When you have a concentrated church-planting focus, you’re able to push back darkness.
In 2003 NAMB named New York City a Strategic Focus City, a four-year emphasis that brought church planters and much-needed resources to the city. During the “New Hope New York” campaign, Southern Baptists started around 45 churches.
“When you see how evangelical adherence has grown in the city and you see how 40 percent of the churches in Manhattan have been started since [2000], we can thank God that Southern Baptists had a part in that,” said Steve Allen, who led the church-planting efforts for New Hope New York. “That’s satisfying and exciting.”
Churches across the convention sent volunteers to the city to help with the church plants that were starting. For example, Shades Mountain Baptist Church of Birmingham, Ala., got involved in New York City near the beginning of New Hope New York. Volunteers from the church have participated in everything from an evangelistic tailgate party at a Rutgers football game to service projects to training churches in special-needs ministries. The church has remained consistently involved in church planting in New York City for most of the past decade.
“We’re all part of this incredible Southern Baptist Convention,” said Danny Wood, pastor of Shades Mountain, as he urged other SBC pastors to involve their churches in the New York City work. “Knowing we’ve been blessed with a number of resources in our churches, we need to go to those other areas and help them in the resource department. Our role [as established churches elsewhere] is to get boots on the ground to help some of these churches get started.”
WORK TO BE DONE
Despite the church-planting boom over the past decade in New York—particularly in the Manhattan city center, the work is far from done. While going from 1 to 3 percent evangelical means hundreds of thousands of new believers, it means the city is still close to the official definition of an unreached people group, making the Big Apple, and the 20 million people in the metro area, a mission field of massive proportions.
Few places do the spiritual needs loom larger than among non-English speakers. NAMB missionary Chris Clayman, whose book EthNYcity chronicles the culture and spiritual needs of the city’s various ethnicities, points particularly to New York’s large Arab Muslim population. According to Clayman it has been two decades since a church planter has come to New York City to start churches among Arab Muslims, even as church planting and the overall evangelical presence have increased.
In fact Clayman suggests that a Muslim from Mali has more access to the gospel in his own language back home in his native country than in New York City. While many Muslims may be more open to spiritual discussions than they were before 9/11, Clayman cites a lack of evangelical workers among those people groups. In all of New York City, Clayman says, there are only two churches made up of mostly Muslim-background Christians.
“For many American Christians, [9/11] provoked more fear than love when it comes to working with Muslims,” Clayman said. “But fear never really reaches anyone. From our perspective, that has to change. We have to be motivated by love.”
It has been a decade since Fortner prayed his prayer in a brittle and broken New York. In those 10 years Southern Baptist church planters and volunteers—along with other evangelicals—have served as pioneers in loving this city and laying the gospel groundwork for years to come.
Now, as Southern Baptists look toward a new concentrated focus on church planting in the city through Send North America, Wood and others are urging churches to join them.
“It gives you both hope and excitement to know that you can already see a move of God,” Wood said. “When you see the additional churches planted in the city, there has to be fruit. That should encourage us to go and plant even more churches in the city.” OM
Tobin Perry is online editor for On Mission.
ON MISSION • Fall 2011 15
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