Von was born in Hollywood, California (1929) as Erhardt George Anton Wolf Trutzschler von Falkenstein. What a name; that's why everyone simply calls him "Von."

Conversion: First Baptist Church of Torrance, California (1940).

Education: High school.

In youth work since 1947. Von was a part-time Youth Director & Director of Christian Education for three churches in San Diego, California from 1947 to 1960 (Emmanuel Baptist Church, Clairemont Baptist Church and Trinity Baptist Church of Allied Gardens), with a two-year interruption by the U.S. Army. He fought in the Korean War as a machine gunner.

Von became full-time Youth Director and Christian Education Director at Clairemont Emmanuel Baptist Church in 1962. He continued in those positions for nineteen years (1962-1981).

Von is single and has never married. He has one sister.

Von's hobbies are travel, adventure and photography.

All of his professional life he has been on the road a month or two each year speaking to youth and adults in camps, retreats, conferences, schools and churches.

He has traveled internationally since 1951. In this time he has visited and/or ministered in more than forty countries. Most of his foreign travel has been by invitation from a variety of mission agencies (Wycliffe, S.I.M., New Tribes Mission, etc.) to speak to field conferences and missionary schools.

Von is the founder and director of Spectrum Ministries, Inc., which was organized in 1981 to continue the ongoing ministry he had with his youth group across the border with the very poor in Tijuana. This non-profit corporation has two primary focuses: (1) physical, spiritual, and medical ministry to the very poor families, children, and teens in and around Tijuana, a city of two million; and (2) exposing the needs and ministry across the border to U.S. teens and involving them in this ministry.

Von has written and co-written many articles and books. Some books that are available at this time are Outrageous Object Lessons (Gospel Light Publications), Incredible Questionnaires (Zondervan Publications & Youth Specialties), and Youth Ministry Crash Course (Zondervan Publications & Youth Specialties).

To learn more about Pastor Von visit his personal WWW site at WWW.PASTORVON.COM.

HOW I GOT INTO THIS MINISTRY

Isn't it strange when a Youth Pastor has to be forced into a mission focus by one of his own youth group? That's what happened to me.

More than thirty years ago David, one of my teenagers, asked me if we could minister to an orphanage he knew of in Tijuana. I wasn't interested and gave him the standard reasons. There are a lot of poor we could minister to here in the US and foreign work was for missionaries that are specially called. Well, he persisted and I finally gave in.

As we drove down to Tijuana I was hoping he wouldn't remember how to get to this orphanage. Work in Tijuana wasn't my type of thing! Unfortunately he remembered the location. It was a cold, wet and muddy trip to this orphanage. When we walked through the big iron gates more than a hundred dirty and love-starved little kids ran to greet us. David enjoyed the time but I wasn't impressed. As we returned home I lectured him on why this kind of thing wasn't for us. At home I took a long shower and tried to wash the whole experience away. Mexico? No way!

A few weeks passed and David with a few of his friends asked me again to visit the orphanage in Tijuana. They persisted and again I drove them into Tijuana to the rather dirty orphanage with those dirty little children. This trip led to more trips and gradually the Lord changed me. I fell in love with these little kids and ministry in Mexico. Our orphanage ministry grew into working in the Tijuana dump and later to a variety of poor barrios. It continues today in the form of Spectrum Ministries.

Now I was the one challenging my teens to become involved in ministry. For years almost every week I would fill my little Volkswagen bus with a team of my teens and head down to work in Mexico.

During the years, more than fifty of my teenagers headed to New Tribes Mission Bible school; of those fifty, thirty became foreign missionaries, as a result, tribes in Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Indonesia, and even Africa, have heard the Gospel for the first time!

If you were to ask those missionaries they would tell you that the one thing they had in common were those trips to Mexico and the ministry there in Tijuana.