Good News in Gotham > The Growth of the Church

By Chuck Colson

Officials tried to exclude God from the 9/11 memorial service in New York last week, but they failed. God never left Gotham!

Many of us were outraged when New York City officials excluded prayer and members of the clergy from the 9/11 10th anniversary service on Sunday. Rudy Washington, a deputy mayor when terrorists flew two passenger jets into the Twin Towers, exclaimed, “To have a memorial service where there’s no prayer, this appears to be insanity to me.”

Well, that goes for me, as well! This decision to exclude the healing possibilities of faith was, at best, simply incomprehensible.

While it’s easy to get upset at the decisions like this of timid city leaders, Christians can rejoice at some good news in Gotham. As the Washington Post reported earlier this year, “New York is exploding with religious fervor … It’s hard for many folks outside the Big Apple — who write off the country’s largest city as hopelessly secularized — to grasp this.”

That’s not hard to understand. After all, in 1975 The New York Times reported, “Religious leaders widely believe that since 1965, their institutions have lost both visibility and impact on public decisions. Fewer people now attend worship.”

But all that has changed. According to the Values Research Institute, Central Manhattan has nearly 200 evangelical churches today—with 39 percent of them started since the year 2000. During one two-month period in 2009, researchers found that one new evangelical church was opened every Sunday in New York.

Read the rest here …