Today, we are broadcasting from our new studios in the Hudson Yards on Manhattan at 7:30 PM.
Partial transcript (will be updated)
T Carnes 0:07
Hi journeyers, I’m Tony Carnes. And this is A journey through NYC religions Television.
I was walking past a mosque in Queens the other day, and it suddenly came to me. New York City is the missionary capital of the world. The mosque itself 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.
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. So, I thought we should have one of these experts on the US to come and talk. Welcome to the program. Chris Clayman.
Chris Clayman 1:17
Thank you, Tony Carnes.
T Carnes 1:19
Tell us a little about yourself, and how did you end up in New York,
Chris Clayman 1:22
Like a lot of people in New York, it was a long journey here. I grew up in the Austin, Texas area, and that somehow led me to Cambridge University in England, where I met Japanese friends, both of which would go to church with me and Bible studies and prayer meetings. And we kind of got to the end of the year, and they seem like they really wanted to, go further and their exploration of the Christian faith. And both of them said, but we can’t do it, because we have never met a Christian where we’re from. I said, wow, you know, I don’t know much about being a missionary in another country or something like that.
But I know I can go be the one Christian someone knows, which eventually led me to Mali, West Africa, I was medically evacuated twice. And that was how I ended up coming to New York, because of the Malian West African population here.
T Carnes 2:12
Did you come to New York to rest and recuperate? Who comes to New York to rest and recuperate? Well, that’s Chris Clayman and he got on the ball and started just discovering the Malians here in New York. And there are a lot of other Africans. So, you start to think, What can I do? And what did you do?
Chris Clayman 2:35
A lot of different things. So one of the first things was I had met a Christian, from actually a Muslim background, which, you know, in some ethnic groups in West Africa, that’s hardly ever heard of. And in a particular ethnic group I used to live among, we didn’t know of any Christians. And the first one we met in the world was in Harlem. And so we started hanging out with him a lot. And realizing he had this newfound status even back in Africa, he was kind of the shame of society for leaving Islam. But now he was kind of the honor of society, because he was the representative in America. They would call him basically a big daddy is how you translate it. And so I ended up going back and forth to Africa into his village and other homes of friends we’d meet in New York. I also studied the ethnic groups of the metropolitan area, just so that we understood the status of people’s faiths and religions and languages they were using, and ended up writing a book called EthniCity, the nation’s tongues and faiths of Metropolitan areas
T Carnes 3:39
It’s a very good book. And I should add, that it really started with A journey through NYC religions before it existed. We were so young. I was trying to figure out what were we doing. And we went down to the Lower East Side. And I asked you to write something up as we visited some places.
Chris Clayman
Probably , horrible,
T Carnes 3:39
it was not good, because I didn’t know what to ask for. I asked for some stupid things to be written up. And it didn’t work very well. And so I started thinking, well, we got to figure this out. This is not working, because I knew that you could write something good. So I knew it came from me.
And so we, we started, I started developing A journey through NYC religions, in 2009 or so. And you started developing some new organizations, you started writing a book, which is called EthniCity.
It’s a very good book to get. It’s about those groups that a sometimes smaller here in NYC and often the groups that have a few Christians in them. It’s about groups here in the city. knows who they are, what their religions are, and what are the main religious sites?
Chris Clayman 4:46
Why do they come here? Where do they live?
T Carnes 5:06
A fascinating book, color photos. And your co-writer was somebody I had taught in college.
Chris Clayman 2 5:31
Basically, Christian denominations in the United States, or you know, other entities, if they want to go and kind of do things to, to share the Bible, or help humanitarian and other countries, they expect to do that with different types of people overseas. But here, they would really seek to start churches among people who look like them and talk like them. And we realize the world is different now. It’s really from everywhere and to everywhere. I have met Thai Christians from Thailand, a place where there aren’t many Christians, who have actually sent church planters to New York to reach White New Yorkers, and so that reality means that we need to have a different type of organization to meet the new realities of this world. And so we started Global Gates with that end in mind.
T Carnes 6:24
Now, you’ve been here for how many years?
Speaker 1 6:27
17 years.
T Carnes 6:29
And you describe New York as like a washing machine of identities, it mixes them all up, and it creates people with complex identities. Just like you’re saying, They’re from Thailand or a Christian, they’re come here to New York to America, you know, what kind of identity they have? And you say, well, they’re either complex or hybrid entities. What do you mean by that?
