God And The City

Olasky is sitting in the Club Room, part of the administrative offices, which are on the 15th floor. The King's entrance is on the southeast corner, behind a set of glass double doors.

"Here's my crackpot idea of the day," Olasky says, grabbing a piece of paper. He draws a Y axis with "vibrant debate" on the top and "apathy" on bottom, and a horizontal X axis, with "violence" on one side and "civility" on the other.

"If you've got vibrant debate and violence, you've got jihad. Violence and apathy, you've got soccer hooligans. We want our kids to be here," he says pointing to the quadrant where "vibrant debate" and "civility" meet.

New York City, according to Olasky and the rest of the King's elders, is the perfect place to teach the art of civilized debate. They believe a mistake was made a century ago when evangelicals began to leave urban centers, sequestering themselves in the suburbs and beyond, ceding cities to the forces of sin. The King's choice of location is meant to prove a point: that the faithful do not need a moat between themselves and pop culture.

The King's style of "new Christian urbanism," as Olasky calls it, frowns on hard-sell proselytizing. But students at the King's have been known to strike up conversations in the city with strangers, hoping at minimum to change their mind about evangelicals. The most outgoing and nerviest is David Lapp, who takes semi-regular field trips to the campus of New York University and approaches people with lines like "Do you want to discuss big ideas?" or "What do you think is the good life?"

"I see this place as a meeting ground," says Lapp, who was home-schooled in Lancaster County, Pa., a.k.a. Amish country. "The people I meet are very detached from Christian America; they're not sure what's happening out there in the heartland. Just talking, I realize that New Yorkers aren't as crazy as I was always told they are, and they can learn that evangelicals aren't as crazy as Pat Robertson makes us seem."

None of Lapp's impromptu dialogues has led even to a follow-up chat, let alone salvation for the unsaved. One, in Washington Square Park, led to a 45-minute talk that ended with each party recommending a book for the other. Lapp suggested G.K. Chesterton's "Orthodoxy." His interlocutor suggested Richard Dawkins's "The God Delusion."

Then again, students at the King's have found themselves in more than a few discussions they couldn't wait to end. Like the two female students who were talking in the stairwell of their apartment building late at night and were accosted by an elderly woman whom they were apparently keeping awake. She had a knife in her hand, which she at first hid behind her back.

"Next time I bring two of these!" the woman shouted, revealing the blade.

Nor was there a lot of amiable back-and-forth when Caitie Hlushak found herself alone in an elevator, at midnight, with a man carrying a black plastic case.

"It looked like the sort of case that would carry a gun," says Hlushak, who comes from a small town near Denver. "And he turns to me and he says, 'I just killed a guy.' I was like, 'What?'" she recalls, laughing. "I just cowered in the corner. He might have been joking, he might have been trying to be friendly."

Friendly? "I know. It sounds crazy. Oh, and he had a can of Drano in his other hand."