As the No. 7 New York City subway line rises from underground in Queens, New York, passengers find themselves riding above one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the world.
In the school system alone, 176 languages are spoken among an estimated 800 languages spoken in Queens.
A group of North American Mission Board (NAMB) trustees and staff exited the subway to meet church-planting missionaries Adam Bishop, Silvanus Bhandari and Joseph Biswas on the aptly-named Diversity Plaza in the Queens neighborhood of Jackson Heights.
Walking around the neighborhood with the church-planting missionaries, trustees gained a better vision for their mission.
“To be able to see the diversity,” said Stephen Spurgin, retired pastor of First Baptist Church, Miamisburg, Ohio, “reading about it is one thing, but seeing it, experiencing it, is another. It will help me to pray more efficiently — more fervently — for their needs and what they’re dealing with.”
Answering the call
Bishop and his wife, Erin, grew up in the United States and answered the call to go to the nations by ministering in New York City.
Bhandari is from Nepal, and Biswas is from Bangladesh. Both felt called to Queens to reach South Asians who had immigrated to the city.
“God called me and my wife to come to New York to reach our Nepali-speaking Hindu and Buddhist people,” Bhandari said. “Nepal is a small country, but a lot of people, 70,000 Nepali-speaking people, live in metro New York.”
Global Mission Nepali Church, which Bhandari began in 2016, has seen several people come to faith in Christ, with around 30 people now attending worship.
When Bhandari and his wife came to New York as new immigrants, they had zero credit history and little means to establish themselves. He told trustees of his gratitude for the myriad of ways NAMB supported him and his wife, including missionary housing in Brooklyn that helped them find their footing.
Lack of religious freedom
Biswas said he began his journey “very alone” before he met a Southern Baptist pastor who connected him with NAMB, and after five years of working to start Evangelical Bengali Church, he and his wife, Rozi, are joined by 60 regular members.
Biswas described how the lack of religious freedom in Bangladesh has made it difficult to share the Christian faith there.
“We are not free to share our faith with other faiths, with other people,” he said. “But [in the United States], we have rights: freedom of speech, freedom of religion.”
Biswas embraces that freedom as a challenge to share the gospel with as many people as possible.
Alabama Baptist Erin Bounds, a member of North Valley Baptist Church, Odenville, was one of those on the NAMB trustees’ trip.
“I absolutely love coming on the tours as a trustee, getting to see boots on the ground, what people are doing,” Bounds said. “It puts so much more meaning to the decisions we’re able to make. They aren’t just decisions on paper. It’s actually real people, real souls.”
As the tour of Queens began winding down, Bounds’ smart watch buzzed her wrist with a calendar notification. She couldn’t help but smile at the timing and shared the bit of serendipity with the group.
Her scheduled prayer time for that evening was for the people and church planters in Jackson Heights. (BP)
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