Chris Clayman 6:52
Yeah, basically, in the city, because there are so many different understandings of ethnic groups and race and socio-economic challenges, people are just wanting to survive. And it’s kind of like having a different ID card for different things. They might pull out a different ID card, depending on who they’re talking to, and how that might benefit. And so if I get some extra money, if I claim that I’m this, then sure, I’ll be that because I’ll get some, you know, money to go to college. Or, hey, I’m talking to this person, and maybe other people see us as the same. But we all know that we’re different, you know, like, maybe Caribbean people in an African American neighborhood. And maybe they’re seen as Black Americans by others. And they’re certainly some things that they connect with. But if they’re together, they obviously see themselves as different I’m Caribbean or Caribbean, people together will say I’m pretty I’m Jamaican, you know, though, they’ll kind of get down to a further kind of, there’s layers of identity, depending on how you’re talking to,
And sometimes that identity is not ethnic group or nationality, it can be, you know, their, their economic, their profession, their hobbies, so many different identities are kind of coming into the city and who they relate to. And sometimes they’re almost having, in many ways, like two or three different lives. I’ve known people who put on the hijab, you know when they’re in their home, and then they go to work, and they’re taking it off, but then they cross a certain street, and it kind of comes back on.
T Carnes 8:26
Now, there are so many, so much we can unpack here. One is the challenge that you are making to sort of traditional mission ideas that is an anthropological idea, that everybody has one unitary identity,
Chris Clayman 8:42
One language, one identity.
T Carnes 8:45
And you say no, it’s much more fluid nowadays. That an old idea identity is fast becoming out of date. In fact, what we’re finding in New York, is the fastest-growing group in New York is actually “Mixed”. They are products of mixed marriages, about 14% of New York is the fastest growing. And the second is, is that different groups in New York are beginning to have multiple identities. They have an ethnic identity and a racial identity. And they’re two separate things, or they have where they live identity or that it’s very fluid. So, you’re challenging an old way of thinking because it is changing right on the ground. And the census just came out. the last census came out, and we’re going to find out some more data in July. That is, it’s continuing this trend. Now, what does that mean for religious groups that want to connect with people? Is there only one way they can connect? Are you really saying that people have a whole bunch of different plugs where you can connect to if you’re a church or a mosque or whatever? There’s a whole different way to plug people in.
Chris Clayman 10:00
Especially for immigrant groups, there’s this natural draw to anything from your culture and Homeland. Often, your religious centers in the mosque in Africa, and you would only go there to pray. And maybe, you know, your rites of passage,
It’s not a community center. But here, you know, that Iman 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. So religion and ethnic groups still have a huge part of who people are.
But then whatever draws them, whether that was, you know, the arts, or professions, or whatever it is, they’re meeting people from so many different backgrounds. And so whereas overseas, maybe, in 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 yeah, I have this, but I’m also this and this and this. And so they’re meeting people and have all sorts of groups are identifying with which means that information is spreading from group to group. And that’s why you have such great fusion in our cities.
T Carnes 11:20
Well, that’s why you have the Buddhists of Singapore took a Christian idea, four spiritual laws from an evangelistic group, and created the Four Laws of Buddha.
Chris Clayman 11:33
Yeah, you can learn from the Christian side, now they’re reaching Buddhists.
T Carnes 11:38
So you know, if people are not stupid, they look and they meet and they, they find ways to relate to people in the city, of course, relating to people is so important. You mentioned to me the other day that there was an incident, a good incident in a church in Harlem. where they shift from the regular services at some point, then they do something for the tourists. And what happened there? Yeah, this shows exactly what you are talking about.
Chris Clayman 12:06
Oh, yeah, the craziness of the city these days, and how even just missions have changed so much, like from the west to the rest now to the rest of the west. And, in fact, there have been even articles in New York Times. I remember their magazine of Africans that we’re really pumping religious fervor back into the city with their evangelism. But in this particular West African church this past Sunday, there are around 50 tourists that showed up in the service,
T Carnes 12:38
This is a fairly large congregation. This is about 400.
Chris Clayman 12:44
So, it’s a pretty good group that is very noticeable. And I think in their tourist guides, their European tourist guides, they list African American churches that they can go listen to the gospel music and kind of float in and out. But this particular French speaking African church has a mother church, that’s an African American church, it’s probably in the guidebooks. And so they show up expecting African American gospel music and make it get a wild West African, French, Morrie and different languages. Well, instead of just turning them away, they say come on in.
And they have got to where they sit, they do this every Sunday, they will greet the tourists find out where they’re from, and this recent past a big group from France, a big group from Spain. And then they would share like a several minute gospel presentation, as they would call it in French, which is normal. It’s a French speaking congregation, the lingua franca of these West African countries. But then a guy came out, he was playing the bass or something, he put down his bass and he came up and he started speaking Spanish, which is not native. French isn’t either, but I don’t know how many, you know, West Africans that speak Spanish. It turns out that he learned how to speak Spanish in New York City through Mexican coworkers, and share this very fluid presentation in Spanish of a gospel message and said, Do any of you want to basically give your lives to Christ and apparently two Spanish guys raise their hands. This is not the first time this has happened. And then they go and they follow up with them and try to connect them with some people back home church.
