Post by Kerrigan on Aug 23, 2006 11:06:00 GMT -5
A while back (possibly about a month ago), a lady from the NY Times called me on my cell phone while I was at home. This was a surprise, but she had found some of my videos on YouTube...I guess. We had a decent conversation and then she finally wrote an article, where she said a few words about me:
Redemption or Bust
IN the dimly lit, couch-lined lounge of the New York School of Urban Ministry in Long Island City, Queens, a barrel-chested young Oklahoman named Josh Nordean approached 14-year-old Jessica Jacobs of Toledo, Ohio, and told her she had pretty eyes.
''That opens the door,'' Mr. Nordean said as he turned to address the score of teenagers assembled in the lounge. This was their first full day in the city, and he was demonstrating how they might go about bringing the Gospel of Jesus Christ to New Yorkers who they thought seemed in need of their message.
Once a conversation was begun, he suggested, the teenagers could follow up by saying something like: ''Hey, I just want to let you know that God really loves you. I'm here from Oklahoma to let you know. And I just want to know, are you right with God? Is everything cool?''
An hour later on this sizzling July day, Mr. Nordean's team from the Guts Church in Tulsa -- ''Guts,'' he explained, because ''that's what it takes to live for Jesus'' -- emerged from the R train at Whitehall Street, said a prayer and set to trawling Battery Park for opportunities.
If it is summer in New York, it is high season for visiting missionaries, whose numbers have swelled greatly in recent years, according to the leaders of several mission groups. That is not only because of the growing pull of evangelical churches, but also because of New York's appeal as a challenging landscape for young evangelicals.
With varying degrees of success, and with styles ranging from fire-and-brimstone to subtle and low-key, visitors fish for souls among the city's diverse multitudes, perform works of Christian charity, and hope, along the way, to develop cultural savvy and a biblical ''boldness'' they can take home with them. As they proceed, they often discover that New Yorkers have their own ideas about matters human and divine.
Robert Smith, a tall guitarist dressed in black, alighted the other day from a bus at a busy commercial corner in Flushing, Queens, and accepted a religious tract from 18-year-old Matthew Moog of Virginia Beach, Va., who had been standing at the intersection for about an hour.
''My personal reaction is, if that's really what you believe, go for it,'' Mr. Smith said. His religion? ''I consider myself a pagan-Buddhist-Christian-Jewish-type person,'' he replied.
Onward Christian Soldiers
Although there is no central source of numbers on missionaries in the city, the substantial increase in the last five years is attested to by religious organizations around the country. In a typical year a decade ago, the New York School of Urban Ministry would play host to 1,000 people. Now the group receives at least 2,500, housing and feeding them in dormlike accommodations of the ministry's building in Long Island City and arranging a packed schedule of ministry opportunities, everything from conducting prayer walks at the United Nations to visiting AIDS patients in hospitals.
Mission New York City, which sprang up in 2001 as a service to the grief-stricken of 9/11, quickly developed into a trip-planning service for missions, when the first of what now total 15,000 evangelists ''just started showing up on our doorstep,'' said Richard Camacho, the executive director.
The Center for Student Missions, near Los Angeles, began a new program in New York this summer, and Adventures in Missions, an international group with headquarters in Gainesville, Ga., will do so next year. Jews for Jesus, which has its main office in San Francisco, has imported more than 150 volunteers this year, several times the usual number.
The feverish activity reflects two trends. The mission trip itself -- a mix of Bible retreat, volunteer stint and adventure camp -- is riding a tide of popularity among evangelical Christians, with millions traveling every year to points around the globe. These Christians are increasingly intent on maintaining a presence in cities, recognizing New York as home to many poor and homeless people and, in all its religious and ethnic diversity, ''a tremendous harvest field of souls,'' in the words of a Web site promotion for one recent trip.
The teams come from all over the country, but especially from the South and Midwest, where evangelicalism is widespread. These young volunteers are most visible when engaged in evangelism, but trips typically also include worship, study and hands-on work like toiling in soup kitchens. And while the missionaries tend to share fundamentalist beliefs, they approach New Yorkers in markedly different ways.
