To the thousands of out-of-work actors milling through Backstage magazine's annual trade show in a Times Square hotel last November, Scott Rourk offered a little uplift.
"We are a spiritual group, reaching out to artists and actors in New York, to help people in practical ways," he told anyone who would listen, handing out 10-minute prepaid phone cards with the label "the 411" and a phone number. "We help you find meaning in life when the auditions aren't coming and the bills are," he said, as he later recalled.
The "spiritual group" Mr. Rourk has in mind is in fact a new Southern Baptist church, and "411" stands for I Peter 4:11, a verse about the glory of God. Born and raised in Fairburn, Ga., Mr. Rourk is a missionary, one of more than a dozen sent north to New York by the Southern Baptist Convention at the vanguard of a two-year campaign to bring the denomination's evangelical gospel to Gotham in 2004 and 2005.
And to reach jaded, materialistic New Yorkers, Mr. Rourk and his fellow missionaries are adapting to the local culture, by giving away free candy bars or doughnuts on wintry street corners, for example, or by applying fuzzy New Age lingo to a Sunday worship service.
"I just didn't use the word `church,' " said Mr. Rourk, 33, who dresses for his work in a long black leather jacket. "It drives people away." He added, "It is a postmodern city, which means it's a post-Christian city, a truly secular city, so we want to come out in a way that is relevant."
The Southern Baptists' New York campaign is the latest and most ambitious stage in a national missionary strategy the denomination's North American Mission Board laid out six years ago.
More than 75 percent of evangelical Christian churches in America have stopped growing or started shrinking, and in the Southern Baptists' home region growth in church membership is nearly flat, said Bob Reccord, president of the denomination's mission board.
So church leaders decided to focus their efforts in other parts of the country, where denomination officials now estimate its growth at about 12 percent a year.
"Southern Baptists came out of the South, and often out of a significantly rural context, but our country has gone very urban," Dr. Reccord said. "We need to continue to grow, and so we need to have an interest in the areas where the people have gathered throughout the nation."
The campaign began with Chicago in 2000 and moved on to Phoenix, Boston, Las Vegas and Miami. Now New York will be the site of its biggest push yet. Southern Baptist missionaries began meeting with local church officials two years ago to lay the groundwork for the campaign's official kickoff this year. The denomination is sending at least several hundred volunteers and is spending several million dollars to support the effort, Dr. Reccord said.
But New York may also present the ultimate test of the Southern Baptists' evangelism. To many evangelical Christians and more than a few New Yorkers themselves, the city occupies a special place as something close to an American Babylon, perhaps the least Christian and most secular metropolis in the country. "I don't know if I thought of it as Sin City, but I knew it wasn't the closest place to God," Mr. Rourk said, diplomatically.
The missionaries may also face some hostility. The city is home to millions of people of other religions, including Hindus, Muslims and Catholics and Jews, who may not appreciate the Southern Baptist efforts to draw others to their faith. Jewish groups, in particular, have often complained that the Southern Baptists target Jews for special proselytizing.
The missionary board has a special division for Jewish ministries and seeks to start "Messianic Jewish" churches, including one on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The Southern Baptists also support Messianic Jewish groups like Jews for Jesus that try to persuade other Jews that they can become Christians without renouncing Judaism — something most Jewish authorities reject.
"As Americans, we just don't do these things," complained Rabbi Moses Tendler, a professor at Yeshiva University, a center of Orthodox Judaism in New York. "If they take one little boy or one little girl and persuade them to become a Baptist, they destroy a family."
When Southern Baptist missionaries turned their attention to Chicago four years ago, a coalition of several local religious groups petitioned them to stay away.
But Dr. Reccord of the missionary board said the Southern Baptists did not single out Jews or anyone else. "We do not focus on any group," he said, "We just try to share with anybody and everybody, as the opportunity avails itself, the chance to know God through a relationship with Christ." He added, "We would not be faithful to the faith that we hold if we didn't."
Despite the protests, the Southern Baptists sent more than 5,000 volunteers to Chicago in 2000, founding 92 new churches and eliciting more than 15,000 "professions of faith," according to a running tally on the Web site of the missionary board.
But the missionary board also learned to tone down its oratory, avoiding phrases like "army of missionaries" or "target" cities. Now the board emphasizes asking local churches and local officials how its volunteers might be helpful, Dr. Reccord said.
