S2E7: The Challenges of City Ministry

Show Notes

City to City New York trainers Robert Elkin and Kristian Hernandez talk about the unique challenges of urban ministry and rethinking ministry metrics in post-pandemic New York City.  

What is How to Reach the West Again?

Christianity is declining in the West. How will the church respond?

Redeemer City to City's "How to Reach the West Again" podcast takes the insights of author and pastor Timothy Keller's book of the same name—and explores them in greater detail with a host of guest ministry leaders.

Join us as we examine ourselves, our culture, and Scripture to work toward a new missionary encounter with Western culture that will make the gospel both attractive and credible to a new generation.

Brandon O’Brien: This is How to Reach the West Again, a podcast that aims to inspire and empower a fresh missionary encounter with Western culture. I’m your host, Brandon O’Brien.

For the whole of season two we’re talking about cities—what are they? What does the Bible say about them? How do we plant churches there? What does it mean to love our cities?

My guests today are Robert Elkin—

Robert Elkin: My name's Robert Elkin and I'm the director of training for City to City New York. Did I screw that up?

Brandon O’Brien: And Kris Hernandez.

Kristian Hernandez: Kristian Hernandez, director of recruiting and partnership City to City.

Brandon O’Brien: Kris and Robert have lots of ministry experience between them. Robert has planted two churches. Kris is lead pastor of Hope Astoria in Queens, and served in ministry before that in Brooklyn.

In addition to their roles in local churches, Robert and Kris coach and train church planters and pastors throughout New York City. They have great perspective on the unique challenges of city ministry in general and how those challenges have been compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic. There’s some subtle and helpful insights in today’s conversation for agencies, denominations, and movement leaders who support pastors in cities.

One more note: Both Robert and Kris make reference to a program called Incubator. That’s a two-year cohort-based training experience for folks who have just planted or are just about to plant a church in New York City. Stay tuned to the end for more information, if you’re interested.

So without further ado, here’s our conversation.

Brandon O’Brien: The whole focus of this season is the city. I'm excited to talk to you guys because where the rubber hits the road with all of this is: “What is it like to actually serve through a local church in actual ministry, in a neighborhood in New York City?”

And you guys represent both practitioners who have planted churches, served in churches, et cetera, but also coaches, trainers who work with other practitioners who are doing that kind of work here. So I'm excited to talk to you about your own experience and to help us understand better what some of the challenges are that are unique to serving in ministry in a complex place like New York City.

Robert, you moved to the city in 2005 into Brooklyn. Kris, you grew up in Brooklyn and are now pastoring in Astoria in Queens. And so can you maybe Robert first, Kris, give us a little bit of context? Paint us a picture of Brooklyn right now, the ministry context of the part of city that you're living in.

Robert Elkin: Yeah, so I think Brooklyn's changed significantly since I moved here 17 years ago, the Brooklyn that Kris grew up in and then my wife grew up in, and they actually grew up very close to each other out there in Brooklyn, but parts of it have changed significantly, and a lot of that is because of gentrification. And now one big shift, I think, is that so many people who work and play in Manhattan now live in Brooklyn, and that was much less the case 20 years ago, and that's a big shift. Part of that was very much underway before the pandemic and part of it was fast forwarded in the pandemic.

I was just in a conversation on Saturday with a bunch of friends from Brooklyn, from our neighborhood, not Christians, not church-goers or whatever, but they were saying all their friends from Manhattan have moved to Brooklyn, literally every single one, and they've just kind picked up their community and moved to Brooklyn, and so that's caused an increase in housing costs. It's changed the landscape of Brooklyn a good bit, but like I said, a lot of that was underway even going back more than 20 years. So transiency is still as much of an issue as ever and deeply, deeply impacts any ministry efforts, whether you're trying to do citywide efforts or more localized. Either way, you're going to be dealing with stuff like transiency, costs of living, those kinds of things in Brooklyn.

Brandon O’Brien: Kris, tell us a little bit about Astoria.

Kristian Hernandez: Yeah. Well, Astoria's a really fascinating neighborhood in that it has really strong ethnic ties to the Greek community. One of the largest Greek communities in New York City, but because of its proximity to Midtown, you could be in Midtown in no time from Astoria, when probably over 15 years ago when development plans in the city began to get approved, at that time in Long Island City, which is a neighborhood right next to Astoria, had one skyrise and it was the Citigroup Building. Now Queens is a skyline. It's insane. So now that neighborhood has been just inundated with young professionals, folks that are looking to be... Kind of a similar situation to Brooklyn as Robert explained, they want to have proximity to the city, but they didn't want to live in the city, and so they want to be in a neighborhood that's in the boroughs and get kind both hands.

