Remembering 9/11: The Most Hopeful People

The following is an uncorrected transcript generated by a transcription service. Before quoting in print, please check the corresponding audio for accuracy.

Sarah Zylstra: Brian and Christina Stanton watched the second plane hit the north World Trade Center tower and fled Manhattan covered in a sticky yellow, gray ash. Christina was wearing her pink nightgown and a pair of Brian’s formerly white socks when she jumped off a railing 10-feet down into a boat on the Hudson River.

Christina Stanton: I remember very well when we got in the boat, the people who were there, because there were bloodied people. There were people barely wearing anything. And then there were people who didn’t have a lick of dust on them, looked like they had just gotten their hair done, just your typical kind of like … It’s almost like where the attacks were and when they left their apartment was what they look like.

Christina Stanton: But there were animals. I remember seeing a bird, somebody brought their pet bird on the boat. There was dogs. There was cats. It was a zoo with people in all different states of people who had escaped from the Towers to somebody who had just probably finished their workout at a fitness gym next door. So, it was really something else. Yeah, it was a true [crosstalk]-

Sarah Zylstra: Nobody asked the boat owner where they were going.

Christina Stanton: You didn’t ask such things, and you didn’t care either. You just wanted out and off. And once we got off the pier, we didn’t know where we were. We didn’t know what to do, where to go. We had nothing with us. But we had heard some people say, “Hey [crosstalk]-”

Heather Ferrell: You’re listening to the Remembering 9/11 series on Recorded, the all new storytelling podcast from The Gospel Coalition, and this is episode two, The Most Hopeful People.

Sarah Zylstra: Turns out Christina and Brian were in Paulus Hook, New Jersey. They walked with some of their fellow passengers over to a BJ’s Wholesale Club. They were able to use the bathroom, wash their eyes, get a drink of water, and have something to eat for the first time that day. From the television sets in the store, they began to learn what had happened. They heard the name Osama bin Laden for the first time.

Sarah Zylstra: They found out the airline industry had been grounded except for fighter jets that were patrolling the New York airspace. Colleges had canceled class, Disney World was shut down. The Mall of America in Minneapolis, and the Sears tower in Chicago were evacuated. Mount Rushmore and the Hoover Dam were closed. And Manhattan had been locked up tight. All the bridges and tunnels onto the island were closed. Even if they’d wanted to, there was no way Brian and Christina could get back home.

Sarah Zylstra: The couple managed to snag one of the last cars from Dollar Rent A Car and then drove for an hour to find an available hotel room. Christina remembers standing in front of the front desk clerk asking for complimentary toiletries. “Which ones,” the clerk asked. Christina and a yellow Mohawk and pajamas stared at her, “All of them.”

Christina Stanton: And I just wanted to be clean. And I put my dog in the shower. And literally, I remember thinking I’m not even going to deal with soap right now. I’m going to let this water run over us. And I remember literally it was like a full 15 minutes until the water ran clear enough. It looked like foam oatmeal in the tub for a full 15 minutes to let this stuff get out. I mean, it was embedded. And also too, I had scratches on my eyeballs, and a lot of people did, like my dog did as well. Because again, the ground up glass in the dust, I knew something’s … Don’t rub your eyes. People who rubbed their eyes got scratches on their corneas and really hurt their eyes. So I watched people rub their eyes, scream, and I said, “I can’t do what they’re doing. Something’s bad,” so I didn’t.

Sarah Zylstra:
The dust was created when each floor of the World Trade Centers crashed onto the floor under it, pulverizing it, and then shooting it out on hurricane-like winds created by the force of those successive impacts. Because the dust was crushed into such tiny pieces, it lingered in the air. Even more than a mile north, the smell was so strong you could taste it in your mouth, and it lasted for months. If you’re thinking, that can’t be good. You’re right. Over time, survivors would report all manner of health problems from asthma to chronic laryngitis to cancer.

Sarah Zylstra:
On September 12, one train into Manhattan opened up. Brian and Christina were on it, eerily alone. They emerged from the station into a quiet city that was pasted over with flyers on light posts, traffic lights, shop windows, mailboxes smiled the faces of the missing. Underneath family members begged for information, “Have you seen this person?” Staring, the Stantons slowly made their way to Christina’s best friend Sarah’s apartment where they’d begin their couch surfing while they waited for officials to say if their building was stable enough to re-enter.

Sarah Zylstra:
Christina could barely sleep. She operated on hyperdrive, walking for hours around the city, sometimes stopping by the Salvation Army posts to grab some shampoo or some free clothing. Brian, on the other hand, slept all the time. He learned that one of his close friends, a fraternity brother, didn’t make it out. The friend had worked for Cantor Fitzgerald, a financial firm that lost 658 people, two-thirds of its New York office on 9/11. There were so many funerals, the firm had to set up an internal calendar to track them all.