"We want to help with whatever need you are facing," Dr. Reccord explained, "and in the process we want to tell you about an amazing change that is taking place in our life, and it has all come through a man named Jesus Christ."
The missionary board picked New York as its "strategic focus city" in 2004 in part because of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, after which thousands of Southern Baptist volunteers converged on the city to help with relief work. Now the missionaries plan charity work, construction projects, sports clinics and a daylong fair in Bryant Park as well as volunteering in public schools.
Most Baptists in New York belong to different conventions like the American Baptists or the National Baptists, which broke with the more conservative and mostly white Southern Baptists over the issue of slavery around the time of the Civil War. But over the years Southern Baptist missionaries have established a number of Southern Baptist congregations among immigrants to New York, including 43 African-American or Jamaican churches, 34 Hispanic, 28 Haitian, 27 Korean, 18 Philippine and 6 Chinese, Dr. Reccord said.
But the current campaign centers on Manhattan. Several of the missionaries said they were making a special effort to reach "influencers" in the arts and communications. "We want to make New York the Jesus center of the world," Mr. Rourk said.
The missionaries have come to New York from the other side of the Mason-Dixon line. But the move can be a sacrifice. Mr. Rourk had never set foot in New York before arriving on a scouting trip and year and a half ago. He had spent the previous six years working as a missionary in Byelorussia, and living in New York has improved his view of that experience. "I used to give the Belarus people a hard time, but, you know, they have a darn good metro system," he said. "It turns out that city life is just not easy."
In addition to the missionary work, the Southern Baptists are asking Christians around the country to pray together for the city, with suggestions posted on a "Prayer New York" Web site set up by the missionary board.
"Would you join us this month in asking God to focus his light on metro New York in such a way that the spiritual flames of revival would burst out in this area?" the site suggests.
Mr. Rourk, who has made Midtown his project, offers anyone who commits to pray for the city special access to a confidential online "Interactive Prayer Map" of the neighborhoods "to help them know how to pray specifically for our target area," according to his Web site. Mr. Rourk said he and hundreds of visiting Southern Baptists had held "prayer walks" through the streets of Midtown, Bibles in hand, talking to passers-by who ask what they are doing while mapping out the streets. Yesterday, 16 Southern Baptist couples from Delaware and Atlanta celebrated Valentine's Day by praying through the streets for three hours before convening at the Empire State Building.
The prayer map, he said, marked the location of "points of light," for like-minded churches, "points of service," like a school or park where volunteers might pitch in, and "strongholds," for places that might hold someone back from a relationship with God. The bars on Eighth Avenue might be one form of stronghold and the temples of materialism along Madison Avenue are another, Mr. Rourk said. Other houses of worship — Catholic churches, mosques or synagogues — are also on the map, not as targets, Mr. Rourk said, but "just as another part of the world we need to reach."
Other tactics are more concrete, like handing out free giveaways. For months, dozens of missionaries and hundreds of out-of-town volunteers have periodically taken to the city's streets to hand out free bottles of cold water on hot days, hand warmers in the cold, mini-highlighters, MetroCards, prepaid phone cards or Nutri-Grain bars, all labeled with missionaries' Web sites, telephone numbers and service schedules. On Friday morning, the missionaries gave away 900 Krispy Kreme doughnuts, along with cups of Starbucks coffee, on a corner near the Port Authority.
"If you give them something of value, that kind of sets it apart," said Kelley Searcy, a missionary from Atlanta, in a Midtown office on a recent Thursday as she and six other missionaries stapled thousands of cereal bars to postcards advertising a series of church services on the theme of "Sex in the City."
While laying the groundwork for the 2004 "New Hope New York" campaign, the Southern Baptists have already founded two new churches in Manhattan, but one has to look hard to find the Southern Baptist connection.
One called the Journey was founded a year and a half ago by Ms. Searcy and her husband, the Rev. Nelson Searcy. Its Sunday morning services nearly fill the Promenade Theater on the Upper West Side. Each service opens with a soft rock band playing Christian music, followed by other performances, skits and prerecorded video displays.
The theology, however, sticks closely to the Southern Baptist tradition. "For those who are Christians, you will have eternal life," Mr. Searcy told the mostly 20-something crowd that filled the theater in a recent Sunday morning. "For those who are not, Jesus describes it as eternal punishment," he continued, warning, "You don't want to go there."