The storefront, it turned out, was
more front than store: a drug den
masquerading as an auto-sound
business. And the sight of six
hoodlums being paraded out in
handcuffs was sadly familiar among
the brick tenements of west Harlem.
But for Danilo Florian, who stumbled
upon the police raid in November
2002, it was nothing less than a
revelation.
“This could be a church,” he
muttered. “Lord, that is the place.”
Mr. Florian, a factory worker by day
and a pastor by night, was desperate
to find a home for his small
congregation, which faced eviction
from its dank basement sanctuary. In
a lucky confluence of real estate
and religion, he tracked down the
storefront’s building manager,
cajoled him into a five-year lease
at a nice rent and even talked him
into joining the church.
Now, on most nights when the
neighborhood winds down to rest, the
fluorescent lights inside the room
flicker to life, and the spartan,
whitewashed space rattles under a
sonic barrage of prayers, yelps and
tambourines. As a teenage band
pounds out bouncy Latin rhythms, men
in crisp business suits that belie
their dreary day jobs triumphantly
pump their fists. Women in flowing
skirts shout, stomp and gyrate
wildly. The air crackles.
The congregation, made up mostly of
immigrants from the Dominican
Republic, has grown to about 60, and
they are bent on converting many
more. For they are living
Pentecostalism, the world’s
fastest-growing branch of
Christianity, with a fervor and
sense of destiny that resonate in
the grand name they have chosen: the
Pentecostal Church Ark of Salvation
for the New Millennium.
Among them are reformed drug dealers
and womanizers, cafeteria workers
who earn barely enough to pay the
bills and women whose sons or
husbands are in prison. What they
share inside this unlikely temple on
Amsterdam Avenue near 133rd Street
is a faith in God, in miracles and
in one another. Religion here is not
some sober, introspective journey or
Sunday chore, but a raucous communal
celebration that spills throughout
the week.
Storefront churches like this have
become part of the streetscape in
New York and around the globe in
recent decades. Tiny and makeshift,
they sprout up almost overnight,
wedged in among the bodegas and
takeout counters. Just in these few
blocks of Harlem, there are at least
seven others.
Yet “los aleluyas,” as the
Pentecostals are called by their
neighbors, sometimes dismissively,
remain mysterious to outsiders —
their intensity scary to some,
comical to others. They can dress
plainly, shun the simplest pleasures
and warn of imminent catastrophe for
those who are not born again.
Children preach like adults, and
adults wail like children. Here one
day, their churches may be gone the
next.
This is the story of one such
church: its people, its pastor,
their fight to survive and the
emotional, sometimes extreme
religion that fires them night after
night.
It is also the story of Hispanic
faith in the 21st century, seen in
tight focus. Though Pentecostalism,
a strain of evangelical
Christianity, was born a century ago
in Kansas and is often associated
with the stereotypical “holy
rollers” of the Bible Belt, it has
made deep inroads in Asia and
Africa. In this hemisphere, its
numbers and growth are strongest
among Latinos in the United States
and in Latin America, where it is
eroding the traditional dominance of
the Roman Catholic Church.
Experts believe there are roughly
400 million Pentecostals worldwide,
and this year, the number in the
city is expected to surpass 850,000
— about one in every 10 New Yorkers,
one-third of them Hispanic. Precise
numbers, however, are hard to come
by because there are scores of
denominations and no central
governing body.
Although several large Pentecostal
organizations like the Assemblies of
God have bureaucracies, colleges and
legions of missionaries, about 80
percent of all Pentecostals belong
to small or independent
congregations. They have
aggressively courted the poor, and
imparted a work ethic that is
nudging their members into the
middle class and beyond.
Here, in cramped storefronts like
Ark of Salvation, people whose lives
are as marginal as their
neighborhoods discover a joyful
intimacy often lacking in big
churches. They find help — with the
rent, child care or finding a job.
As immigrants, they find their own
language and music, as well as the
acceptance and recognition that
often elude them on the outside.
They find the discipline and drive
to make a hard life livable.
To spend a year with this
congregation is to see a teenage
single mother and party girl
discover the strength to go to
college, marry in the church and
land a job. It is to see a former
political radical and brawler pray
over alcoholics in the park. It is
to see the 50-year-old pastor
roaming the city, driving the
church’s van to gather members for
Bible class or trolling for converts
outside an upper Broadway subway
station — to keep the Ark afloat,
and growing.