Sarah Zylstra:
Another real concern was pets. Dozens of the New Yorkers who’d fled or died in the attacks, left dogs, cats, and birds behind in their apartments. Building managers and emergency volunteers worked to find them and reunite them with their owners if they could. Brian and Christina had a different problem, their dog, Gabby, wasn’t able to keep down any food. They took him to the vet who told them Gabby had ingested ground glass when he was trying to look himself clean of the ash and dust. He had cuts on his esophagus, cuts on his eyes, and a distressed respiratory system. The bill was $517.

Sarah Zylstra:
Brian and Christina weren’t destitute, but they were unemployed. He’d been interviewing for jobs in finance, but now the Financial District was literally rubble. Christina had been a tour guide in lower Manhattan, and now her workplace was collapsed, covered in Ash, and guarded by the military as rescue workers looked for bodies. Neither one could earn a paycheck in the foreseeable future. Christina was worried enough about money to start talking to our friends about it.

Christina Stanton:
I did have a very close friend, her name was Michelle Jennings. And we met at a show, a show that we both were in the cast. And her husband was the Minister of Music at Redeemer Presbyterian Church. And so I knew who we was and we were friends as well.

Sarah Zylstra:
Redeemer was just 12 years old, already an unlikely success in a city famous for its enlightened secularism. Tim Keller’s church plant had grown from 50 to 2,800 in attendance on any given Sunday. In a few days, Christina would meet Andrea Mungo, the social worker who headed up Redeemer’s care for its congregation

Andrea Mungo:
The first week, it was a Tuesday, so that first week was all about prayer and mobilizing. We had groups of people come into the office every day to pray, so that was just beautiful to see Redeemerites just come together in prayer. And the other thing that we wanted to do immediately was to call every member and make sure that all of our people were okay. People started calling the office saying, “We want to give money. Where do we send money?”

Sarah Zylstra:
Redeemer hadn’t asked anyone for money, but it’s surprising growth over the past decade meant churches knew it was there and they didn’t know how else to help. Across the country, churches started dropping checks in the mail. In total, they would send more than 2 million unsolicited dollars to Redeemer.

Andrea Mungo:
We wanted to get this money into the hands of people that need it, who have been directly affected, either who have lost family members in the Towers, or lost jobs. And so we went into outreach mode, and we created an outreach card and printed it on our copier. And we, on that Saturday, that very first Saturday, there were three teams of people that went out to mainly Union Square Park, but also other areas around. We couldn’t get close to where it was happening, so we just kind of went out. It wasn’t very specific. “Were you directly or indirectly affected by this tragedy? Please call,” and our phone number and name of the church. And by Monday, people were calling and wanting to come in, and we were making appointments.

Sarah Zylstra:
But before Monday came Sunday, the first worship service after 9/11. In some places, like Bethlehem Baptist in Minneapolis, it was their third service since the attacks. They gathered first on Tuesday for prayer meeting to focus on lament and then Wednesday to focus on humility.

John Piper:
Sunday morning was hope the earth was shaking underneath. We didn’t know, okay, will my water system be contaminated and will 50,000 people die of poison in Minneapolis tomorrow? And so I knew that insecurity and deep sense of destabilization of soul, not just life in America, but our own souls was prominent. And so I preached for a moment, say 35 to 39.

John Piper:
My main remembrance was not so much the size, but the intensity of it. I’m a person who loves reverence in church services. And most church services begin with chatty meetings and everybody’s kind of chipper, and then you have to work to help people to get more or less serious towards the things of God. And that wasn’t true that Sunday, there wasn’t a lot of chipper baseball talk going on. This was a service where people realized either what we believe is real or we’re playing games here. I’m not going to try to play a game this morning. We really need to go hard after God.

John Piper:
God has a way of taking the moments in life that seem to, from one angle, call the faith into question, and from another angle, make things so frightening and so real that you got to have a God. You’ve got to have something stable. And so it doesn’t drive you away, it pulls you who’s you in. I think that was happening on that morning.

Sarah Zylstra:
In Washington, D.C., Mark Dever held a special prayer service at Capitol Hill Baptist Church.

Mark Dever:
I gave a brief address and shared the gospel. We prayed, so the following Sunday, we had a guest preacher here.

Sarah Zylstra:
Wait, what? Five days after terrorists slammed a plane into the Pentagon, about four miles from where he’s sitting, and he’s letting a seminary kid preach the message?

Bert Daniel:
I contacted Mark Dever, the pastor at Capitol Hill. And I told him, “Mark, I’m happy to sit this one out, and for you to preach this Sunday.”

Sarah Zylstra:
Burt Daniel was in school at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and would have to wait for air travel to resume before he could get from Louisville to DC. Mark told him to come on over. He didn’t change a thing about the service except to add in his own quick 10-minute reminder of the certainty of God’s justice and the importance of being prepared to die. Then he turned things over to Bert, but here’s why.