The Rev. Kerrigan Skelly, a preacher who lives near Raleigh, N.C., and teaches evangelical techniques, visited New York in May as part of an evangelism ''boot camp.'' He did what he considers the ''loving'' thing by telling people sitting around the fountain in Washington Square Park that if they didn't believe in Jesus, they were bound for hell. A few listeners engaged him in debate, but most of the parkgoers went about their business.
In contrast to Mr. Skelly's approach, the 300 young visitors associated with the Center for Student Missions are encouraged to act more like inquiring students than religious proselytizers and to ask nonthreatening questions like ''How long have you lived in this neighborhood?''
''It's not a trick,'' said Cindy Menz-Erb, the center's New York director. ''We don't get to the end and then say, 'Do you know Jesus?' ''
God and Pronouns
If part of what these visitors seek is encounters with diverse people, the city could hardly fail to satisfy, and the human interactions that result from their efforts are by turns clumsy and careful.
In one such juxtaposition, two serious young men, Chris Beggs from Kansas City, Mo., and Saidou Ly from Mauritania, chatted one summer evening on a sidewalk in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, a casual moment long in the making.
Mr. Beggs, 21, had been drawn to the city even as a boy, when he used to buy books about skyscrapers and pore over foldout pages detailing the infrastructural wonders of the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings. This summer, he is working with Urban Impact, a Christian ministry run by the Rev. Larry Holcomb, which has its headquarters on West 44th Street and focuses on working with Muslim immigrants.
''My personal mission on this trip is basically to bring back credibility to Christianity,'' Mr. Beggs said, ''so that we're not so much seen as, you know, goofy churchgoers from the South that can't relate to the city, because how I read Jesus in the Bible is someone who is very much involved with the working class and the city and who is all about justice.''
Mr. Ly, 20, had moved from Mauritania to New York only three months earlier, and had gotten a job at a 99-cent store in Bedford-Stuyvesant. To improve his rudimentary English, he found his way to lessons at the storefront meeting hall of the Pulaar Speaking Association, a local club for West Africans.
''My teacher,'' he said, putting his arm affectionately around Mr. Beggs's shoulders.
Inside the center, dozens of West Africans bent intently over their English workbooks under the tutelage of volunteers from the South. Mr. Beggs's girlfriend, a Missourian named Megan Johnson, drilled a man in a blue dress shirt on pronouns and family relationships. ''What about your brother's daughter?'' she asked. ''Niece,'' he replied. ''Good, good,'' she said approvingly.
Urban Impact was invited into the club to teach English. Has the organization converted anyone?
''Probably not really,'' Mr. Holcomb acknowledged. ''We would like for people to know about our beliefs, and that's sort of where we draw the line.'' There would be time to talk about faith, at summer-camp programs, for example, and during a Fourth of July barbecue, he said.
During English lessons that evening, possibly the sole mention of religious matters came from a second-grader, the daughter of Muslim immigrants from West Africa, who remarked at one point that only white people went to church. Stephanie Skiles, a white Baptist from a small town in East Texas who had been chatting with the girl in a soft drawl, didn't bat an eye.
Afoot in the Divine City
A few days later, Chelsea Botens and Serah Hare, two teenagers from outside Dallas, were hard at work wielding Windex and paper towels in a steamy room at the Bowery Mission, a tenement-style building where homeless men sleep, eat, shower and, if they choose, enter a program of counseling and education. This operation relies on hundreds of volunteers coming in from out of town every year; and their numbers have jumped by 20 to 30 percent in the last five years, according to Tom Basile, the mission's associate director.
For a week, the two teenagers and a score of their colleagues spent their days washing walls, chopping vegetables, and stripping and cleaning pews in the mission's chapel. By night, the young visitors got the lay of the land from a real New Yorker.
''They clean all day and they still have energy to go out at night,'' said Manuel Silvia, a Lower East Side resident who said that he walked into the Bowery Mission last December suffering from drug and alcohol abuse and is now a missionary trainee there. ''I took them to the Manhattan Bridge. I took them all through Little Italy and Chinatown -- they'd never seen that before -- straight down Canal Street.''
