I hopped off the bus in the middle of Chinatown on Friday afternoon after a four-hour bus ride. I forgot to charge my phone before I left D.C. earlier in the day, so I was stuck waiting at a park for my roommate, Andrew, to come find me so we could venture out in Manhattan. My traveling buddy had already darted off down the subway to catch a Broadway play. The park was right outside a high school and really big, full of Asian children and their parents or older siblings (as seen in the pic above). It brought back memories of my time in China building relationships with college students and sharing the gospel with them while we played ping pong or their new favorite game, American football. I began to pray over this park and the children, whose families were more likely than not something other than Christians.
I spoke to a few people while I was there, but while I was prayer walking a middle aged Asian man came up to me and asked if I was visiting the school. I told him my story and we found that we both worked in D.C. and were in New York visiting. He told me that he grew up in Singapore, practicing ancestor and idol worship before moving to America as a teen and being introduced to Christianity through his aunt’s Lutheran church. He became a religious scholar, and he was quick to tell me about the different branches of Christianity, as well as other info about Buddhism and Islam. He even knew that Southern Baptists were the largest protestant denomination in America at over 15 million people. But what got me was when he started talking about what people desire in a religion and how he had come to the conclusion that the Mormon church was the “branch of Christianity” that had answered all the questions people are seeking. He then told me he was agnostic and didn’t want to have anything to do with practicing religion. He wasn’t very open to hearing what the scripture had to say about life and eternity.
Ran into another guy in Times Square on Saturday night who was “preaching” from the Old Testament about how the white race is naturally evil, was sent from Satan, and that blacks should take out vengeance on whites for slavery. After listening to this guy among a crowd of black men for awhile, a few of the black guys in the audience came up to me and asked what I thought and went on to show them that the gospel teaches that God is a loving God and longs for the repentance and salvation of all people, and that the Bible predicted there would be false prophets, like this street preacher, in the end days. I happened to have my pocket Bible with me so it turned into a unique opportunity.
What my venture to New York showed me, which I’ve been learning all summer in D.C. with all the screaming and yelling going on, is that we as Christians must be constant students of the Word, committing it to our hearts and minds so that anytime we are asked we can give an answer for the hope that we have, and also so that we may stand firm on the foundation of Jesus Christ when we are blown about in the wind (by trials or by crazy people).
Other than that, NY was great. Caught a Yankees game, spent some time on Times Square and Chinatown, and went down to Ground Zero where it looks like a huge construction site with two big square holes in the ground. Andrew's church plant team is an awesome group of people and they are truly making impact in a hard place.