Bert Daniel:
So months prior, maybe even a year prior, Mark had planned a two-week series on the book of Habakkuk. The first week was the Sunday before 9/11. The second week was the Sunday after 9/11. And the title of the series was, When Bad Things Happen. The first Sunday, Jamie Dunlop, who’s on staff at Capitol Hill now, he preached Habakkuk one and two, and the pre-chosen title for the message was Questions. So, what questions do we have when bad things happen?

Bert Daniel:
And then the second week, which was the week I was supposed to be preaching, the pre-chosen title was Confidence. How can we have confidence when bad things happen? So it was just really remarkable, uncanny, how the Lord had designed all of that. And so as a result, Mark felt compelled just to move forward with the sermon schedule as it had been formulated and designed. And so, that says a lot about Mark too. I mean, just his confidence in the Lord’s sovereignty, his willingness to share his pulpit with young men who are training for ministry.

Sarah Zylstra:
For a 26-year-old, even for one whose grandpa preached the Sunday after Pearl Harbor, the experience was a little nerve wracking.

Bert Daniel:
I will say-

Sarah Zylstra:
… was a little nerve-wracking.

Bert Daniel:
… I will say a few things that really set me at ease. One was just Mark’s confidence in the Lord’s sovereignty that, like, God’s planned this. It’s obvious his hand is involved in the sermon schedule and everything. It’s this text. And so, that gave me a sense of confidence.

Bert Daniel:
I think the other thing is just having a confidence in God’s word. Capitol Hill is really a church that wants to hear from God’s word. And so, there was a sense too that I don’t have any real special obligation this week except to study this passage, try to understand it as best I can, and then to communicate what it’s saying, and try to apply it as best I can to the circumstances, the tragic events that are taking place this week.

Bert Daniel:
And so, there was a real sense of ease and peace and calm that came with just knowing that the Lord is in control of this. And my only job here is just to communicate what’s already been revealed. Well, you know…

Sarah Zylstra:
In New York, Tim Keller did change his text. He stepped out of his series on Jonah and into John. Even more than Capitol Hill Baptist, his church was packed.

Tim Keller:
The week before 9/11, Redeemer’s probably average attendance was like 2,800 people.

Sarah Zylstra:
Okay.

Tim Keller:
Okay? The Sunday after 9/11, it was 53 or 5,400 people that showed up for service. That’s not that unusual. The whole city was like that.

Tim Keller:
At one point, we went up… one of the morning services, I went out there and like 15 minutes before we were to start, not only was the place packed, but there were lines out the back door. So, I did a audible with the musicians. I said, “Would you be willing to do a second service after this service?” They said, “Sure.” So, what we had, we had ushers go running out and say, “Come back in two hours and there’ll be another service.”

Sarah Zylstra:
Okay. At this point you were doing one service?

Tim Keller:
We were only doing one morning service in that location.

Sarah Zylstra:
Okay. Got you.

Tim Keller:
Okay? And all I remember is like 8 or 900 people showed up for the second service, even though we’d never had one before. And we just called an audible. We sent everybody away. They…

Sarah Zylstra:
Keller preached on Jesus’ reaction to the death of Lazarus.

Tim Keller:
… the son of God. But here’s what he offers: not a consolation; a resurrection. “What do you mean?” you say. “What do you mean, not a constellation?” Well, here’s what I mean. Jesus does not say, “If you trust in me, someday I’ll take you away from all this.” I wish I could get away from the sight of Lower Manhattan. It’s unbelievable. We’re going to have to live with that for years. Does Jesus come and say, “I will take you away from all this. Someday, if you believe in me, I’ll take you to some kind of wonderful paradise where your mortal soul will just be able to forget about all this”? I don’t want a place like that right now. I’m so upset and mad about what we’ve lost, but Jesus Christ does not say, “I give you constellation.” He says, “I’m giving you resurrection.”

Tim Keller:
What is resurrection? Resurrection means I have come to not just take you out of the earth to heaven, but to bring the power of heaven down to earth to make a new heavens and new earth and make everything new. I’m going to restore everything that was lost and then million times better. It’ll be a million times better than you can imagine. Everything.

Tim Keller:
The power of my future, the power of the new heavens and new earth, the power of the joy that will come and the wholeness that will come and the health that will come and the newness that will come and all the tears will be gone and all the suffering and all the death and all disease and all that will be wiped out. The power that is going to incorporate and envelop everything, everything’s going to be made better. Everything’s going to be made right. I…

Sarah Zylstra:
He also said something to his people that Piper and Dever didn’t have to say: please stay.

Judy Cha:
And I don’t remember the whole sermon, but a phrase that he said really got to my heart because he said, “Are you here to serve the city?”

Sarah Zylstra:
Judy Cha worked at Redeemer’s Counseling Center.

Judy Cha:
We’re here to serve the city, right? And that’s exactly what brought me to [inaudible]. Just the reminder to help me feel stable again. God wants me [inaudible].

Judy Cha:
But we soon realized, as the churches around the nation were sending us funding. And there were people lined up at our offices to see our mercy ministry for financial assistance, for counseling, for prayer support.