Such excursions are a powerful part of the draw of missionary work in the city. One team from Kalamazoo, Mich., planned to take in a Yankees game and the ''Graffiti'' exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum. While the youths from Tulsa were roving Battery Park, a team from South Carolina milled about nearby, watching a troupe of street performers called the Calypso Tumblers, and planning forays to the Statue of Liberty and ground zero.
Apart from such jaunts, however, the volunteers spend most of their time in spots that are not considered tourist destinations. Perhaps because of its reputation as a onetime encampment of the homeless, Tompkins Square Park is a focus of mission activity. The other afternoon, the team from Kalamazoo distributed steaming bowls of stew and clothing from the side of a van from the Queens-based Street Life Ministries, while another, from a tiny town in Pennsylvania, passed out cards bearing directions to CityLight Church, on East Seventh Street.
For both groups, a major goal was to make contact with individuals, to talk to people, and to pray for them. A few of the more experienced or gregarious missionaries were already clasping the hands of people sitting on the benches. Other volunteers were just getting their feet wet.
''It's harder than I thought it would be,'' said a 16-year-old named Josh. One woman didn't even acknowledge him when he greeted her. ''I thought people would want to talk to you about their problems or whatever,'' he added. ''But some people don't really want to have that conversation.''
Nicole Lovett, a 20-year-old from Guilford, Conn., also found it hard to break the ice. As she put it: ''We're just literally laying it out and saying: 'You know what? Look, we're not from around here. We're trying to see if anybody needs a prayer for healing or has a need for anything.' ''
A Wayward Flock
In the eyes of some New Yorkers, these visits by young missionaries are like a soothing balm.
''They are very gentle,'' said a middle-aged man who was wearing a camouflage shirt open to the navel, as volunteers distributed sacks with soap and toothbrushes near Tompkins Square from the familiar white van operated by Street Life Ministries. ''All the time they come here to our bench -- Polish alcoholics usually here on this bench,'' he added in a sonorous East European accent.
Others find the missionaries exasperating. ''They must think this is the neighborhood of lost souls, man, because it's every weekend,'' said David Samuel, a 44-year-old East Villager who works as a lighting technician and has seen more than he'd like of earnest visitors seeking to ease his way to heaven. ''I hate coming out of my house and walking to my park and being proselytized to by these 17-year-olds from North Carolina. It drives me crazy.''
Some groups of missionaries return home with a roster of New Yorkers whom they view as potential converts. The Southern Baptists, who this year have imported about 900 out-of-towners to help paint school classrooms and run sports camps, say that 238 New Yorkers signed up as followers of Christ through the camps last summer.
At the same time, there is growing debate within the evangelical community about the pitfalls of short-term missions and how to avoid them. With so many young people involved in an array of unfamiliar situations, leaders of some organizations worry that the trips can devolve into self-serving and insensitive ''drive-by'' missions.
''I feel like so many of the paternalistic issues that have existed in missions throughout the centuries continue to predominate,'' said the Rev. Dr. David Livermore, director of the Global Learning Center, a research and training institute at Grand Rapids Theological Seminary in Michigan.
There may also be an undue emphasis on tallying conversions of questionable depth. ''I've heard people in churches say, 'Even if people don't want to listen to you, get out there,' '' said the Rev. Dr. Jim Lo, dean of campus ministries at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minn. ''To me, that's the wrong approach.''
But some missionaries end up listening rather than preaching, more intent on developing their own faith than on telling others how to be saved.
One example of this breed is Courtney Aukerman, a recent graduate of the University of Delaware, who comes from what she described as ''a long line of church people.'' Ms. Aukerman is in town this summer to lead mission trips for the Center for Student Missions, the California-based group, and in preparation, she rode every line of the subway, took a few buses and walked around neighborhoods in all the boroughs. She and her colleagues have listened to a trumpet player while sheltering themselves from a storm in Central Park, and eaten Senegalese food in Harlem. They have shared meals with the homeless, collected garbage from the street and asked questions like ''What is your favorite thing about living in the Bronx?''
Somewhere along the line, she began to feel not only a powerful tug toward full-time mission work, but also the lure of the city as a place to call home. ''You can't tame it,'' she said, sipping fruit juice at an outdoor cafe on Avenue A as a vibrant pageant of street life passed by. ''There's some sort of soul in the city that is nowhere else. Like when you sit on the train, and you can hear the music of the tracks.''
