New York City is emerging as the “missionary capital of the world,” says researcher and journalist Tony Carnes. In introducing his guest, missionary and researcher Chris Clayman, in an interview published on his website A Journey through NYC Religions and his television show, Journey TV (July 9), Carnes notes that “there are more missionaries moving in and out of New York City for more religions than is found in any other place around the world. There are Buddhist missionaries from Singapore with their four spiritual laws. India’s Prime Minister recently came to the city to join a mass gathering for Yoga Day at the United Nations. And who hasn’t heard from the ubiquitous door knockers of the Jehovah’s Witnesses? And these people, the missionaries, are savvy about the city. They study it carefully, like scribes writing on a Torah scroll.” In the interview, Carnes and Clayman discuss the new and complex nature of missionary work and flows in cosmopolitan cities like New York. Clayman, whose micro-level research and reporting are based on anecdote as well as statistics, describes how the line between mission-sending and receiving congregations in New York has become blurry. He notes how obsolete the old notion is of missionary activity proceeding from “the West to the rest”: “It’s the rest to the West now.”
He cites the example of a church in Harlem that groups of European tourists regularly visit in order to hear African American gospel music. But the church is actually a French-speaking West African church with an African American mother church, which is the one that is probably listed in the tourists’ guidebooks. Instead of finding gospel music, the tourists end up hearing “French and Mooré and different languages. Well, instead of, you know, just turning them away, [the parishioners] say ‘come on in!’ And they have got to where—they say they do this every Sunday—they will greet the tourists, find out where they’re from…and then they would share like a several-minute ‘gospel presentation,’ as they would call it, in French…And then they go and they follow up with them and try to connect them with some people [and churches] back home.” Clayman finds that the pandemic helped to make New York churches accessible to the world. He describes how one church started a Zoom meeting for Bangladeshi Christians from a Muslim background, which “opened it up to the world. So they came in from Canada and Paris and London and Dubai and Malaysia and Bangladesh and India. It grossed over 600 people that are connected to this group, meeting three hours a day…And because Muslims often—you know, if they’re interested in converting, that’s a huge problem. They would have to see some sort of community. And they saw community, and [actually] a couple of hundred…people were baptized through that online group during Covid.”
Source: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Clayman adds that the multipurpose nature of Muslim congregations in New York can give them a missionary function. While in Africa one might go to the mosque only to pray, in New York and other American cities the “imam is a matchmaker for marriages; he’s a community leader. In fact, most of the time, you won’t even see ‘mosque’ on the mosque; they’ll call them ‘cultural centers,’ ‘Islamic cultural centers.’” One such Islamic center in New York has a “missionary training school, sending out what they call ‘messengers’ to places around the world. Some of the messengers go down the streets of New York City, and one of their converts is a native-born American who has become head of their school.” Clayman points out that while “religion and ethnic group still [have] a huge part of who people are,” they are drawn to the city for many reasons, the “arts, or professions, or whatever it is, [and] they’re meeting people from so many different backgrounds. And so whereas overseas, maybe what people were doing would kind of spread through a homogeneous ethnic group and it wouldn’t really go beyond those boundaries much, here those boundaries are a lot more porous, and almost like Venn diagrams where they’re overlapping…And so they’re meeting people and have all sorts of groups they’re identifying with—which means that information is spreading from group to group, and that’s why you have such great fusion in our cities.”
(A Journey through NYC Religions, https://nycreligion.info/journey-tv-with-chris-clayman-nyc-global-capitol-of-missionaries/)