Sarah Zylstra:
That all started on Monday. It was Mike O’Neill’s first day as Director of Hope for New York, which is Redeemer’s external mercy ministry. It supplies funding and volunteers to dozens of non-profits around the city. They do things like tutor kids, take meals and worship services to an AIDS hospice, serve the hungry, work with immigrants, and support couples with unexpected pregnancies. But the job Mike got hired for was not the job he stepped into.

Mike O’Neill:
And I do think that for the first six months of my job, we were doing relief work.

Sarah Zylstra:
Mike asked his partner non-profits what they needed and then got to work supplying extra money and volunteers. The surge of church attendance also meant a surge of volunteers. He had so many that he couldn’t always find enough for them to do.

Sarah Zylstra:
At the same time, Redeemer’s flyer was making its way around town. And word was spreading from friend to friend from Salvation Army centers to Southern Baptist clean-up crews: do you need money for groceries or rent? Redeemer can help. The church phones started ringing and its office lobby filled up with people. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Manhattan had already lost 60,000 jobs, and that didn’t even count potential jobs like the one Brian was interviewing for or the ones that would disappear over the next couple months as businesses and residents fled the city. At one point, out of every four Redeemer elders would be unemployed.

Andrea Mungo:
So, what we were able to offer was one-time assistance with basic needs, like rent, mortgage payments, food, utility bills. It was truly a job that was difficult, to hear these stories, and yet a joy to many of them shared the gospel with them and when it was an open door. And to be praying with them was really an honor. So…

Sarah Zylstra:
When Christina’s friend, Michelle, told her to take her money problems to Redeemer, both Christina and Brian resisted. They weren’t victims, they reasoned. They could probably figure out a way to get the bills paid. And there were so many more people who needed it more, but Michelle knew their situation.

Sarah Zylstra:
When Brian and Christina finally got back into their apartment, 12 days after 9/11, they found a really thick layer of dusty ash had blown in through those open terrace doors. Scraps of papers, office memos, reports, lists of numbers had landed all over their floor. On a neighbor’s terrace, were pieces from the second plane.

Sarah Zylstra:
Not only were Brian and Christina carrying the unexpected expenses of the car rental, food, hotel stays, and vet bills, they also had to replace some of their belongings and thoroughly clean the rest. The costs were adding up.

Sarah Zylstra:
“Get over to Redeemer,” Michelle told Christina. “This is exactly for people like you.” Finally, without telling Brian, she went.

Christina Stanton:
… very simple. I had a lot of nerves about what are they going to ask me? I don’t want to be telling my story to complete strangers. I’m at a church and I’m asking for financial help. Are they going to make me promise to start coming to their church? Am I going to have to come back here with receipts? Am I going to have to commit to going to church and a bunch of endless phone calls for follow-up? Like, what am I signing up for? I had that kind of a very skeptical sense of like, “Certainly, they’re just not handing out money.” Certainly that there’s going to be a catch to it, right?

Sarah Zylstra:
They did ask her a question: how can we help you?

Christina Stanton:
And basically, everything I had said that I was not going to do kind of went out the door because these two women, for one thing, were the sweetest, kindest, most loving, gentle people. You could tell that, that they were that way to their core from their demeanor. And I just think that that put me at ease. I just kind of vomited our whole experience, and here’s what happened to us. I remember crying and just really going there in a way that I think I hadn’t told anybody about what happened to us. It just kind of tumbled out. And they were so responsive. They clearly cared. They didn’t offer a lot as far as any advice or… their whole demeanor told me that they cared. And it was the first people I felt like did care. And then they handed me a check, and that was it.

Christina Stanton:
So, I remember walking out feeling like, “Wow, that was just so amazing that these two strangers cared that much. They produced a check to help. Who are these people? Who is this church? What is this? I had never even heard of such a thing of just handing out money like that.”

Sarah Zylstra:
I want to take a minute here to explain something. Maybe your church doesn’t have a counseling center. Maybe your church doesn’t have a professional social worker to head up diaconate work. Maybe your church doesn’t have its own charity organization to work in your city. My church doesn’t have any of those things. Even for a church of nearly 3,000, that’s a lot of mercy ministries.

Sarah Zylstra:
There are two reasons for this. First, Redeemer’s focus on outward ministries, like the work that Hope for New York did, was patterned after historical reformed diaconates in Europe. Keller loved them so much and wrote about them for so long that his dissertation is now one of the longest in the history of Philadelphia’s Westminster Theological Seminary.

Sarah Zylstra:
The robust services inside the church for Redeemer’s own members developed a little bit later. I asked to Redeemer Pastor David Bisgrove about that.

David Bisgrove:
Because the church grew so quickly and because what you have in a place like New York City is a bunch of people who have moved, that don’t have their normal support system. So, they’re living by themselves. Their lives are fairly uprooted. And so, the combination of you may need some financial support because you’ve lost your job and marrying that with some kind of spiritual support because you’ve lost your job and your closest relative is 1,000 miles away. And you moved here because you were trying to get out. You were trying to get rid of the church. And you’ve been showing up on Sundays, but you’re not really that connected.

