The Evangelical Squad
James Estrin/The New York Times
NEW FLOCK Guy Wasko, center, pastor of a new branch of Trinity Grace Church that opened this month in the East Village, praying with members of his new congregation. More Photos »
By JOHN LELAND
Published: April 22, 2011
IN a vast, unheated room overlooking Cooper Square in the East Village, Guy Wasko tried to shake off the start-up jitters. It was late March, less than three weeks before the biggest day of his professional life, and there was still so much to do. A financial backer was wavering. The music was a big question mark: was it the right flavor for the neighborhood, funky enough, soulful enough? What about his hospitality team? The members had to be trained, the signs had to be right, the branding had to pop.
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James Estrin/The New York Times
The mostly white and Asian congregation of Trinity Grace Church in the East Village aims to become more “multigenerational and multiethnic.” More Photos »
Mr. Wasko did what he does every Wednesday at noon. For the next hour, he and a group of pastors prayed for their church, their neighborhood, their city.
They prayed for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and his decision-making processes. They prayed for teachers and homeless men and the titans of Wall Street. Without a New York accent among them, they kept it decidedly local.
“Father,” said an Australian voice to Mr. Wasko’s right, “your kingdom come, your will be done, in New York as it is in heaven.”
Some people come to New York to be artists, bankers, architects, socialites. These men had come to start churches.
THE Australian voice belonged to Jon Tyson, 34, a former youth minister who, five years ago, started Trinity Grace Church, an independent evangelical congregation organized for an evangelical no-man’s land. In 2006, as a new arrival from Orlando, Fla., Mr. Tyson held the first service on Easter, in a bar on the Upper West Side. Back then the congregation was called Origins, and Mr. Tyson wore his hair in a faux hawk and preached in T-shirts, trying to create a church for people who did not like church — radical, crunchy, grounded both in Scripture and in the writings of the economist Richard Florida about a mobile, urban creative class.
In short order, the church expanded to Chelsea, Park Slope in Brooklyn and the Upper East Side, each branch led by a new arrival to the city. Along the way the church became Trinity Grace and Mr. Tyson added a necktie and more traditional liturgy — New York, it seemed, preferred church to look more like church.
Five years later, it was Mr. Wasko’s turn to start a fifth branch. Mr. Tyson liked the East Village because it was filled with young people new to the city, and because there were poor people the church could serve. Also, Mr. Tyson said, it was the home of his favorite cigar bar. Mr. Wasko fell for the neighborhood after seeing “Rent.”
“We don’t have a great strategic plan,” Mr. Tyson said. “We don’t have an imperialistic vision.”
But the church and its expansion into the East Village highlight a concerted groundswell of middle-class, professional evangelicals in Manhattan, an area many churches once shunned as an epicenter of sin. It is the place, many now believe, to reach the people who influence the world.
Though much attention has been paid to New York’s boom in immigrant churches, in recent decades the number of English-speaking evangelical churches south of Harlem has grown tenfold, to more than 100, said Tony Carnes, a researcher and founder of the online journal A Journey Through NYC Religions, who has studied New York churches since the 1970s. Without fanfare, the newcomers have created networks to pay for new churches and to form church-planting incubators, treating the city as a mission field.
Because the institutions are new, Mr. Carnes added, the city has become “like a Silicon Valley of church-planting.”
“You can come here, try new ideas, fail and start again,” he said. “It’s a hot area where failure isn’t a disgrace.”
ON a Sunday afternoon in March, about 70 people gathered in a rented Ukrainian Assembly of God church on East Seventh Street for Mr. Wasko’s third and final preview service. The pastor wore a tie for the occasion and preached a message directed at the neighborhood. “What does it really look like to live as a Christian in this city?” he asked.
For more than a year, he had recruited this core group, mainly from Trinity Grace’s church in Chelsea, meeting with people over coffee or drinks to urge them to join not just the church but the neighborhood. Mr. Wasko was following a strategy taught by Redeemer Presbyterian Church, which opened in New York in 1989 and has fueled the city’s evangelical renaissance. Most Sundays, Redeemer and its pastor, Timothy Keller, draw 5,000 people to five services in three locations; its church-planting arm, Redeemer City to City, has helped start 170 churches in 35 cities, according to its Web site.
In Mr. Wasko’s sermon, current events and politics went unmentioned. Instead, he talked about a men’s shelter where church members served once a month and about a young member’s foster son who was just back from a detention center upstate. It was not enough, he said, for people just to attend church on Sundays.
“I want to see the spiritual climate of this neighborhood actually change,” he preached. “If we’re not able to say the East Village and Lower East Side are better because of Trinity Grace Church, then I would say we’ve failed.”
One woman at the service was Karen Bowlby, 30, who moved to New York from Louisiana five years ago, just when Mr. Tyson was beginning Origins. Ms. Bowlby, who grew up in a Southern Baptist home, had developed a drinking problem and a habit of cutting herself. After she realized she was attracted to other women, she went to a Christian therapist who “tried to pray it out of me,” she said. “My mind-set was that I could be fixed.”
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Sexual morality has been a divisive issue for some Christian churches, and a challenge for an evangelical church trying to move into the East Village. Trinity Grace considers all sex outside marriage sinful, and marriage as a union between a man and a woman. Mr. Wasko said that he had kissed three women before marrying his wife, and that he now regretted all of them. In its counseling for couples, the church subdivides physical affection into a 10-step “purity ladder,” moving from amorous looks to intercourse, and insists that couples who have already been intimate stop, and abstain until they are wed. Anything past kissing, Mr. Wasko said, “is an on-ramp where things progress pretty quickly.”