That growth could have profound
implications. The Ark and other
storefronts are already draining
Catholic and mainline Protestant
churches of the urban immigrants who
have long filled their pews. Their
striving members could refigure the
political calculus of New York or
even the nation, turning a
historically liberal Hispanic
population into a force for
conservatism.
Then again, any of these churches
could vanish, victim to a rent
increase, a fickle landlord or a
financial setback. They are trying
to thrive in New York, of all
places, where poor neighborhoods are
gentrifying and housing prices are
soaring, where strangers can be
hostile and, on this block,
dangerous. Their demanding creed,
with its rigid moral code and almost
daily churchgoing, can split
families and alienate friends.
The souls who worship at 1463
Amsterdam Avenue have gotten by for
six years on their faith, their wits
and whatever breaks — even a drug
bust — come their way. As they chase
outsize dreams of a bigger building
and a far bigger flock, they are
guided only by Scripture and a quiet
man who assures them that the meek
really shall inherit the earth.
“We are not complacent,” Pastor
Florian explained. “We are more
ambitious than Rockefeller.”
The Spirit of a
Crusade
Pass through the drab metal doorway,
behind the tightly drawn blinds, and
the storefront starts to look like a
church. Heavy green drapes flank a
worn pulpit. Packed tightly below
are dozens of chipped wooden chairs
cadged from a Midtown bar.
And much of the worship here looks
like any Christian service, if
several notches higher in volume and
passion. One recent Sunday, quiet
prayers in Spanish gave way to
singing, Bible readings and
testimony from the congregation,
then a collection, a sermon and a
final blessing from the pastor.
But during the blessing, the band’s
hypnotic beat quickened. Prayers
became cries of “Glory to God!” The
crowd pressed forward, and a thicket
of hands strained to touch the
pastor’s outstretched arm. Some
women began to quiver and shake,
their ponytails whipping from side
to side.
The room grew hot, and a strange
sound came rumbling from up front.
“Omshalamamom!” shouted Lucrecia
Perez, her hand thrust into the air,
her eyes clenched shut. “Shambalashalama.”
She was speaking in tongues, an
ecstatic and indecipherable flood of
syllables that often erupts during
intense worship — brought on, the
faithful believe, by the presence of
the Holy Spirit, part of the divine
Trinity. Though uncommon or unheard
of in most other Christian churches
— even dismissed as hokum by some
ministers — it is celebrated here as
the very mystery that gives the
faith its name.
On the day known as the Pentecost,
according to the New Testament, the
Holy Spirit descended on the
disciples after Christ’s
resurrection, allowing them to speak
in languages unknown to them. Later
Christians occasionally broke into
garbled prayer or prophecy, to the
approval or alarm of church
authorities, but it took nearly
2,000 years for the phenomenon to
light a spark.
On New Year’s Day in 1901, a woman
in Topeka, Kan., began speaking in
tongues during a Bible-school prayer
vigil and did not let up for three
days. Pentecostal groups formed, and
in 1906, a preacher named William J.
Seymour started a series of jubilant
meetings in Los Angeles, called the
Azusa Street Revival, that are now
credited with propelling the faith
throughout the world.
Like some other evangelicals,
Pentecostals assert the Bible’s
word-for-word authority, the need to
accept Christ and the duty to share
that faith with others before the
end days, when the born-again will
be whisked up to heaven in what they
call the rapture.
But they differ in their intense
conviction that the Holy Spirit
descends on believers and blesses
them with extraordinary gifts,
especially the power to speak in
tongues, that prepare them for those
dark days, when everyone else will
be left behind to suffer.
The message can be grim. The
strictest Pentecostals — and Ark of
Salvation has several “rajatablas,”
as they are called — can come across
as humorless scolds, dressing
severely and rejecting any
distraction from God: television,
popular music, even too much work.
If that were all Pentecostalism
offered, the storefronts would be
empty.
But the gloom is tempered by a
noisy, collective joy born of the
belief that the faithful will be
blessed in this world and the next.
That joy lends a sense of freedom,
and often abandon, to services at
the Ark, where people break into
song or their own spur-of-the-moment
prayers.