Sarah Zylstra:
To take care of that population, Redeemer had leaned in hard to internal support services. So, that meant when 9/11 happened, the church didn’t have to quickly invent a bunch of programs; they just needed to scale up what they already had. Before the first week was out, Andrea Mungo was writing job descriptions.

Andrea Mungo:
So, we hired five people to help logistically do this work.

Sarah Zylstra:
At the counseling center, instead of 4 or 5 new patients a week, they were getting 10 to 15.

Andrea Mungo:
Initially, folks who were already struggling, say with anxiety or depression or substance abuse, their symptoms were escalated because of this crisis and the stress that came [inaudible]. So, that’s what we were seeing, like, a rise in that.

Andrea Mungo:
And then eventually, we were offering crisis counseling. And it was all free because of the generosity of all the gifts that were… and then we were seeing victims, those who were directly [inaudible], stories like folks coming in because they had talked to their loved one right before or they arrived at work. Were they in the building? They weren’t sure. Are they somewhere? And can’t get a hold of them.

Andrea Mungo:
So, these stories, firefighters who were just grieving because they couldn’t do enough, and they lost their comrades, and recounting stories of their last conversations with their comrades. Yeah, it was heavy.

Sarah Zylstra:
Redeemer’s pastors were also working overtime. While tragedies often elevate church attendance, that increase in numbers rarely lasts. But Redeemer’s bump just kept going and going. In the end, they’d keep nearly 1,000 new members. And all of them needed to be welcomed, discipled, and folded into community groups. Some were new conversions. Some were lapsed Christians returning to the fold. You’ve already met two of them.

Christina Stanton:
Brian was more about attending church than I was. I think I would’ve eventually made it around, but he wanted to do this now. I’m like, “Okay,” you know? I was still feeling like I didn’t want to go anywhere after 9/11. I was still wanting to be a homebody and nest and lick my wounds. And he was like, “No, we got to get up and go.” So, the push for church attendance really came from him. So, the holy spirit was obviously prompting him as well.

Sarah Zylstra:
They decided to try out Redeemer. They were impressed with the way the church had already cared for them. And they figured if other…

Sarah Zylstra:
They were impressed with the way the church had already cared for them. And they figured if other churches were sending them money, then Redeemer must be legit.

Christina Stanton:
I was so impressed with the service. I was impressed with Tim Keller spoke that day. We really resonated with what he was saying. My husband was very much like I’m ready. He was ready to get involved, find out more about Jesus. I want to give my life to something that that means something. I mean, he was ready to check it out, check out who Jesus is, commit his life to Christ. I was more of a slow and steady drip. And since I am an extrovert, what actually made a big difference to me was being in community with other Christians that really brought me to Christ in a very tangible way.

Sarah Zylstra:
It wasn’t long before Brian and Christina signed up for a membership class. Months later, Brian came on staff as Redeemer’s Chief Financial Officer, which he’s still doing. And Christina worked for a while as an Administrative Assistant at the church planting center. It was an interesting time to be doing church planting in New York, Lower Manhattan was a crime scene. The last World Trade Center fire wouldn’t be put out until December. It took weeks for the dust to settle. Christina was wiping it off her furniture every day and nine months to clean up the tons of wreckage, thousands of businesses were destroyed or displaced for many people. It made a lot more sense to move away and over the next 10 years, nearly 2 million people did. With the city emptied out, under construction, and losing jobs many feared New York would slide right back into the high crime rates and fleeing population of the 1980s and nineties. Tim Keller knew that already on September 16th.

Tim Keller:
I’m not being that strong. I’m not proposing this. I hope it’s not true, but over the next months and years, New York will be a more dangerous place to live. I hope it’s not true. I hope it’s not true that this will be a very difficult place to live economically or politically or in other ways. I hope that this does not become… It feels like it today, does it not. But the fact that I hope it does not become a more difficult, dangerous plays, a more expensive place economically to live, vocationally to live, a more difficult and expensive place to be emotionally and everything. I hope not. But if it does, let’s stay. Let’s enter in. Let’s be part of the problems. You know, it’s not just fixing, it’s not just telling people the truth, what the city’s going to need are our neighbors and friends and people who are willing to live here and just be a great city.

Tim Keller:
And what we need for example, it may be more difficult and expensive just to be Redeemer for the next few months and years. I don’t know. I hope not. But if it does, then that’s the best thing we can do for the city, just be ourselves though it’s going to maybe cost more money, maybe take more time. Maybe we’re going to have to be able to be a little less concerned about our own careers and more concerned about the community. So let’s enter in, let’s weep with those who weep. Let’s not be afraid of that. Okay. Let’s just have to fix it.

Sarah Zylstra:
Not only that, but they pulled others along as well. Terry Geiger was the director of the church planting center then.

Terry Geiger:
Immediately I got phone calls from young men wanting to come to New York to serve the church or start churches. It was uncanny.

