Feature

Missionary Impossible

To understand this last group, I spent a Sunday at a Tribeca church called Mosaic Manhattan. It uses a public-school auditorium as a makeshift sanctuary. On the darkened stage, a spotlight shone on a four-piece rock band. “Let all creation proclaim, holy is your name,” goes one typical snatch of lyrics that are projected, Power Point–style, on a big screen.

Southern Baptists, who traditionally condemn card-playing and dancing, aren’t known for their ironic sensibility. But the New York Evangelicals understand that irony is central to the urban vernacular, so they try to speak it. A video appears on the screen showing a finger-puppet rendition of the Bathsheba story, narrated by a child. When King David invites her into his boudoir, the seductive chorus of Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On” grinds into gear. At the mention of the biblical verse “and they slept together,” an obnoxiously loud snoring sound is emitted. The congregation doubles over in laughter.

The ethos reflects the Rick Warren approach. There’s no hint of denominational affiliation. No cross hangs over the proceedings. Spirituality has been cleverly packaged to resonate with pop culture. A Lacoste marketing executive delivers a talk on temptation. Describing David, he says, “This guy is like Trump.” He compares Bathsheba to “porn pop-ups on your computer.”

There’s one striking thing about the New Yorkers drawn to Mosaic Manhattan: Most of them are lapsed Catholics seeking a new spiritual home. Because of bad childhood memories—not to mention recent scandals—they have no interest in returning to the religion of their youth. If these lapsed Catholics want to find a church that practices a variation on traditional Christianity, Evangelicalism affords an attractive counterpart to Catholic ritual, since it is rooted in the most extreme reaction to Catholicism. Fortunately for Evangelicals, the city has a seemingly endless supply of lapsed Catholics.

But for all these victories, the Baptists have found proselytizing in the age of Fahrenheit 9/11 and partisan polarization to be a tricky business. On a Saturday morning, Rourk and ten volunteers stood on Ninth Avenue handing out granola bars and invitations to the next day’s services. Before the group took to the streets, Rourk instructed them on the fine art of Manhattan evangelizing. Don’t initiate conversations with strangers. That won’t go over well. “If they ask why we’re handing these out, tell them, ‘We’re showing Jesus’ love in a practical way.’ ”

As I stood with Rourk, one of his deputies, Ric, approached, removed his Florida State baseball cap, and wiped his brow. A married couple had just aggressively challenged him. “You don’t think there’s too much faith here already?” the women shouted. “You’re creating a new church so that you can get people to give you more money.” The encounter had stoked Ric’s adrenaline. But he admitted that such disputes are frequent. Mostly, their missionaries receive abuse from Bush haters. When I asked for examples, he told about how an enraged woman had recently stood in the face of an elderly missionary from the South, pointed her finger, and screamed, “You’re all Evangelicals, and you’re voting for Bush!”

The only reason Rourk and company don’t find themselves in many more such standoffs during this fraught election year is that Baptists—at least those trying to win over believers in the urban North—have checked their politics at the door. They never mention abortion or homosexuality in services. When the Lacoste marketing manager began to riff about Jim McGreevey’s homosexuality in his sermon, he interrupted himself. “I shouldn’t go there,” he said, quickly changing the subject. But to maintain this silence would require bucking the twenty-year trajectory of the denomination, which has grown ever more enmeshed in conservative politics. Since these Manhattan churches only exist thanks to the denomination’s beneficence, how long can they escape its politics? It seems inevitable that visiting missionaries will harp on the sacrosanct nature of the fetus or the sinfulness of gay people. And if the denomination doesn’t force these issues, life in New York will. It is only a matter of time before congregants take gay friends to church. What then?

One afternoon, Rourk and I left his office and went across 42nd Street to a Starbucks. Conversation had drifted into a discussion of homosexuality, a subject that serves as a dam stanching his usual stream-of-consciousness style. Rourk and the other Southern Baptist pastors in New York know that they have a reputation for intolerance and that their attitude toward gay people usually gets held up as Exhibit A in the case against them. Indeed, Rourk does just about everything to avoid the words gay and homosexuality. He favors the euphemism that particular lifestyle. Given his desire to proselytize in the theater community, however, even he acknowledges that he can’t avoid talking about “that particular lifestyle.”

As he began to lay out his position, Rourk used a straw to draw patterns in the foam at the bottom of his empty Frappacino cup. “There needs to be an understanding that God loves all people. People say that all the time. That’s a nice, easy thing to say. But God loves theater people.” He put down the straw and tried to choose his words carefully. “How am I going to navigate this?”

Pointing out the café’s window, he announced, “I have just seen several couples walk by that, you know, that have a lifestyle that is contrary to what the Bible talks about. But we are supposed to be a church that reaches out, just as Christ did.” Rourk concedes that the church has unfairly stigmatized gay people. “There are many people who commit adultery. Sex outside marriage is not what God intended—but you don’t hear people upset about all those adulterers. These are things that I don’t want to be misconstrued. But Christianity faces far more threats than homosexuality.”

After his initial tentativeness, he caught an explanatory groove, like he gets on the pulpit. “We want to be a place where you’re allowed to come in and believe what you believe and live like you live. But if you discover truth, then you need to embrace it with everything you have.” When Rourk describes his envisioned community, he smiles, partly from satisfaction, partly in the knowledge that this rhetoric will help his case. “In my study of this type of lifestyle and people who came out of the lifestyle, a lot of people don’t want to be in it.” As he uttered this phrase, he realized that he hadn’t navigated the issue as cleanly as intended. He grandiloquently stared at my notebook, as if making fun of his gaffe, and said, “This is going into something that I don’t want to go into.”

It felt like this two-hour conversation had lasted longer. Rourk spent much of it suggesting that my spiritual core would remain hollow until I established a personal relationship with Jesus. “I believe God is working on your heart,” he told me. “You know I love you and your family.” Finishing our conversation, I returned to the gay question one last time. “If someone in your church commits adultery or has a gay relationship, what happens?” I asked.

“When a person falls away,” he explained, “we’re going to introduce church discipline. So, if a person fell back into that particular lifestyle and wasn’t repentant, a believer could confront them. But if the sinner says, ‘You’ve no business telling me how to live,’ we can take them before the church to be judged—and removed.”

As Rourk bounded down 42nd Street, I noticed him stare back wondrously toward the luminescence of Times Square. He still looked more like a tourist—an appropriate pose. Rourk doesn’t quite get his audience. It’s not, as he’s fond of reiterating, that New Yorkers are wary of religious trappings or wield crude stereotypes about Evangelicals. And it’s not just that most of the city’s inhabitants have profound disagreements with Southern Baptist teachings on gays and the subordination of women. New York has a rival view of the world, its own informal theology that preaches the virtues of ambition and tolerance, valuing the cutting edge over the traditional. If the Baptists fail to build a following, it won’t be because the city’s so besotted with secularism. It will be because the city is already a church.