Flowers in Flushing and Training in the Big Apple

In July, we ventured to New York City for MTW Pre-field Training. We were paired with a Korean-American church, Living Faith Community Church in Flushing, Queens, near the Mets' stadium and where the US Open takes place. The churhc is in a neighborhood with pretty walk-up houses, and hydrangeas abound!

Our ministry with the church was mainly advertising for their Vacation Bible School in August, but we spent most of our time fellowshipping with them and taking part in Sunday worship services by giving our testimonies and giving the Children's Gospel presentations. The area of Flushing is a dense area of mostly Korean and Chinese. In fact, most of the businesses in the area (including our daily staples of Starbucks & Dunkin Donuts) had Chines & Korean characters on their signs. There's way more foreign languages spoken and seen in Flushing than English!

We were excited to be living in an Eastern European community in Sunnyside, Queens, and going to our daily MTW classes/lectures in Long Island City, Queens, which were both closer to Manhattan midtown. We found ourselves excited to live in a new area of NYC, because we both knew Manhattan well and have spent much time there previously. Queens is probably the most diverse place on Earth! It is said that more than 160 languages are spoken and over 150 nationalities found there. Riding our 7 train every day we mostly saw Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Turkish, Indian, and many other cultures, so it was refreshing to be in such a diverse borough. I could not have fathomed the enormity of Queens before living there...in my mind NYC to me was Manhattan, so Queens was venturing into a world unknown! Queens is cheaper than Manhattan too - we found many ethnic restuarants that we frequented - mostly Thai, Lebanese, Turkish, and Japanese.

Our classes every afternoon centered on many facets of missionary strategy and living: Language learning acquisition, church-planting philosophies, evangelism, and cultural textualization of planting churches and starting ministries. Our last week in New York we found ourselves procrastinating just like the good ole days at Vanderbilt....we finished all our final assignments in the last 2 days of the month. We scrambled to see and visit with all our friends in the city, and loved the last bit of time we were able to spend with them. We celebrated our last night by kareoking with some of our Thai friends and Andrew's former co-workers from Bangkok - can't wait for all those kareoking opportunities in Thailand!!