Music flows through everything — not
solemn hymns, but brassy Caribbean
tunes. In fact, some sound exactly
like the songs that hard-core
members condemn — the pop and salsa
on Spanish-language radio — but with
religious lyrics that are repeated
so breathlessly that some singers
faint.
That ability to harness the local
music and culture is one reason for
Pentecostalism’s swift spread around
the world.
“It takes in everything and absorbs
it,” said the Rev. Dale T. Irvin,
president of the New York
Theological Seminary. “You get as a
result this extraordinary emergence
of churches.”
In New York, the ranks of
Pentecostals have grown 45 percent
since 1995, said Tony Carnes,
president of the International
Research Institute on Values Changes
in New York City, an independent
group financed largely by
foundations that has been surveying
churches since 1989.
Pentecostals became the city’s
largest group of born-again
Christians in the mid-1990s, and
within a few years, a new storefront
church was opening every three weeks
in the South Bronx, he said. The
9/11 attacks set off a fresh growth
spurt.
Another factor in that growth
worldwide is the way the faith
reaches out to people on society’s
edges and gives them vital roles.
Unlike Catholics and some
evangelical Christians, Pentecostals
let women preach and lead; Mr.
Florian’s co-pastor is his wife,
Mirian. The humblest member can take
the pulpit to share testimony, a
prayer or a poem. Recently, an
8-year-old girl preached excitedly
to a rapt congregation, then laid
her hands in blessing on a new
convert.
Mr. Florian himself has few
credentials other than three years
of night-school Bible classes and a
wrenching sense of duty. A lapsed
Catholic from the Dominican
Republic, he joined a small
Pentecostal church 16 years ago
after his 7-year-old daughter
survived a grave bout with
encephalitis. Six years ago he and
eight others left that church and
founded the Ark in the basement of a
building riddled with rats.
The congregation, which draws
members from all over Upper
Manhattan and the Bronx, moved to
its street-level space four years
ago thanks to the drug raid, and a
willingness to seize on
opportunities. That pragmatism is
also reflected in its religious
practices, which are more moderate
than in many other storefront
churches.
While the Ark forbids smoking,
drinking and dancing and discourages
flashy clothes and jewelry, it
issues few other edicts. While its
members believe that Satan — the
enemy, they call him — is as real as
God, they conduct no exorcisms, as
in some churches.
While some members speak in tongues,
most do not, including Pastor
Florian, a low-key man who explained
the experience in surprisingly
down-to-earth terms. “It is like a
fax talking to another fax,” he
said. “Tongues are not a human
language. It is your spirit speaking
with God.”
And while nearly everyone in the
congregation works and puts
something into the brass bowls that
are passed around at every service,
Mr. Florian makes none of the urgent
appeals for money — or promises of
windfalls or miracles — that drive
some churches. The pastor, who still
works his factory job decorating
expensive handbags, takes no salary
from the church.
Not that the Ark celebrates poverty.
Members are told that hard work and
frugal living will be rewarded,
perhaps not lavishly, but
adequately. The dress code for
services is decidedly white collar:
suits for the men, long skirts for
the women. Children are urged to
excel in school, and the pastor
boasts of the several college
graduates in the church — refuting
what he says is the notion that
born-again Christians are
simple-minded.
“When you are a professional, people
have no idea how you can be a
believer,” he said. “The Gospel is
not just for the poor. God is not a
God of the ignorant.”
The poor do get help, from the
church’s meager savings account or
from other members; it is not
unusual to see a small wad of cash
passed from hand to hand after
services. But unlike many larger
churches, the Ark has neither the
mission nor the money to dispense
charity to the needy outside —
except as a means to convert them.
And its members, proud and stoic,
are reluctant to accept handouts.
When Ms. Perez, the woman who spoke
in tongues, had her hours as a home
health aide cut back, she and her
daughter Genesis moved into a
homeless shelter for eight months.
For weeks before their eviction, she
asked the congregation for prayers,
but barely hinted at her plight.
“I can’t ask them for money,” said
Ms. Perez, 46. “They don’t have it
to lend. They need what they have
for a new church.”
Last April, Pedro Garces, the
building manager and a church
member, found her an affordable
studio. Whatever happens, members
are constantly reminded, the Ark
will bear them up.