T Carnes 14:25
Now, the Spanish guys What did they say happen?
Chris Clayman 14:30
I can tell it experience another time. They said there was a Swiss person who apparently did the same thing. Yeah. And he was so I don’t know if it was just enraptured by the lively worship that these African people had in their community. You know, so many people do not have community and I’m finding that churches these days. There’s so much content online and everywhere else that churches, the ones that are attracting the most people, it’s because of their community, and people were longing for community. And maybe it’s something about this community that he’s never seen that much warmth and love between people and wanted to know the reasons behind that. And he actually was begging him to get baptized that day.
I don’t know if we can do that.
T Carnes 15:17
So in some ways, you use this phrase, giving your life to Christ, I would like you to explain a little bit. It seems for him, it really meant I’m joining a community where I feel there was something really different going on there. And then they would explain what that was, what does it mean? Why this phrase, give your life to Christ?
Chris Clayman 15:40
So basically, as they would probably have explained it to him is that before there’s good news, there’s bad news. And of course, the gospel is good news.
And the bad news is that we’ve been separated from God because we’ve kind of gone our own ways, we haven’t followed the will of God, we’ve tried to just kind of serve ourselves or be successful, or whatever it might be. And there are different ways of being lost, you know, what even the world around us would define his sin, and everything else is destructive, but also our own pride and just seeking to live for ourselves. And the message of the Bible would say, you know, sin is these things where we’re not following the will of God that separates us from him. But you can’t really get back to God in your own way.
And so the message of the Bible is that God has provided a way to be reconciled to himself, and that’s through the perfect life and really the sacrificial death and resurrection of Jesus, And so, if you accept God’s way of reconciling you back to God is really where you find your completeness and wholeness and why you exist in this world. So it’s not even so much inviting Jesus into your life as giving your life to a grand story. I even wrote a book called Super Plan. And it came from one of our missionaries here in the city, from a Muslim background from an area in the world, you’d never expect that you would find a Christian.
T Carnes 17:10
How did he tell this story? The guy that you write about in Super Plan?
Chris Clayman 17:17
He said, You know, I should have died. Because people wanted to kill me because I became a Christian, but God had super plan. And he says I shouldn’t get married because of arranged marriages. And the Muslims didn’t trust me, because I’m a Christian and the Christian background people didn’t trust me because they had their impression of Muslims. But I met this Muslim lady, and several years later, she becomes a Christian. And we get married. You see, God has a super plan. And so he would describe it as really where to lay down our own lives to live for a larger story, what he called a super plan. And really our identity is found in our Creator and what he thinks of you.
T Carnes 17:59
Where we fit in that plan and for each person. I found that really interesting: how he translated it from his Muslim Bangladeshi background,
And that it made a lot of sense in his whole life, how that holds together, particularly for a lot of immigrant lives. You always have plans coming here and they don’t work out. And then you try to, you know, replay it.
Chris Clayman 18:38
It’s even in the suffering, even in the pain and the hard things, one of the things that are helping, certainly immigrant Christians, but I think a lot of people from different religions, is they see that there’s some greater purpose behind it. And so that’s always something that I hear from some of my friends from different countries that are Christians. They will say, Oh, I’m in the wind. You know God takes me where he wants me to go. Or, it’s okay. If this is a momentary point of suffering or conflict, God is teaching me something through it, and it’s part of a super plan. And that’s something I commonly hear.
T Carnes 19:14
So they’re they’ve actually developed a vocabulary, a language to talk about life and faith.
You know, we had somebody on our last program on how do you raise children to keep the faith. She’s a sociologist from City University, the John Jay School of Criminal Justice. One thing she discovered is that kids basically need a language of faith. Now, the parents don’t spend enough time with them talking about faith. In fact, they found ideally, it was once a day. That if the parents can’t talk about faith in their everyday life, then neither can the kids. It’s so disconnected. They can’t sort of live it out. connect to other people, because they don’t have a way to talk about it in everyday life. So what struck me with that book Super Plan and some of your other stories that you’ve told me over time, is that people have to learn a language of faith. If they’re going to talk to people, it’s got to be a natural language to the linguistic group they’re talking to.
Some people come from overseas to get away from their culture. A lot of women, some people come to say, I want to put that behind, and maybe they are rejected. So they came, they’re just cut off. So they lose their original language. But then they learn other languages on the way and sometimes they learn the language of faith, but then they don’t have a language of faith in the original language. I remember you talked to me about a woman that went through this, her story is just a, I wouldn’t say typical, but certainly, in many ways typical and a complex way.