Yet he has tried to tread softly concerning sexuality and abortion. Though he shares many beliefs with the religious right, Mr. Wasko said, he sees his duty as pastoring from next door, not condemning from on high.
Mr. Wasko said, “The church disowned a lot of people during the AIDS epidemic,” when some Christian leaders said the disease was God’s punishment for homosexuals. “I have a responsibility as a pastor in the East Village to apologize for that, even though I wasn’t here, and to recognize the hurt and try to show a different way. It seems to me Jesus won a lot of people by loving them first.”
The topic made him visibly nervous, and he chose his words slowly. “I’m not intentionally trying to scoot around hot-topic issues,” he said. “I’m not trying to hide from the gay issue or the abortion issue. Jesus had some hard teachings. It’s prudent for us as an East Village church to know where we stand and what the Bible teaches, but not to lead with positions that polarize people. I want our church story to be so much more than where it stands on one hot-topic issue.”
When Ms. Bowlby met Mr. Tyson, she said: “I wasn’t looking for a gay-friendly church. I don’t want to be told, ‘Anything goes.’ I want to be at a church that addresses the whole of who I am, not just my sexuality.” What she found at Trinity Grace stunned her. “People there just wanted to love me,” she said.
Trinity Grace’s approach marks a generational break from the religious right of leaders like Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell, said Edmund Gibbs, a senior professor of church growth at Fuller Theological Seminary.
“They’ve been educated in a culture of respect and acceptance,” Mr. Gibbs said. “They would have their convictions but still be welcoming to gays and lesbians and people of other faiths. It’s not a placard-waving generation.”
For Ms. Bowlby, navigating her sexuality and her faith has meant a journey with few guideposts, trying to discover what “holiness looks like in a relationship that cannot be validated by marriage,” she said. “I can’t tell you what that’s going to look like. It’s not easy. If I met someone and said, ‘I want to wait and see if you’re the person I want to spend the rest of my life with,’ the gay community would look at me like I’m insane.”
FOUR days before the East Village church’s opening, Sara Frazier, 23, led its youth group in a lesson about God’s unconditional love. The teenagers here are not related to the adult congregants. Instead they are African-Americans and Latinos drawn from the housing projects and other poor sectors of the neighborhood. For Mr. Wasko, they are a bridge to the community he wants to serve, the struggling families who may or may not ever come for services. At times Mr. Wasko calls his church “multigenerational and multiethnic,” though it is not yet either; the youth ministry is his hope for making this a reality.
Miss Frazier told the youth group: “When you have thoughts like ‘I’m unlovable’ or ‘I’m stupid,’ that is Satan trying to make you question your identity. That is a lie from Satan trying to get you to believe that you are not an adopted child of the creator of the universe.”
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“The East Village fits so perfectly with what I’m doing in the South Bronx,” Miss Frazier said. “Me and all my white, well-educated friends from N.Y.U. are in my house with all these kids and Bloods and ex-cons and mothers. And that is what the East Village church will look like. The vision is that the cool hipsters and the people in the projects, this will be their home. That isn’t the culture of our other churches.”
Sunday, April 10, was the big day. Earlier in the week, Mr. Wasko had found someone to run the Sunday children’s program. And one of the church’s backers, the Church Planting Network in Boca Raton, Fla., a 35-year-old organization that helped start Redeemer Presbyterian, among other churches, had come through with a $50,000 grant. (The church has a three-year budget of $900,000, drawn from the Trinity Grace organization, member donations, Redeemer and outside donors; Mr. Wasko raises funds for his own salary.)
Mr. Wasko paced alongside a pre-service buffet but was too nervous to eat. He wore a black hoodie and jeans. A tattoo on one forearm showed the handprints of his three daughters.
“What’s happening in the East Village is happening with or without the Waskos or you,” he told about two dozen core volunteers. “The time is right. This is so much bigger than all of us, and the glory is all to the Father.” He gathered momentum as he spoke. “You’re part of making history happen today.”
And then it happened. A few minutes after 5, with about 170 people in the pews, the church band — known as the worship team — began the congregation’s inaugural service. A member named Amy Leigh Cutler read a poem to the body of believers.
“You blush like sunrise over Delancey,” she said, “and I am smitten by the Stanton Street of your smile.”
Mr. Wasko preached about the offensiveness of the image of the cross, because it offered salvation that people cannot earn. “It’s offensive to the intellectual elites because it says that wisdom isn’t enough,” he said.
THE Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said the church was “the most segregated major institution in America.”
Like many new evangelical congregations, Trinity Grace Church’s is segregated by age as well as by race. Most members are white or Asian and under 35, and few have children. In a transient neighborhood like the East Village, this generational clustering is part of the church’s appeal — it offers community to unrooted newcomers — but it is also a challenge for the church’s longevity. When members start families, will they stay in the neighborhood?
For now, Mr. Wasko was willing to look past this question. The crowd was bigger than he had expected, with more unfamiliar faces. He had not advertised, but other pastors had spread the word on Twitter and Facebook, he said. Mr. Tyson, wearing a dark wool overcoat, stood watching from the back. A homeless man took a seat in the rear pew.
A week later, for the church’s second service, the congregation would be about a third smaller, but at the moment Mr. Wasko was on a roll. He beamed at a family from Miss Frazier’s Bronx group, sitting in the front pew. He quoted from Scripture and from the band Death Cab for Cutie.
For Mr. Wasko, this was a moment long in the making, but it was just a start. To change the neighborhood, he said, it would take “9 or 10 thousand people living in the way of Jesus.” He urged the congregants to join an evening group, a morning group, to come for weekly dinner at his apartment on Avenue D. And when the day was over, the pastors marked the occasion in the neighborhood — at Mr. Tyson’s favorite cigar bar.
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