Spanish Christian Church, destroyed in Harlem blast, was ‘a little church that had an amazing impact’ Heaven help this church. The pastor of the destroyed Spanish Christian Church, which lost at least five parishioners in the Harlem blast, struggled for words after surveying the scorched site. “I have no words to explain how I feel, but I know that everything is in God’s hands,” said a visibly shaken Rev. Thomas Perez, standing in the shadow of the rubble at 1644 Park Ave. “I can’t explain it. I’m the pastor and they were my children . . . We’re praying now just for the Lord to keep us together.” The tiny evangelical church has been playing an outsized role in the largely Hispanic community for the past 80 years. The 60-member house of worship was seen as a beacon of hope for the sick, elderly and needy. Throughout the 1990s, the church provided food for AIDS patients, legal advice for new immigrants and temporary housing for the homeless. To this day, many of the people who lived in the roughly half-dozen church-owned apartments upstairs were parishioners who moved in years ago in need of a helping hand. “This was a little church that had an amazing impact,” said Leigh Piatt-Gonzalez, who was an assistant pastor there from [...] newsnyork/spanish-christian-church-destroyed-in-harlem-blast-was-a-little-church-that-had-an-amazing-impact/
Posted on: Fri, 14 Mar 2014 08:30:47 +0000
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