Chris Clayman 21:08
I don’t know if they necessarily lose their language, it’s that they, maybe whatever that new group is that they’re forming to, they’re having to learn a new language to connect with them. And that becomes maybe a preferred language.
T Carnes 21:08
Didn’t she grow up in one language, but she couldn’t say that about her faith.
Chris Clayman 21:28
That particular woman comes from Guinea and West Africa. But her power
T Carnes 21:36
For the viewers, Guinea is when you look down Africa, on the west coast, there’s the sort of the hump that goes out, and then it comes in and Guinea is right, in that that’s on the coast there.
Chris Clayman 21:49
Her mother was Fulani, which that group is really responsible for spreading Islam throughout
T Carnes 21:55
They’re traitors and they move around.
Chris Clayman 21:57
So she grew up learning the Quran, you know, in Arabic but her parents would travel all over the world and live in various parts. And that kind of piqued her interest. So she ended up studying in Eastern Europe, eventually moved to Paris, and became, you know, a young professional there. But in that process, there were some reasons why she kind of separated from her group a little bit. Her group felt shamed by some things going on in her life, but she kind of dove fully into her profession working long hours, like many people do.
But her friends were mainly not from her ethnic group. They were, you know, white French people, they were, you know, Caribbean, French people, Cambodian friends. But she had a co-worker who ended up sharing with her in a way that gave her interest to go to church with her. So she was a Christian woman. Eventually, she converted away from Islam to become a Christian. But then she learned the Bible, learn to worship, learn, to pray, learn to sit, you know, all those things in French, which would have been a third or fourth language, maybe a fourth language for her at that point, fourth or fifth language.
T Carnes 23:10
And then she felt called to be a missionary in New York City, and reaches out to homeless and drug addicts and, you know, helps provide food and clothing and all of that, in the process. She meets a lot of women who come from her background in Guinea. And as she was talking to them, they couldn’t even speak French. They couldn’t speak English. And when she came here, she was going to English-speaking churches. So she learned that vocabulary for talking about the things of God, but she never could speak that in Pular, her main language. So, it wasn’t until 25 years after she became a Christian, when she comes to New York meets people from her ethnic group, and finds out she has lots of extended family members here because she had kind of been disconnected from her family. And she has this newfound interest. They had kind of rejected her, but she started reading the Bible in her language, praying in her language. And now she has really hundreds of women connected to her because she started using the language. And there’s actually been research done on this, there’s kind of about a 10 times more chance of really seeing a huge interest in what you’re doing if you’re using a language other than the dominant language of the country. She had to sort of learn she had to learn it here.
That’s remarkable. A kid can easily learn how to talk that,
Chris Clayman 24:35
But not some of the 60s!
T Carnes 24:38
Wow, that’s incredible. Well, now you mentioned she was a woman and an awful lot of the converts here in New York from Africa and Muslim countries are women. Why is that?
Chris Clayman 24:54
Which is very different than what it is overseas. If you were to go to churches of new converts, it would almost all be men. The women’s place in society is that they’re just seen as secondary or tertiary, not even invited to church or, or it would be, you just follow me, but we’re not going to even share why this is important. As a result, when a lot of those men die and the women just go back to Islam.
T Carnes 25:22
I just want to end with two things. One is you mentioned that the Coronavirus, the COVID pandemic actually moved a lot of people online and that created an explosion of religious connections.
Chris Clayman 25:38
Yeah, so same guy that sees the super plan in all things. A lot of people saw COVID and churches have really struggled right in New York City. I was COVID You go to any church in the Sunday membership, or people that are showing up is really, really low. Well, they saw this and said, super plan opportunity. So they opened up a Zoom meeting for Bangladeshi Christians from a Muslim background. But not just New York, this 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, women’s groups, young groups all connected. 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 a couple of 100 people were baptized through that online group during COVID.
T Carnes 26:36
Wow, that’s an interesting religious development from COVID. It’s a good thing out of a bad thing. You know, one last question. And I think we got about 30 seconds or so. If you had to summarize New York up to somebody else, if you want to know the city, would you say read the book of John in the Bible or watch all 11 seasons of The Walking Dead or something else?
Chris Clayman 26:57
I would say neither. I would say go and hear someone’s story. New Yorkers are so busy, you know, we’re so survival-orientated, and especially post-COVID, people are scared of each other. But if you will sit and actually ask someone’s story, you’ll find out all sorts of things, including their own spiritual journey. You will find out about the city by listening to people.
T Carnes 27:21
Thank you, Chris. This is Tony Carnes for A Journey through NYC religions Television. I hope that you’ve learned a little bit about New York, the mission capital of the world. Who guessed it?