Notice she didn't say much good about me...that isn't the way I remember the conversation on the phone...oh well!
Redemption or Bust
IN the dimly lit, couch-lined lounge of the New York School of Urban Ministry in Long Island City, Queens, a barrel-chested young Oklahoman named Josh Nordean approached 14-year-old Jessica Jacobs of Toledo, Ohio, and told her she had pretty eyes.
''That opens the door,'' Mr. Nordean said as he turned to address the score of teenagers assembled in the lounge. This was their first full day in the city, and he was demonstrating how they might go about bringing the Gospel of Jesus Christ to New Yorkers who they thought seemed in need of their message.
Once a conversation was begun, he suggested, the teenagers could follow up by saying something like: ''Hey, I just want to let you know that God really loves you. I'm here from Oklahoma to let you know. And I just want to know, are you right with God? Is everything cool?''
An hour later on this sizzling July day, Mr. Nordean's team from the Guts Church in Tulsa -- ''Guts,'' he explained, because ''that's what it takes to live for Jesus'' -- emerged from the R train at Whitehall Street, said a prayer and set to trawling Battery Park for opportunities.
If it is summer in New York, it is high season for visiting missionaries, whose numbers have swelled greatly in recent years, according to the leaders of several mission groups. That is not only because of the growing pull of evangelical churches, but also because of New York's appeal as a challenging landscape for young evangelicals.
With varying degrees of success, and with styles ranging from fire-and-brimstone to subtle and low-key, visitors fish for souls among the city's diverse multitudes, perform works of Christian charity, and hope, along the way, to develop cultural savvy and a biblical ''boldness'' they can take home with them. As they proceed, they often discover that New Yorkers have their own ideas about matters human and divine.
Robert Smith, a tall guitarist dressed in black, alighted the other day from a bus at a busy commercial corner in Flushing, Queens, and accepted a religious tract from 18-year-old Matthew Moog of Virginia Beach, Va., who had been standing at the intersection for about an hour.
''My personal reaction is, if that's really what you believe, go for it,'' Mr. Smith said. His religion? ''I consider myself a pagan-Buddhist-Christian-Jewish-type person,'' he replied.
Onward Christian Soldiers
Although there is no central source of numbers on missionaries in the city, the substantial increase in the last five years is attested to by religious organizations around the country. In a typical year a decade ago, the New York School of Urban Ministry would play host to 1,000 people. Now the group receives at least 2,500, housing and feeding them in dormlike accommodations of the ministry's building in Long Island City and arranging a packed schedule of ministry opportunities, everything from conducting prayer walks at the United Nations to visiting AIDS patients in hospitals.
Mission New York City, which sprang up in 2001 as a service to the grief-stricken of 9/11, quickly developed into a trip-planning service for missions, when the first of what now total 15,000 evangelists ''just started showing up on our doorstep,'' said Richard Camacho, the executive director.
The Center for Student Missions, near Los Angeles, began a new program in New York this summer, and Adventures in Missions, an international group with headquarters in Gainesville, Ga., will do so next year. Jews for Jesus, which has its main office in San Francisco, has imported more than 150 volunteers this year, several times the usual number.
The feverish activity reflects two trends. The mission trip itself -- a mix of Bible retreat, volunteer stint and adventure camp -- is riding a tide of popularity among evangelical Christians, with millions traveling every year to points around the globe. These Christians are increasingly intent on maintaining a presence in cities, recognizing New York as home to many poor and homeless people and, in all its religious and ethnic diversity, ''a tremendous harvest field of souls,'' in the words of a Web site promotion for one recent trip.
The teams come from all over the country, but especially from the South and Midwest, where evangelicalism is widespread. These young volunteers are most visible when engaged in evangelism, but trips typically also include worship, study and hands-on work like toiling in soup kitchens. And while the missionaries tend to share fundamentalist beliefs, they approach New Yorkers in markedly different ways.
The Rev. Kerrigan Skelly, a preacher who lives near Raleigh, N.C., and teaches evangelical techniques, visited New York in May as part of an evangelism ''boot camp.'' He did what he considers the ''loving'' thing by telling people sitting around the fountain in Washington Square Park that if they didn't believe in Jesus, they were bound for hell. A few listeners engaged him in debate, but most of the parkgoers went about their business.