“We will never be alone,” Pastor
Florian said one night during Bible
study. “That is God’s promise.”
Hotheads and Warm
Hearts
The first to arrive, as usual, was
Ramon Romero. On a Thursday evening
in July that was still hot and
sticky at 6:30, he walked slowly
from his apartment to the church,
past reminders of the life he had
left behind. Two laborers lounged on
a grimy stoop, sipping beer, as men
outside a bodega argued politics,
and raunchy reggaeton music thumped
from passing cars.
Mr. Romero, a handsome man of 73 and
a founding member of the Ark, rolled
up the church’s metal gate and
slipped into the silence inside. The
others would soon arrive — with
their own reasons for coming and
their own styles of worship — but
this was his time and his way. He
knelt and clasped the slatted back
of a wooden chair, his lips emitting
no more than a low rasp.
That rasp, which can rise to a
growl, is one hint that this stern,
stony-faced man was once a scrapper.
A strict father, he let his wife
coddle the children, as he put it,
while he wielded the strap. He was
tough outside the home, too, active
in leftist politics and unions in
the Dominican Republic before he
moved here in the mid-1960s.
“I was someone who did everything
except stain my hands with blood,”
Mr. Romero said. “I was a hothead.”
He paid for it. His efforts fighting
the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo
landed him in jail for seven months,
he said. While driving a Pepsi-Cola
route in the Dominican Republic, he
helped workers unionize and strike
for fair pay, but the bottling
company lured everyone back to work,
he said, then fired him — with the
support of the same workers he had
organized.
Years later, feeling betrayed by
politics and worried about his
wife’s depression, he let a nurse
bring her pastor to their home one
night to pray. Mr. Romero converted
quickly, with the same intensity he
had brought to politics.
His wife, Esperanza, took longer to
let go of her Roman Catholicism,
particularly the room she had filled
with statues of saints — worthless
idols, according to Pentecostals,
who believe that people should pray
directly to God. Mr. Romero
persuaded his wife that the statues
had to go.
“I went in that room with a hammer,
and I broke every saint that was
there,” he recalled. “I smashed a
table, a fountain full of water, an
expensive one. I broke it all. I
tied it up in a bag and tossed it in
the farthest dump.”
He paused at the memory. “And
nothing happened to me.”
His wife died in 1999, but her name
is still on the downstairs buzzer.
In their sparely furnished
apartment, Mr. Romero passes the
time reading the Bible and, with a
tinge of guilt, watching sports. His
five children — some live nearby,
and one is in the congregation —
hardly talk to him. He wonders if he
may have been a bit too strict.
But no matter. This night, as he
settled into his regular seat near
the front, he had achieved a kind of
peace.
By then he had been joined by
another early bird, Ramona Campaña,
who enjoys the church’s sociability
as much as its spirituality. As
others entered, Ms. Campaña, 73,
looked up from her Bible, smiled and
extended a hand. An elegant woman,
she wore a long skirt and matching
jacket whose only embellishment was
a golden brooch bearing a cross and
a lamb, the church’s logo.
When she arrived in New York from
the Dominican Republic 35 years ago,
she worked in a hotel laundry,
ironing until her eyes stung from
the steam. Her lunch included a
bottle of Heineken stashed in her
purse. She played the numbers. And,
she said, she practiced the sort of
once-a-week Catholicism that was
more habit than conviction.
“You can sit next to me, and when
the service is over you don’t even
know my name,” she said. “You don’t
ask, ‘How are you?’ It’s foom, and
you’re out.”
That ended one day in the Bronx that
was so jarring she still recalls the
date: June 12, 1993. Ms. Campaña and
her daughter had gone to the wake of
a relative who had converted to
Pentecostalism on his deathbed. Most
Christian wakes focus on the
deceased, but the faithful at this
service turned away from the open
coffin and crusaded for new members,
offering a stark choice: Accept
Christ or spend eternity in hell.
Moved by the congregation’s passion
— “I saw unity in them,” she said —
she joined a Pentecostal group.
After moving to 141st Street years
later, widowed and alone, she heard
about a new church in a nearby
basement and went out asking, “Where
are the aleluyas?” until she found
the Ark.
