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 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.
The mostly white and Asian congregation of Trinity Grace Church in the East Village aims to become more “multigenerational and multiethnic.”
Mr. Wasko, 33, who has spiky brown hair and eight-gauge steel posts in both ears, hunched his shoulders inside his dark wool coat. He had left a large, well-financed organization in Pittsburgh to take on this challenge: starting an evangelical Christian church in the East Village, a neighborhood perceived by many as libertine.
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.”
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