Teen Challenge choir founder retiring

Phil Breithaupt, the founder and director of the Teen Challenge New Creations Choir, will wrap up a 37-year career today at the Cape Girardeau ministry.

Breithaupt's wife, Beverly, who has been with Teen Challenge since 1991, is also retiring from the ministry, which provides a Christian-based program meant to help people of all ages control drug and alcohol addiction.

To celebrate Breithaupt's career with the ministry, the staff is welcoming people to a reception at the Teen Challenge Healing Rooms from 2 to 5 p.m. Saturday.

Before moving to Cape Girardeau in March 1973, Breithaupt was involved with a Bible training school in New York founded by David Wilkerson, also the founder of Teen Challenge. Breithaupt formed a choir there, he said, that recorded an album and traveled the country.

When arriving at the Teen Challenge program in Cape Girardeau, Breithaupt formed New Creations Choir. The choir has been together ever since and is made up of students in the Teen Challenge program. They've sung for various churches, civic groups and assemblies and also traveled to Canada, Houston and Jacksonville, Fla.

While serving as music director for Teen Challenge, Breithaupt said, he's enjoyed seeing men's lives change through the power of Christ. So many of the men are deemed "incurable," he said, but more often than not the Teen Challenge program transforms their lives.

"I feel very privileged and honored to be a part of that," Breithaupt said. "But I realize that we do very little. We're just channels, and God does the real transformation."

The Breithaupts had been thinking about retiring for about a year but wanted to know the position of music director could be filled. Breithaupt has been training New Jersey native John Bechtel for a year and a half. Bechtel is a graduate of the Teen Challenge program, Breithaupt said, and has been employed with the ministry since 2006.

"He'll be able to take this choir to a new level," Breithaupt said.

The departure from Teen Challenge isn't so much as a retirement as it is a transition, Breithaupt said. He and his wife have applied to be volunteers with U.S. Mission America Placement Service, a ministry that helps construct new churches or provide maintenance to different sites around the world.

ehevern@semissourian.com

388-3635

Pertinent Address:

303 Matc Lane, Cape Girardeau, MO