“It’s good,” she said, “to be in a
place where they see you not by how
you look, but by what’s in your
heart.”
As this evening’s service started,
Ms. Campaña lost herself in song,
smacking a battered tambourine and
swaying in rhythm. Like several
other women, she was so taken with
the prayers and music that she
doubled over, feet stomping and arms
flailing, until her neighbors eased
her back up.
But others’ worship was as varied as
their lives. Young mothers sang
cheerily alongside their fidgeting
children. Grandmothers prayed aloud
nonstop, as if in a running
conversation with the Almighty. Two
teenage boys exchanged a laugh. Near
the front, Roy Guzman, a 25-year-old
engineer who works for an
international consulting company,
sat motionless, immersed in his
Bible.
“I don’t just want to
feel this,” he said later, a
little sheepishly. “That could be a
flaw, but I like to have an
intellectual knowledge of what I’m
doing.”
And then there was his cousin
Chislen Peña, a normally soft-spoken
young woman who fairly explodes when
her time comes to preach.
Dressed austerely — long black
skirt, pulled-back hair, no earrings
or makeup — she paces the narrow
stage with nervous energy, shouting,
slapping her Bible and tossing her
head back. She will pause, freeze
the congregation in her gaze, then
break into a grin and yell, “Aleluya!”
She is joyful — fiercely, severely
joyful — even if her life has been
anything but.
Ms. Peña, 28, had her first child
when she was 14, with a man who
ended up in prison for murder. She
had a daughter with another man who
was deported for dealing drugs. She
married for the first time soon
afterward, only to divorce when her
husband told her he had
H.I.V. Her brother is in jail
for murder.
“I once tried to kill myself,” she
said. “I heard little voices telling
me to do it.”
She found her faith through an
uncle, and like other Pentecostals,
she preaches about her life to show
that no one is beyond help. In the
pulpit at one service, her voice
hoarse and her forehead sweaty, she
told of waiting for the results of
her H.I.V. tests.
“I said forgive me — He forgave me,”
she said, to rising applause.
“Praise the Lord! And the tests kept
coming back negative! And negative!
And negative!”
After the service, people lingered
for conversation and food, hugging
and thanking her. They all knew she
had returned to school, earned a
college diploma and found a job as a
counselor in a drug treatment
center.
Remarried in 2004 to a fellow
Pentecostal, she was expecting her
third child, a boy they planned to
name after an Old Testament prophet
who warned of impending punishment.
Just saying the name made her smile.
“Jeremiah,” she said.
Saving ‘el Mundo’
The end is near. This is actually
good news at Ark of Salvation: At
the start of the earth’s final days,
they believe, a trumpet blast will
herald the rapture. But for those
left behind, the Book of Revelation
and sermons at the church lay out a
litany of horrors that will follow:
plagues, poisoned rivers, smoke that
will pour from the earth and blot
out the skies.
The Ark’s ultimate mission, then, is
to save the nonbelievers — not just
for their sake, but for the
church’s. To keep going, Pastor
Florian says, the Ark must grow.
So as much as its members mistrust
and revile the secular world — “el
mundo,” as they call it — they must
leave the church’s embrace to spread
the word to anyone, anywhere,
anytime.
“God sometimes sends you to places
you do not want to go to — like you
have to go somewhere where you can
be robbed,” the pastor reminded them
one night with a smile, shrieking in
mock terror: “Oh, no! Not 134th
Street!”
They exhort relatives and friends,
schoolmates and co-workers, with
promises of hope or warnings of
damnation. They hold weekly services
in people’s apartments and invite
neighbors. In good weather, they
haul out the drums and amplifiers
and preach on the sidewalk. They
walk up to strangers in parks and
supermarkets.
Eneida Vasquez was window-shopping
at a 99-cent store one day when she
spotted Kenia Ledesma, a sad-eyed
woman with three young daughters and
a rocky marriage. She walked up to
the stranger, told her she was not
alone and hugged her. Ms. Ledesma
joined the church that week.
But the congregation leaves little
to chance. One July afternoon, three
teenagers sat in the church, neatly
sorting piles of religious tracts.
One girl stamped the Ark’s address
onto the leaflets, which are printed
in Spanish with color photos and
graphics.