Sarah Zylstra:
Presbyterians, Baptists, Independents, galvanized by 9/11 and inspired by Redeemer’s effectiveness, planters kept asking Redeemer what they could do.

Terry Geiger:
And we were able to help every pastor who had come. So we brought them together, we trained them, or we prayed for them. And it was amazing what happened.

Sarah Zylstra:
What happened was that Redeemer helped plant about a dozen churches, in partnership with networks and denominations, and they aided even more with funds and training. In the decade after 9/11, more than 70 evangelical churches started in New York City center. From one angle, it seems like an odd choice to pour so much energy into starting other churches when your own needs all the time and attention it can get. But from another angle, the timing was perfect.

Chris Giammona:
So I think people were just trying to process it. We had a lot of people in our circle, had non-Christian friends that we were just having groups get together for dinner and just talk and meet up. I think people were trying to process what this meant.

Sarah Zylstra:
That’s Christian Mona, a Redeemer elder. You might remember his story from the first episode.

Chris Giammona:
And I think in some sense, for some people, whether it lasts or not, it is sort of a wake up call. Whether that wake up call lasts more than a week, a month, a year or two years, you never know, only God knows, but there’s the people where it’s a wake up call and then there’s the other people where it is for a time and then this too shall pass.

Sarah Zylstra:
Andrea Mungo was seeing the same thing.

Andrea Mungo:
You know, it was a unique opportunity as a church to really love and preach to a suffering city. And I remember so many spiritual conversations with people, strangers on the subway or, just people I would run into regularly around the church office and even up in Harlem, the opportunity for spiritual conversations was ripe.

Sarah Zylstra:
The numbers bear that out. Nearly 40% of Manhattan’s evangelical churches were planted after 2000, according to sociologists, Tony Carnes. During one, two month stretch in 2009, a new church opened its doors in Manhattan every single week. The amount of evangelical New Yorkers grew from just 1% in 1990, to 3% in 2011, to 5% in 2016. So here’s Redeemer sitting in the middle of Manhattan, working like mad to dig into all the opportunities, planting churches, counseling, evangelizing. It was the best of times. It was the worst of times

Mike O’Neal:
I did get a call from, he was a [inaudible] pastor, in Oklahoma City, and he actually called me that week and warned me that you don’t realize it’ll be years before your people in your city are over the shock of this and burnout. And people will want to leave the faith and pastors will quit the ministry because it’s much more traumatic than you think. And he was right.

Sarah Zylstra:
How long can you go before you burn out? How many stories can you hear? How many hours can you volunteer? Over five months Andrea’s small team helped 767 families and individuals. She remembers praying for her staff and encouraging them and hanging on to Galatians 2:20. I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.

Andrea Mungo:
I think the other thing that has stayed with me from day one at Redeemer is preaching the gospel to myself. And I had to do that so much more in those days. And I have to keep, I have the gospel is for not just for when you believe it’s for when you keep believing and you keep walking with Jesus. And that it’s when we keep remembering the gospel, it lifts the burden. It enables us to keep walking this life of faith in a suffering world and in a way that nothing else can truly do for us.

Sarah Zylstra:
At Hope for New York Director, Mike O’Neal was exhausted.

Mike O’Neal:
But towards the end of those six months, I personally was at a place where the six months of being engaged in that on a daily basis had taken an emotional and spiritual toll. And I’m not embarrassed to say that I went to see a counselor a few times, just to talk that through and to pick up a few sort of tools in order to respond to that. I remember one of them was to just simply stop reading the New York Times every day. And it sounds kind of funny, but the New York Times, at the time, printed a bio of every victim over the course of weeks. And I do remember sort of reading that on the way, on the subway every morning and, and being a New Yorker, there were quite a large number of people that I grew up with. I wouldn’t say that I was close friends with them, but they were part of my community who died and to just sort of constantly see their faces and stories was pretty upsetting.

Sarah Zylstra:
Mike, wasn’t the only helper who was ready for some counseling after six months of secondary trauma and compassion fatigue. As Hope for New York and the Diaconate wrapped up their over time, the demand for the counseling center never seemed to let up.

Tim Keller:
So we did hit a wall, in that, not so much because I mean, we were tired and we were seeing a lot of people hurting and being traumatized as well, but it showed up internally with a polarization of some sort within our team. Because remember we grew very, very fast. So we hired people who we felt were committed to the Lord, they were all Christians. And they all said that they do Christian counseling, but we really didn’t have a very firm idea about what Redeemer counselings approach is and what keeps us together. So what happened was there was this polarization that began, it began and it got worse slowly. So by the time 2003 June, there was an internal break. The Director resigned and about half of the staff also resigned.

