Global Teen Challenge is a network of Christian faith-based corporations intended to provide rehabilitation services to people struggling with addiction. It was founded by David Wilkerson in 1960. The global headquarters is in Columbus, Georgia, United States.

There is little public record of what goes on in Teen Challenge facilities. Questions have been raised about whether the practices of the organization are abusive and cult-like. In the United States, there are no federal laws or agencies that regulate organizations like Teen Challenge.

Teen Challenge was founded in 1961 by David Wilkerson, an Assemblies of God pastor who left a rural Pennsylvania church to work on the street among teenage gang members and socially marginalized people in New York City and who, perhaps, is best known for later authoring The Cross and the Switchblade and founding Times Square Church. Teen Challenge started its first residential program in December 1962, in a house in Brooklyn, New York.

In 1973, 12 years after the ministry began, Teen Challenge established a national headquarters. In 1995, Global Teen Challenge was founded to assist the growing number of Teen Challenges starting up outside the US, but struggling to acquire the necessary resources and training. In 2022, Global Teen Challenge had more than 1,400 accommodation centers in 129 countries around the world.

The organization offers rehabilitation programs of a general duration of 12 months to help young people to get out of addictions of all kinds (alcoholism, drugs, crime, prostitution, etc.). In the past it forced participants to sign ‘civil rights waivers’ under duress, and to this day requires parents/guardians to sign waivers giving over unconditional control of their child, and stating they will not “interfere with the custody and management of said minor in any way.” The centres use practices such as enforced silence and banning communication (verbal and visual) between participants for perceived infractions, or on suspicion that the participant is gay - sometimes for months; monitoring and censoring all phone conversations with people outside of the programme (eg parents).

In 1973, Archie Johnston compared results of Teen Challenge with that of a transactional analysis approach at a Terminal Island Federal Correctional Institution therapeutic community, and with a third group who received no treatment. While the numbers of subjects was small (17 in each group), he found evidence to support his recommendation that, while Teen Challenge was an "effective" treatment (with a drug recidivism rate after 29 months of 32%), Transactional Analysis was a "very effective" treatment (with a comparable 16% rate), suggesting that perhaps the lower recidivism rates were a result of TA changing the addiction concept of the self-image more thoroughly and at a slower pace. He hoped that Teen Challenge would incorporate some psychotherapy into their treatment model.

A Wilder Research study of 141 former residents who graduated Minnesota Teen Challenge between 2007 and 2009 reported that 74 percent of adult program graduates (10 percent of respondents were teenagers) reported no use in the previous six months, 58 percent had attended school since graduating, 74 percent were employed, and 53 percent rated the overall quality of Minnesota Teen Challenge as “outstanding”. When asked to name what helped most, the faith-based aspects and the staff were mentioned most frequently.

Aaron Bicknese tracked down 59 former Teen Challenge students in 1995, in order to compare them with a similar group of addicts who had spent one or two months in a hospital rehabilitation program. His results, part of his PhD dissertation, were published in "The Teen Challenge Drug Treatment Program in Comparative Perspective". Bicknese found that Teen Challenge graduates reported less drug-use recidivism than the hospital-program graduates, but not less than those who continued attending Alcoholics Anonymous after the hospital program. His results also showed that Teen Challenge graduates were much more likely to be employed, with 18 of the 59 working at Teen Challenge itself, which utilizes graduates in its operations.