“We order them from the Dominican
Republic, 10 for a penny,” Pastor
Florian explained. “They are bigger
and different from the ones you
usually see around here. That way,
when someone gets it they can’t say,
‘Oh, I saw this already.’ ”
Before the teenagers headed out in
small groups, he gave them precise
instructions: Approach the person
with a smile. Hold out the tract
with the cover facing up. Leave with
a “God bless you.”
The payoff, however, was slim.
Everyone could see the aleluyas
coming, by their dress, their
smiles, their persistence. Some
neighbors were polite, but from
others they got snubs, catcalls or
worse.
Outside El Mundo, a store on
Broadway that sells $100 suits and
$10 dresses, a drunken man glared at
Frankie Lora and Stephanie Dionisio,
both 16. He cocked his head and
leered at Stephanie.
“You good?” he taunted. “You good?”
She fumbled for a tract, the one
that said drunkards will never enter
heaven. As he staggered off,
cursing, Stephanie turned to
Frankie. “Tell him Jesus loves him,”
she pleaded. “Tell him!”
On days like this, members console
themselves with the knowledge that
they did their duty. Maybe, they
speculate, the person they
approached in the park joined
another storefront — for there is
little sense of competition among
the neighborhood’s many Pentecostal
congregations, which sponsor events
together and visit one another.
That camaraderie, however, does not
extend to the institution that once
loomed large in so many members’
lives: the Catholic Church.
Pentecostals believe that Catholics
and many Protestants will not be
joining them in the rapture. Only
born-again Christians, they say,
will be saved.
Pastor Florian does not preach much
about other faiths, and in fact his
three children have attended
Catholic schools on scholarships.
But his feelings are clear. The day
after Pope John Paul II died in
April 2005, the pastor began his
sermon with a pointed remark.
“We are not sad,” he said. “Our
leader is not dead. Our leader is
Jesus Christ. And he is alive!”
Around the corner is the Church of
the Annunciation, a thriving
Catholic parish where Mexicans and
Dominicans make up most of the
roughly 1,100 worshipers who fill
its sanctuary on Sundays.
Its pastor, the Rev. Jose Maria
Clavero, knows that the Catholic
Church has lost many Latinos to
Pentecostalism, but he sees those
converts as nominal Catholics who
were never part of any parish. “If
they are taking in people who were
not anywhere, blessed be God,” he
said. “At least they are in church.”
He and other priests, remembering
when large parishes were the vibrant
heart of New York immigrant life,
give the small storefronts credit
for building intimate, supportive
communities in some of the city’s
most forlorn neighborhoods. And
Annunciation, like many Catholic and
mainline Protestant churches around
the world, has even embraced
Pentecostalism’s ardent worship
style, as part of the charismatic
renewal movement that began in the
1960s.
A small charismatic group meets for
prayer every Monday, and Father
Clavero makes a point of attending.
At first it was to keep the group in
check; he was alarmed by what he saw
as an overemphasis on healing and
miracles — the same sort of zeal
that makes Pastor Florian nervous.
But the group has matured, the
priest said, and its exuberant songs
echo through the church each Sunday.
“It lifts you up,” he said. “You’d
have to be a stone not to feel it.
They give life.”
The Politics of
Purity
The sidewalks along St. Nicholas
Avenue were thick with weekend
shoppers and booming with music.
Slowly, a faint background rumbling
grew into a roar as 200 people
strode into the middle of the
street, part of the annual “Great
March for Christ” in Washington
Heights.
“A Christ who is against adultery!”
hollered a Pentecostal preacher
leading the procession. “A Christ
who is against homosexuality! That
is the Jesus we represent.”
The marchers — including a
delegation from Ark of Salvation —
prayed, sang and urged repentance.
Some scurried to hand out tracts and
invitations to a religious rally.
But while they wooed the public, one
figure was courting them. Adriano
Espaillat, a Democratic assemblyman
then running for Manhattan borough
president, stood among them, casting
for votes, not souls.
“God bless you,” Mr. Espaillat said
with a quick handshake to each
marcher. “God bless you.”
Pastor Florian turned his back on
him.
“He is a politician,” he said
curtly. “I cannot even look at him.”
The prevailing image of evangelical
Christians in America is one of
militant churches and politically
ambitious leaders, like the Rev.
Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, who
have built a national base of
like-minded Christians determined to
shape public policy, especially on
sexual issues.
But while Pentecostals strongly
oppose abortion and gay marriage,
they have a long history of shunning
political involvement. Though some
notable Pentecostals have run for
office — John Ashcroft on the right
and the Rev. Al Sharpton on the left
— most politicians are seen as
agents of the secular world.
“I think Pentecostals realize
ultimately their trust is in God and
not in politics,” said Loida
Martell-Otero, a theology professor
at Palmer Theological Seminary in
Pennsylvania. “The people in power
have traditionally rendered them
powerless.”
That has not stopped political
leaders from trying to convert them,
especially in cities like New York,
where Latino Pentecostals are seen
as a large and growing bloc that
could turn to either party.
Republicans invoke causes like
banning abortion and gay marriage,
while Democrats promote economic
programs for the poor who fill so
many storefront churches.
Pentecostals do vote, and are eager
for more involvement, according to a
study released in October by the Pew
Forum on Religion and Public Life,
which found that 79 percent of
Pentecostals wanted religious groups
to speak out on political issues.
In New York, the poverty and
independence of many Pentecostal
churches have kept them from
coalescing, said Mr. Carnes, whose
International Research Institute on
Values Changes has studied their
growth. But Pentecostals are
teaching a tireless work ethic, he
said, that will vault them —
especially their children — into
more professional and managerial
jobs in coming years, and make them
a major economic and social force.
The next step, Mr. Carnes said,
could be leveraging that force into
political clout. “The key for these
pastors will be to connect up with
disaffected leaders in the centers
of power — some councilman or
businessman looking for something
different,” he said. “You could have
a huge change in the city.”
Now, though, many pastors are torn.
Mr. Florian would love to have a
soup kitchen or an after-school
center for teenagers, and the
congregation turned to its city
councilman, a Democrat, for help in
finding a bigger building to house
them. But they dropped the effort
after the councilman invited them to
help out at a neighborhood health
fair, and the pastor learned they
would not be allowed to preach
there.
“I only want to do things for the
Lord,” Mr. Florian said. “I do not
like to ask any man for favors.”
He and other storefront pastors
would seem natural allies for the
Republican Party, which has courted
Latino Pentecostals, political
analysts say, with government grants
for churches that run “faith-based”
social services. But the Ark, like
most small churches, has neither the
space nor the staff for such
programs.
Mr. Florian says he supports
President Bush “for his principles,”
and has urged his congregation to
vote for candidates who share their
moral values. But he cannot vote;
though he is a legal resident and
says he intends to become a citizen
as his wife did, he has not
assembled the paperwork.
And unlike many Christian ministers,
he has little to say about most
public issues: Iraq, terrorism, even
immigration. He and others at the
Ark are busy enough with the
troubles they see in their own
streets and homes: crime, drugs,
splintered families.
In fact, before abortion and gay
rights dominated political
discourse, Latino Pentecostals in
New York invariably supported
liberal candidates who reached out,
as they did, to the poor and
forgotten.
Today, the Rev. Ruben Diaz, one of
the first Pentecostals to venture
into New York politics, pursues
evangelicals with a mix of
social-spending liberalism and
family-values conservatism. A
Democratic state senator from the
Bronx, Mr. Diaz warns that his
party’s support for gay marriage and
abortion rights could alienate his
religious constituents.
“The evangelical churches will be
the Achilles’ heel of the Democratic
Party,” he said, “unless it opens
the door to a segment of the
population who does not think
exactly like them.”
There is no doubt where the Ark
stands. Yet even on the moral issues
that matter most to the
congregation, Pastor Florian has
little faith that a political party
or sprawling bureaucracy can get the
job done. He is even wary of close
ties to other religious groups with
their own agendas.
So for now, at least, the Ark will
go its own way — the slow way — as
it tries to save the world and
realize its Rockefeller ambitions.
Praying and singing. Supporting one
another. Approaching strangers on
the street. Changing minds and
hearts, one by one.
After one fruitless afternoon
handing out tracts, a girl in the
congregation ran up to tell Pastor
Florian that a woman had promised to
visit the church. His face lit up.
“Do you know what it is to save a
soul?” he asked. “Just one soul?
Priceless.”