Tim Keller:
But in the hindsight, everybody was exhausted. I mean, the first year, everybody was on adrenaline. There was depression. There were, both my wife and I, we had major illnesses during that time. And about two years later, we looked around and realized that the staff was unhappy, that I had gotten because of my illness and casualness, sort of detached from the staff. That there was a lot of, I don’t think the congregation felt it, but inside the staff we actually had to rebuild the whole staff. It’s a long story, I think I made a number of mistakes at that period. I just felt like it would somehow run without me. I preached, I still led, took care of myself, took care of my wife, but after about two years or so, I kind of resurfaced and realized, I didn’t really know the people, they felt detached from me. I had not been a good leader. And there was a lot of that. 9/11 was both, put everybody on adrenaline and then there was just a lot of crashing. It was a hard time.

Sarah Zylstra:
As Tim Keller will tell you, suffering will not leave you unchanged. It can make you hard and bitter, feeling far from God, or it can soften and sweeten you and deepen your faith. The trauma of 9/11 didn’t leave anyone alone, even if you weren’t in New York. Scott Croft was a member of Capitol Hill Baptist church in Washington, DC, might remember him running outside of Mark Dever’s office in the first episode.

Scott Croft:
But at the time it was a bunch of young people, lot of 20 somethings, my wife and I were 29, people who had never been touched by death, never seen it, never smelled it, just it’s all going to be fine. And so there was a good, I remember a really good dynamic of, okay, this happened, God is good and sovereign, so it’s still going to be fine. One of those lessons that you can get but for the circumstance.

Sarah Zylstra:
It was a hard coming of age moment for the entire group. All at once.

Scott Croft:
Mark and the Elders were very good about it, in the sense that they were pastorally sensitive and at the same time brought a sort of Puritan ethos to it. Life has been hard before. It’ll be hard again. This is a tragedy, love God, serve one another. He’s right there on his throne where he was on the 10th, that sort of consistency paid huge dividends. That sort of perspective paid huge dividends that I saw at the church.

Sarah Zylstra:
One of the best ways to take advantage of suffering, to make sure it pulls you toward God instead of pushing you away, is to know it’s coming. That’s straight out of Psalm One, John Piper says

John Piper:
A lesson that I would plead with pastors, the time between calamities is the time to prepare your people for the calamities. You build a vision of God, you build a vision of his sovereignty, you build a theology of suffering in the good times so that your people have roots.

John Piper:
That your people have roots. That’s one image, blessed is the man who meditates on the Lord day and night. He’s like a tree that’s planted by streams of water, that bears its fruit in season. Even when the drought comes, he doesn’t dry up. Well, how does that happen? Well, by sending roots down in the peaceful times.

Sarah Zylstra:
Even before 911, America’s long Christian roots were beginning to curl up. Until the 1990s Christianity was what Keller calls, “Thick,” which means virtually everyone believed in God, and in an afterlife, and in sin. Most people respected their pastors highly, and they had a church home, even if they didn’t go there regularly. But before and around 911, the numbers began to shift. Americans began to be less likely to believe in God, less likely to go to church, less likely to read their Bibles or to pray. The percent of those who formally belong to a church, which had hovered around 70% for decades, began a steady decline. Today it’s less than 50.

Tim Keller:
Before 911, the bad guys were the atheists, the commies, and therefore, to be against the people who are trying to kill us was to be against atheists. Now, the people who are trying to kill us were religious believers. In fact, very conservative, you might say, religious believers, and I could tell that, that meant a change, and I did see that, and I did recognize that this changes things, because now, instead of religion being a bulwark against the people who are trying to kill us, now, religious people, highly religious people, are the enemy. That definitely changes the way people are thinking about things. There’s no doubt about that.

Sarah Zylstra:
In 2004, a book called, The End of Faith, blamed the Islamic religion for 911 and argued that religion is the enemy of reason and should be rooted out of society. The author, Sam Harris, was joined on the bestseller list by writers like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. In 2006, journalist Gary Wolf started calling these men, The New Atheists, because they actively argued against religion and evangelized for atheism. Two years later, Tim Keller would write his own bestseller, The reason for God, to refute them, the book would elevate his profile so much that he would no longer be able to spend time after his services talking to church members and curious new Yorkers who’d dropped in. Redeemer had become a tourist destination for Christians. Now, those who lined up to see him were visitors from out of town. Here’s Redeemer pastor David Bisgrove. Again.

David Bisgrove:
We became more a known thing. “Celebrity’s,” not always a good word, but there was a celebrity that was already building about Tim, and about Redeemer generally because of our context, for those whatever, 11, 12 years before 911, and those next eight to nine years, we became more of a movement. I don’t think it’s unrelated to 911, it was going to happen anyway, but 911 certainly elevated our profile.

Sarah Zylstra:
Yeah. That makes sense. An elevated profile can bear a lot of fruit. Redeemer grew to 5,000 attendees, meeting at three locations. They continued to minister to thousands through, Hope for New York. They re-imagined employment through the Center for Faith and Work. They supported hundreds of church plants through, City to City. The Counseling Center, with a philosophy written up by Keller, continued to expand, and by the time COVID hit, they were able to handle a record number of client sessions online. Keller began to headline conferences, and wrote books like, Counterfeit Gods, Generous Justice, and, The Meaning of Marriage. He was able to speak truth in, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Newsweek. In 2005, he co-founded the Gospel Coalition.

