundraising because he got to exercise his gift of evangelism. “I would go door-to-door, witnessing and sharing about the ministry of Teen Challenge, but also leading people to the Lord.”

In 2004 he received a call from Riverside Teen Challenge and was offered a job as a teacher-advisor. Andrew even went to Denmark in 2005 on a three-month missions trip ministering to adolescents and teenagers–something he had never thought possible before.

Today Andrew is the Dean of Students at Riverside Teen Challenge and heads up evangelism efforts at Teen Challenge of Southern California. He found the love of his life, Jackie, who is also a Teen Challenge alumni and graduate of Calvary Chapel Bible College. Together they have three beautiful children.

But that’s not the end of the story.

“You know what’s crazy,” Andrew says, “is that I’m not the only one in my family who went through Teen Challenge. My little sister Lindsey went through Teen Challenge, my little brother Austin went through Teen Challenge, my whole family went through Teen Challenge after I gave my heart to the Lord.

“My little brother went through Teen Challenge, did his internship, went through the Bible college, then he launched out and served in Germany Teen Challenge for more than six months.”

Teen Challenge has played an enormous role in helping Andrew become the man of God that he is today. But there are so many like Andrew who still need spiritual and physical healing from addiction and don’t know where else to turn. We want to help them, but we need funding to house and feed the students.

Will you please make a donation today and help other men and women find the purpose God has for their lives? Recovery and new life is within their grasp. We just need to help them find it.

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