Be an Agent of Change: Father Peter G. Young’s Challenge to You

Father Peter G. Young spent more than half a century fighting for the addicted, the homeless and the incarcerated in New York. In this clip from The Slingin Podcast launch on Hoodz Radio, he doesn’t tell a war story. He issues a challenge, the same one a Navy captain once put to him: be an agent of change.

Watch on YouTube

Watch: “Be an Agent of Change”, Father Peter G. Young on The Slingin Podcast, Hoodz Radio.

Father Peter G. Young died on December 9, 2020, at age 90. Kay Bond recorded this conversation with him for The Slingin Podcast on Hoodz Radio.

In His Words

“Being an agent of change is what it’s about. So I beg you and I pray that you will take on the challenge, so that we can help other people. That’s what God wants us to do… If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”

Listen to how he says it. He’s not asking politely. He says I beg you. For Father Young, helping somebody else isn’t a hobby or a side gig for people with extra time. It’s the job God hands every one of us. And the last line cuts off every excuse: there’s no neutral corner. You’re either moving the problem or you’re part of it.

A Challenge on the Bow of a Destroyer Escort

That phrase, “agent of change,” wasn’t something he picked up from a slogan. In his telling, it was handed to him at sea. As a young man in the Navy during the Korean conflict, serving on a destroyer escort that patrolled the Atlantic coast and the Caribbean, he watched shipmates go ashore in island ports, get drunk and force themselves on local women. He had been raised to respect women, and he weighed 267 pounds. So he made himself shore patrol, with no authority at all, and he physically confronted the men.

One night on watch, the captain noticed he was bleeding. After hearing what happened, the captain counseled him on how he’d handled it, then asked a question that changed his life. He kept bringing it up, and he gave it a name. Father Young recalls praying on the fantail that he could live up to that challenge. He dates it to 1953. Everything that came after, the shelters, the treatment programs, the fight at the Capitol to treat addiction as a disease instead of a crime, traces back to that night.

From the Memoir

His memoir Fifty Years Young puts that moment at the center of his whole story.

From Chapter 5, “The Navy Experience”:

“Then he said, ‘Young, have you ever considered becoming a chaplain?’ ‘Chaplains get the respect they need to accomplish what you want with these men,’ he said. He kept bringing it up. He called it being an ‘agent of change.'”

The same chapter shows where the “solution or problem” line in the clip comes from. It wasn’t the Navy that taught him that. It was home:

“My childhood values said ‘become a solution and not a problem.’ If the captain said I’d be needed as a chaplain, I had to give it a try.”

From the Prologue, “It Was a Duty”: Father Young ties that calling to his hero, Dr. Martin Luther King, whom he calls his contemporary in social ministry. He recalls being on the Mall in Washington on August 28, 1963, and he takes the memoir’s guiding words from Dr. King:

“Dr. King said this was what God wanted: see a need, then be an agent to help.”

Put that next to the clip and the line is almost word for word: That’s what God wants us to do.

From Chapter 40, “Gratitude to God for the Journey”: Looking back at eighty-five, he makes clear the captain’s challenge was never a burden:

“But the challenge my Navy captain gave me, to be an agent of change, sent me down the path of a very happy life instead. Whatever sacrifices were made were never difficult.”

Why It Matters Now

Here’s the thing about a challenge: somebody has to say it out loud. A captain said it to a young sailor with a bloody face, and that sailor went on to spend his life with people most of society had written off, the drunk in the county jail, the addict on the corner, the man coming home from prison with nowhere to sleep. That’s the Legacy.

The Movement is what happens when the challenge gets passed on. Families are still burying loved ones lost to addiction. People are still walking out of prison into the same streets that put them there. Every one of those struggles needs somebody who sees a need and decides to be the one who helps. It doesn’t take a collar. It doesn’t take a title. It takes a decision.

Father Young’s own words leave no room to stand on the sidelines. If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. So pick a side.

Watch the full conversation with Father Peter G. Young on The Slingin Podcast at HoodzRadio.com, and follow Hoodz Radio so you don’t miss what’s next. And keep your eyes open for 50 Years Young, our 10-part series on Father Young’s life, his ministry and the fight to treat addiction as a disease and not a crime.

Respect the Legacy. Amplify the Movement.