Sarah Zylstra:
Sociologist Tony Carnes wrote this. “Once Keller gained a beachhead in Manhattan center city, there was a galvanizing effect on the whole city, and because New York city also occupies mind space around the world, a change in its symbolic center starts to have global effects. In March 2020, New York City became a global hotspot for a brand new tragedy. In less than three months, 20,000 lives were lost there to COVID-19. For a few days, a new Yorker was dying every two minutes. The city systems couldn’t handle it. The army and national guard were called out to help with body removals from homes, hospitals, and nursing homes. Corpses were stacked up in refrigerated trucks. The South Brooklyn Marine Terminal, which was used to sift debris after 911, was transformed into a massive morgue. The line to get a body into any of the four city crematoriums was months long. Funeral homes were turning people away. It didn’t take long for people to start wondering if lungs compromised by 911 dust would have a hard time with the Corona virus.”

Christina Stanton:
Guess what, we got COVID, and I got a very bad case of it. I was hospitalized twice. I was told I had a 50% chance of survival.

Sarah Zylstra:
Christina caught COVID in March 2020, before medical professionals knew much about how to treat it. She was isolated in a hospital room, visited only by doctors and nurses who were wearing so much protective gear they looked like aliens.

Christina Stanton:
For the most part, they didn’t come in at all. They barely came in, because I was so highly contagious. So I was alone. I couldn’t talk on the phone, I didn’t have enough breath support for that. I couldn’t turn on the TV, because was all they were showing were this horrible stories of deaths. I couldn’t turn on Facebook or any social, because people were sharing and resharing terrible stories of deaths. I was like, “This is it. I have nothing. I can’t, I don’t have anybody here.” I remember talking to the Holy Spirit out loud. I remember thinking, “I bet those nurses watching me on their monitor think I have just lost it,” but I was praying to the Holy Spirit was saying, Holy Spirit, if this is the end of the road, I’m okay with that, please prepare me for death. I don’t want any anger in my heart. I want to be in peace. Help me be peaceful. Show me where there’s no peace.” It was okay. I was ready.

Sarah Zylstra:
When Christina prepared for death the first time, in Battery Park on 911, she was surrounded by people, including her husband, and she’d felt completely alone and scared. When she prepared for death the second time, utterly isolated in her hospital room, she felt the companionship and peace of the Holy Spirit.

Christina Stanton:
I didn’t have Christ in 911, and I did have Christ during COVID, and it was a night and day experience.

Sarah Zylstra:
It’s too early yet to tell the long-term impact the pandemic will have on churches in America. Already, there are stories of members who’ve drifted away and churches who have closed their doors, and there are also stories of people finding Jesus and churches growing with the wide reach of livestream. Once again, Redeemer sits in a city whose population is fleeing to safer ground. But this time, instead of gaining members, they’ve lost many to cheaper, safer, less crowded towns, where people can work remotely. Instead of hiring new staff, they’ve had to let people go. They don’t even have Tim Keller to rally around. He retired from the church in 2017, but David Bisgrove, who leads Redeemer Westside, sees opportunity.

David Bisgrove:
So I don’t know what it means for us coming out of the pandemic. I do feel like the weakness that people have been experiencing, the vulnerability, the latent sense of, “I’m not in control of my life,” is an advantage to the gospel.

Sarah Zylstra:
Because that is exactly what the gospel teaches. We are not in control.

John Piper:
“I am God, and there is none like me. Declaring the end from the beginning. And from ancient times, things not yet done, saying, “My purpose will stand and I will accomplish all my desire.”” In other words, I think underneath, at the very bottom is a massively strong, sovereign, wise, just, good, merciful God, and people need to know Him and trust Him. Then, from that grows the second, and that is the cross of Jesus. In Romans 8 32, “He who did not spare His own son, but gave Him up for us all. Will He not with Him freely give us all things?” So the logic barrier’s, if God was actually willing not to spare the most precious being, valuable being, glorious being in the universe, but hand him over to suffering and scorn and torture for me, will He not, then, before me with His sovereignty? So it’s those two things together. The sovereignty of God and the cross of Christ should make us, in the midst of the worst calamities, both personal, in our families, and globally, the strongest, most courageous, most hopeful, most joyful people on the planet.

Heather Ferrell:
Thanks for listening to the, Remembering 911 Series, on Recorded. Recorded is part of the Gospel Coalition’s podcast network. Its executive producer is Steven Morales. It’s produced and edited by Josh Diaz and me, Heather Ferrell. Sound designed by Josh Diaz and [Robby] [Odetta]. Artwork by Gabriel Reyes. Our editor in chief is Collin Hansen. The, Remembering 911, series was hosted and written by Sarah Zylstra. Special thanks to Andrew [Lopara] for assistance with production. You can find more podcasts from the Gospel Coalition at tgc.org/podcast.