Oh, Hey Brooklyn.

I know I said I’d blog about some dreams I’m seeing grow in me and a new project I’m hoping to start soon, but today was too great a day not to share about! And it just didn’t flow into anything else. So, this will have to do for now!

Today, all five interns got to do something together: which I’m not quite sure has ever happened before! We got to spend an amazing day in Brooklyn with Nathan Tubbs.

When you think of New York City, what comes to mind? Broadway. Times Square. Central Park. Movie stars. Music. Empire State Building. Statue of Liberty.

Every single one of those things is located in Manhattan. There are, however, four other boroughs beyond Manhattan: Queens, Staten Island, the Bronx, and Brooklyn. In Brooklyn alone, there are over 2.5 million people. It has the largest percentage of New York City’s population.

Today, Nathan Tubbs took the five interns on a quick tour of this borough. We started with the famous Coney Island Cyclone (an old wooden roller coaster) and Nathan’s Hot Dogs (not Nathan Tubbs’ cooking but the famous hot dog stand at Coney Island). And yes, both are as good as they’re made out to be! After that, Nathan took us on a short ethnic tour of some of Brooklyn. [Quick side-note about Nathan: he’s a church planter working in one of the neighborhoods and has come to really love his community. I can’t wait to see God do great things through him and his wife Leslie.]

We started in the area around Brighton Beach, a Russian community. What was the most surprising to me was that this part of town has a quite large population of Jews. It was pretty cool seeing all of the signs start to be written in Russian and to hear more Russian on the street than English. After a quick subway ride, we were in a completely Jewish neighborhood. The signs on everything had switched from Russian to Hebrew. Also, those couple of blocks house very traditional Jews. It was really interesting to me especially because of research I’ve done on the Jewish culture in different classes. This past spring, for example, one of my class projects was to plan a strategy on how to reach an unreached people group of the world. My team picked the German Jews living in Munich. For obvious reasons, this people group has a zero percentage of evangelical Christians. After writing that nearly 30-page paper, I have a huge heart for seeing those in the Jewish faith come to recognize Jesus as the Christ. I wish I could have spent more time in those areas with some Jewish ladies. I would’ve loved to be able to talk with them just a bit.

But we left the Jewish community with the distance of a single avenue and found ourselves in the second largest (I’m pretty sure) Chinatown of New York City. One block and you’re in a completely different culture. You feel like you’re in a different country! Nathan said that if you knew the differences in the dialects, we would have heard three types of Chinese being spoken. That’s pretty impressive, in my opinion, especially seeing as I’ve yet to be able to speak another language in a way that doesn’t end in a native speaker’s laughter.

After another avenue or so up, we found ourselves in Mexico. No more Chinese food restaurants or signs in the Chinese characters: it was burritos and bueno all the way! After walking through that area and catching another short subway escape from the heat, we were in a white middle-class neighborhood. I don’t remember where it fit, but there was somewhere an Arabic speaking community we passed through. I think it was after Mexico…but you can only keep so many countries in order from one day! I really would have loved to be able to speak to some of those ladies as well. I would love to some day work with a Muslim culture (I know my parents probably aren’t too jazzed about that…sorry!).

It was so strange to see the clearly defined cultures so close together and yet retaining their individuality. We saw plenty of new things and I wish I had time to really experience all of their cultures!

As I said before, there are almost 3 million people in Brooklyn alone. Only 3% of those 3 million claim the name of Christ. It’s a common opinion that of those that will claim Christ, typically about half are true believers. That means that in Brooklyn there are around 45,000 believers. That means that 2,955,000 people are not believers. In Brooklyn alone. That’s only 1.5% of Brooklyn. For the International Mission Board to classify a people group as “unreached”, there must be less than 2% Christianity in the people group. That means Brooklyn, an area of New York City, an area of the United States of America, is an unreached people group.

Two million, nine hundred fifty five thousand people in Brooklyn do not know Christ.

That’s a big number. Too big of a number for our brains to comprehend. We don’t really know what almost three million people look like, right?

Let’s imagine it for just a minute on a bit of a smaller scale.

Each of those numbers has a face. That face is the face of someone’s daughter or son. Someone’s brother or sister. Someone’s best friend. Someone’s crush. Someone’s Biology lab partner. And each of those faces has a name. Alexander. Sarah. Dahlia. Anthony. Lin. And each of those names has a story. A shop owner who sells clothes and traditional home items. A seventh-grade student who struggles just to pass her science tests. A college student working through the summer to pay tuition. A new mother who’s almost obsessively worried about her first son. A little boy that doesn’t believe in God, because if his parents don’t, then why should he.

An unreached people group isn’t just a number or another statistic to add to a list that’s already too long. An unreached people group is too many people with whom we have plenty in common but who are in desperate need for a true hope and a real Savior.

And those stories, those names, those faces are exactly the reason why people like Nathan Tubbs are so vitally important to the cause of Christ. We’re told throughout the Bible that God wishes to bless every nation. It’s found all the way from Genesis (in God’s covenant with Abram) to Revelation (in the description of the multitude in Heaven). Reaching the nations is the heartbeat of the Father. And there are unreached groups of these nations all throughout even our own country.

I pray that our eyes would be opened to see beyond the statistics. I pray that our hearts would be softened to feel beyond the surface. And I pray that our feet would be ready to go beyond the sheltered.