In contrast to Mr. Skelly's approach, the 300 young visitors associated with the Center for Student Missions are encouraged to act more like inquiring students than religious proselytizers and to ask nonthreatening questions like ''How long have you lived in this neighborhood?''
''It's not a trick,'' said Cindy Menz-Erb, the center's New York director. ''We don't get to the end and then say, 'Do you know Jesus?' ''
God and Pronouns
If part of what these visitors seek is encounters with diverse people, the city could hardly fail to satisfy, and the human interactions that result from their efforts are by turns clumsy and careful.
In one such juxtaposition, two serious young men, Chris Beggs from Kansas City, Mo., and Saidou Ly from Mauritania, chatted one summer evening on a sidewalk in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, a casual moment long in the making.
Mr. Beggs, 21, had been drawn to the city even as a boy, when he used to buy books about skyscrapers and pore over foldout pages detailing the infrastructural wonders of the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings. This summer, he is working with Urban Impact, a Christian ministry run by the Rev. Larry Holcomb, which has its headquarters on West 44th Street and focuses on working with Muslim immigrants.
''My personal mission on this trip is basically to bring back credibility to Christianity,'' Mr. Beggs said, ''so that we're not so much seen as, you know, goofy churchgoers from the South that can't relate to the city, because how I read Jesus in the Bible is someone who is very much involved with the working class and the city and who is all about justice.''
Mr. Ly, 20, had moved from Mauritania to New York only three months earlier, and had gotten a job at a 99-cent store in Bedford-Stuyvesant. To improve his rudimentary English, he found his way to lessons at the storefront meeting hall of the Pulaar Speaking Association, a local club for West Africans.
''My teacher,'' he said, putting his arm affectionately around Mr. Beggs's shoulders.
Inside the center, dozens of West Africans bent intently over their English workbooks under the tutelage of volunteers from the South. Mr. Beggs's girlfriend, a Missourian named Megan Johnson, drilled a man in a blue dress shirt on pronouns and family relationships. ''What about your brother's daughter?'' she asked. ''Niece,'' he replied. ''Good, good,'' she said approvingly.
Urban Impact was invited into the club to teach English. Has the organization converted anyone?
''Probably not really,'' Mr. Holcomb acknowledged. ''We would like for people to know about our beliefs, and that's sort of where we draw the line.'' There would be time to talk about faith, at summer-camp programs, for example, and during a Fourth of July barbecue, he said.
During English lessons that evening, possibly the sole mention of religious matters came from a second-grader, the daughter of Muslim immigrants from West Africa, who remarked at one point that only white people went to church. Stephanie Skiles, a white Baptist from a small town in East Texas who had been chatting with the girl in a soft drawl, didn't bat an eye.
Afoot in the Divine City
A few days later, Chelsea Botens and Serah Hare, two teenagers from outside Dallas, were hard at work wielding Windex and paper towels in a steamy room at the Bowery Mission, a tenement-style building where homeless men sleep, eat, shower and, if they choose, enter a program of counseling and education. This operation relies on hundreds of volunteers coming in from out of town every year; and their numbers have jumped by 20 to 30 percent in the last five years, according to Tom Basile, the mission's associate director.
For a week, the two teenagers and a score of their colleagues spent their days washing walls, chopping vegetables, and stripping and cleaning pews in the mission's chapel. By night, the young visitors got the lay of the land from a real New Yorker.
''They clean all day and they still have energy to go out at night,'' said Manuel Silvia, a Lower East Side resident who said that he walked into the Bowery Mission last December suffering from drug and alcohol abuse and is now a missionary trainee there. ''I took them to the Manhattan Bridge. I took them all through Little Italy and Chinatown -- they'd never seen that before -- straight down Canal Street.''
Such excursions are a powerful part of the draw of missionary work in the city. One team from Kalamazoo, Mich., planned to take in a Yankees game and the ''Graffiti'' exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum. While the youths from Tulsa were roving Battery Park, a team from South Carolina milled about nearby, watching a troupe of street performers called the Calypso Tumblers, and planning forays to the Statue of Liberty and ground zero.
