Love Quote by David Wilkerson

Planting a church in Times Square isn’t framed here as strategy; it’s framed as obedience. Wilkerson’s line works because it collapses a sprawling urban project into a single, unarguable causality: the Holy Spirit led, so the human actor follows. That move sidesteps the usual questions that shadow religious institution-building in a media-saturated neighborhood - fundraising, branding, competition, ambition - and swaps them for a spiritual chain of command. The intent is legitimacy, but not the corporate kind. It’s authority rooted in claimed divine initiative.

The subtext is an argument about place. “The heart of Times Square” isn’t just an address; it’s shorthand for spectacle, vice, tourism, money, and the city as a machine that eats attention. By choosing that location, Wilkerson positions the church as a counter-presence inside America’s most commercial crossroads: not retreating from modernity, but confronting it at its loudest. The phrase also functions like a dare to both believers and skeptics: if faith is real, it should survive neon.

Context matters. Wilkerson rose to prominence through street-level ministry and the story behind Teen Challenge, built on the belief that addiction and despair weren’t abstractions but neighbors. Times Square, especially in the late 20th century, carried a reputation for grime and danger before its corporate “cleanup.” The quote quietly claims continuity: before the Disneyfication, before the sanitized postcard, there was mission. It’s a line designed to sanctify a risky past and keep a congregation oriented around calling, not comfort.