Scott Rourk, pastor of the 411, prays with Mario, a retired Cuban bellman, during a 411 service.    (Photo: Arlene Gottfried)

Rourk has a mildly bohemian look himself. He once jokingly called himself the “long-haired hippie preacher.” He has a classic skate-rat cut and must constantly push his hair back behind his ears. He dresses in untucked shirts and New Balance running shoes. From the first time I met Rourk, he flashed signs that he wasn’t an angry stiff. Even though his denomination takes a dim view of cursing, Rourk throws a well-timed “crappy” or “pissed off” into conversation. Behind his desk, he has propped a calendar featuring photos of outhouses. And while he listens to Christian rock, he admits to being fanatical for Rod Stewart.

During his sermon, he paid homage to Stewart with a moment worthy of stadium rock. He grabbed a stool and precariously balanced himself on one rung. “You’re going to Hell!” he shouted in a thick southern accent, pointing his finger in deliberate parody. A few weeks prior, Rourk was having coffee with a secular acquaintance. Walking down the street, a preacher stood on a corner shouting about damnation. After the preacher faded from view, Rourk sheepishly asked, “You didn’t see that guy saying ‘You’re going to Hell’?” The acquaintance replied, “I didn’t see him at all.” Rourk told this as a parable of how the old fire and brimstone won’t sell in New York. “Post-Christians need to hear about our experiences in a not-so-confrontational way: ‘Let me tell you, this is how Jesus changed me.’ ”

Before he decided to start his church, Rourk had never been to the city. The son of a railroad engineer, he’d spent his childhood in the small-town South. During a brief—and characteristically entrepreneurial—stint owning a landscaping company, Rourk became attracted to missionary work. He spent two summers in the former Soviet republic of Belarus, where he organized churches and furtively proselytized in a military prison, after which he decided that God had called him to serve Jesus full-time. He spent three days on a Georgia mountaintop fasting and praying. When he came down, he enrolled in New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.

Rourk received his master’s in “people group strategies,” the seminary term for the science and methodology of missionary work, which requires students to become proficient in the analysis of demographic data. His program also required him to take classes on urban ministry, which freely imbibes the ideology of the renowned liberal urban-planning critic Jane Jacobs. Its teachers are unabashed enthusiasts of city life. The biblical redemption narrative “began in a garden, but it will end in a city. Cities are the future,” Rourk likes to say, alluding to Jerusalem.

In a class on church planting, Rourk took on a life-altering assignment. He devised a plan for a ministry in the Times Square area—an area where his mentor, an old pastor from Georgia, had wanted to start a church. The more Rourk learned about midtown, the bigger his plans became. “When I began to study the people in this area, I found there were influencers of culture. I was amazed. They are actually influencing our culture, because who doesn’t have a TV? Who doesn’t go to movies? Who doesn’t watch MTV? These are things that have an influence on culture, not always a positive influence, but an influence. So my thinking began, What would happen if we began to reach this group of people for Christ?”

Rourk explained this to me at an Italian café on Ninth Avenue. Since coming to New York and settling in Hell’s Kitchen, he has become an enthusiast of yuppie life. He takes his daughter to ballet lessons at Chelsea Piers and discourses fluently on the best Mexican restaurants in the city. “There’s a Starbucks on every street corner,” he says in awe. And that’s a fitting sentiment. Rourk wants to reverse the old missionary equation. “We focus not on the down-and-out but the up-and-out. These are people trying to find the next big thrill, jumping out of airplanes with snowboards on, risking their lives, doing all kinds of crazy sports. God loves those people and he wants the people to come to know him, because they are influencers of the world.”

If he had harbored any doubts about his plans, September 11 erased them. After the attacks, he made his first trip to New York to lay the groundwork for his church and minister to the attacks’ victims. He told me, “Just before those planes slammed into those buildings, God whispered into the ears of the terrorists, ‘I’m going to start a church in New York City.’ ”

Of all the spots Rourk sends missionaries, he considers John’s Pizzeria on 44th Street the most resonant. When groups enter the restaurant, it isn’t immediately apparent why it should possess symbolic value. But across from a mural of the city skyline, stained glass is planted in windows. Glass also circles a cupola poking from the ceiling. This was the sanctuary for the Gospel Tabernacle, the pulpit from which the famed A. B. Simpson preached the power of faith healing. During the 1890s, the building served as the headquarters for his Christian and Missionary Alliance, a group that financed proselytizing in remote lands. “It breaks your heart to see churches that have been turned into restaurants and theaters,” Rourk tells me. “But this is what happens in a post-Christian city.”

In the Baptist version of New York history, the city has deeper roots in Evangelicalism than in secularism. There’s something to this. Until the sixties, great revivalist preachers had successful stays in the city. The fiery fundamentalist J. R. Straton, a fierce opponent of evolution, made his home at Calvary Baptist on 57th Street. For a ten-week revival in 1917, Billy Sunday built an 18,000-seat tabernacle in Washington Heights replete with its own post office, emergency hospital, and library. And in the summer of 1957, Billy Graham filled Madison Square Garden for 97 nights and packed Yankee Stadium—drawing 2.4 million.

But, as Rourk and other missionaries explain, their brand of Christianity has come and gone from these parts—and their efforts grow from an acute sense of their own decline. Until now, Southern Baptists haven’t capitalized on the pop-cultural mainstreaming of Evangelical faith. They have been torn by internal divisions and are not nearly as innovative as other denominations. Over the past decade, these failings have taken a toll. More than 75 percent of Southern Baptist churches have stalled in growth or shrunk, even as Pentecostals and other more experiential denominations showed major upticks in church membership.

Five years ago, the denomination announced a plan to boost these numbers by reaching a long-neglected market: cities. Southern Baptists have sent experienced urban missionaries to Chicago, Phoenix, Boston, and Las Vegas and given them two years to spiritually make over the cities. For all these efforts, however, New York clearly represents the missionary mother lode. According to the denomination’s North American Mission Board, Southern Baptists will invest more heavily here than their other target cities.

The Baptists are careful about how they describe New York. They’ve tamped down any threatening rhetoric, scrubbing workaday phrases like “armies of missionaries” and “crusade” from their lingo. When one of Rourk’s deputies described New York to me as a “foxhole,” the pastor quickly interrupted and called that “the wrong choice of words.” “Nice metaphor,” another deputy sarcastically called out, shaking his head.

His gaffe revealed an important truth. According to the Boston University sociologist Nancy Ammerman, New York symbolizes Evangelical alienation from the culture. “There’s a sense of being disempowered, of being a movement that would have called itself the Moral Majority; but when they look at political and cultural life, and at New York, one of the centers of that life, they say, ‘It is not like us.’ ” Ammerman suggests that the targeting of New York serves much the same purpose as proselytizing trips into danger zones like Iraq or Saudi Arabia. They provide dramatic story lines that stir the imagination of the people in the pews and unite the community behind a big cause. This year, New Hope New York claims that it is on pace to bring approximately 9,000 volunteers to the city, who will give up their vacations and weekends to evangelize. On June 5, New Hope New York imported more than 200 of them from twelve states to spend the day prayer walking. They walked until they covered 213 of the city’s Zip Codes.