Apart from such jaunts, however, the volunteers spend most of their time in spots that are not considered tourist destinations. Perhaps because of its reputation as a onetime encampment of the homeless, Tompkins Square Park is a focus of mission activity. The other afternoon, the team from Kalamazoo distributed steaming bowls of stew and clothing from the side of a van from the Queens-based Street Life Ministries, while another, from a tiny town in Pennsylvania, passed out cards bearing directions to CityLight Church, on East Seventh Street.
For both groups, a major goal was to make contact with individuals, to talk to people, and to pray for them. A few of the more experienced or gregarious missionaries were already clasping the hands of people sitting on the benches. Other volunteers were just getting their feet wet.
''It's harder than I thought it would be,'' said a 16-year-old named Josh. One woman didn't even acknowledge him when he greeted her. ''I thought people would want to talk to you about their problems or whatever,'' he added. ''But some people don't really want to have that conversation.''
Nicole Lovett, a 20-year-old from Guilford, Conn., also found it hard to break the ice. As she put it: ''We're just literally laying it out and saying: 'You know what? Look, we're not from around here. We're trying to see if anybody needs a prayer for healing or has a need for anything.' ''
A Wayward Flock
In the eyes of some New Yorkers, these visits by young missionaries are like a soothing balm.
''They are very gentle,'' said a middle-aged man who was wearing a camouflage shirt open to the navel, as volunteers distributed sacks with soap and toothbrushes near Tompkins Square from the familiar white van operated by Street Life Ministries. ''All the time they come here to our bench -- Polish alcoholics usually here on this bench,'' he added in a sonorous East European accent.
Others find the missionaries exasperating. ''They must think this is the neighborhood of lost souls, man, because it's every weekend,'' said David Samuel, a 44-year-old East Villager who works as a lighting technician and has seen more than he'd like of earnest visitors seeking to ease his way to heaven. ''I hate coming out of my house and walking to my park and being proselytized to by these 17-year-olds from North Carolina. It drives me crazy.''
Some groups of missionaries return home with a roster of New Yorkers whom they view as potential converts. The Southern Baptists, who this year have imported about 900 out-of-towners to help paint school classrooms and run sports camps, say that 238 New Yorkers signed up as followers of Christ through the camps last summer.
At the same time, there is growing debate within the evangelical community about the pitfalls of short-term missions and how to avoid them. With so many young people involved in an array of unfamiliar situations, leaders of some organizations worry that the trips can devolve into self-serving and insensitive ''drive-by'' missions.
''I feel like so many of the paternalistic issues that have existed in missions throughout the centuries continue to predominate,'' said the Rev. Dr. David Livermore, director of the Global Learning Center, a research and training institute at Grand Rapids Theological Seminary in Michigan.
There may also be an undue emphasis on tallying conversions of questionable depth. ''I've heard people in churches say, 'Even if people don't want to listen to you, get out there,' '' said the Rev. Dr. Jim Lo, dean of campus ministries at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minn. ''To me, that's the wrong approach.''
But some missionaries end up listening rather than preaching, more intent on developing their own faith than on telling others how to be saved.
One example of this breed is Courtney Aukerman, a recent graduate of the University of Delaware, who comes from what she described as ''a long line of church people.'' Ms. Aukerman is in town this summer to lead mission trips for the Center for Student Missions, the California-based group, and in preparation, she rode every line of the subway, took a few buses and walked around neighborhoods in all the boroughs. She and her colleagues have listened to a trumpet player while sheltering themselves from a storm in Central Park, and eaten Senegalese food in Harlem. They have shared meals with the homeless, collected garbage from the street and asked questions like ''What is your favorite thing about living in the Bronx?''
Somewhere along the line, she began to feel not only a powerful tug toward full-time mission work, but also the lure of the city as a place to call home. ''You can't tame it,'' she said, sipping fruit juice at an outdoor cafe on Avenue A as a vibrant pageant of street life passed by. ''There's some sort of soul in the city that is nowhere else. Like when you sit on the train, and you can hear the music of the tracks.''
Notice she didn't say much good about me...that isn't the way I remember the conversation on the phone...oh well!