But at the same token, it's home to some of the largest housing developments in the country, and so famous for the housing projects where Nas, the rapper, grew up, and did some of his iconic albums with the New York skyline in the background. The neighborhood's around kind of this very expensive area. Long Island City, Astoria now still exist, Ravenswood housing projects, and a lot of poverty and a lot of crime and a lot of difficult situations. You feel those tensions and that you can go and get a $20 avocado toast and then a few blocks over you could get robbed. So it's an interesting experience to say the least.

Brandon O’Brien: I get the sense in a lot of conversations that I have with people outside of New York, in the US, that the pandemic is kind of a past. It doesn't really affect ministry anymore. Maybe we have fewer people or the makeup of the congregation has changed, but we're kind of back on course. But the more I talk to people in New York and talk to people in cities outside the US that are dense and complex New York, there's a lot of anxiety still about the way the pandemic has changed the realities of ministry.

How has that changed the realities of what ministry looks like on the ground in an average New York City church?

Robert Elkin: I was in a conversation with a pastor last week who recently did a survey of his congregation, a decent size congregation too, it's like several hundred people, and half of his church has been in New York more than 10 years, 47% of his church has been here less than two years, and then there's 8% left. So that's one big shift of New York is everybody here has been here since the pandemic or more than 10 years, basically everyone. So that's a massive thing. How do you build community? How do you discipleship that can last? I think the other ones that are also citywide, but that churches are dealing with is just mental health is such an issue in New York because the pandemic just ravaged us. It ravaged our communities, everything about our lives. Took everything away.

Mental health's such a thing, and then that bleeds out in other things, like homelessness and crime and stuff going on in the subways, and all of those things are real and real-time. They're happening all the time. And I know people personally who are getting chased on subway cars with a person with a wrench last week. It's still real-time the stuff that's happening in the city that in a lot of ways is part of the process of the pandemic continuing to unfold in our city.

Kristian Hernandez: With respect to ministry, we're seeing folks that are not coming back to the gathered space with the church, one, because this is just totally shifted their rhythms, their priorities, their emotional health. They don't feel safe or they just feel very disconnected and isolated socially. So it's like if it was a struggle to get up on a Sunday after a long week and commute to a church and they faithfully push through back in the day, now it's such a drastic reset that... So we're seeing a lot of churches. These are kind of anecdotal things we're sharing, but what we see at churches, so many of them, their congregations have been slashed in terms of the membership, anywhere up to half, at least 25%, budgets. And then you have people that were faithfully committed and part of your church before the pandemic have moved. So there's been a mass exodus of people leaving the city or leaving where they were at because the work from home thing was such, at least for me, such a surprise uppercut in this whole thing.

I was expecting the economy, that's what's going to really be ruined and how many people are going to die, that's what's going to change everything, but what's changed the landscape in New York just as significantly is now people could take their New York salary and go live in Pennsylvania, and if you don't feel called to the city, really rooted, it's going to be a hard argument to win and say, "No, you should stay here and suffer for the sake of reaching the city," when you could get a backyard somewhere that's bigger than six apartments.

Brandon O’Brien: We had in an earlier episode, Tom Dyja on the show, he wrote a book called New York, New York, New York, which is a history of the city for the last 40 years, and his metaphor for how the city works is that it's kind of a brain that has these different parts that are all connected by synapses or pathways, and so it's like each one is a different social network that are different parts of the city and they interact through all these different connections, and when you talk about ridership is down on the subway, that's a broken connection, right? When you're working from home, that's a connection that breaks. When you're meeting for church online instead of in person, that's a connection that sort of breaks.

You kind have to build those connections back up, and that's a tough reboot after something like this. So I mentioned that to say that part of the work that you do with City to City is trying to explicitly make these kinds of connections between pastors and networks and denominations and things. How has that work of connecting pastors with each other been affected by not just the pandemic, but the fact that a lot of people move out and a lot of new people come in?

Kristian Hernandez: Man, I would say it's both slow and incredibly hopeful in the sense that... I mean, gathering of any sorts these days is just like it's an uphill battle. People are just tired, they're reticent, and so even worthy things, it's like I've never felt like the pressure or the need to convince people so to speak of, "No, you want to be here. This is not going to be a waste of your time. You should come," because people are just tired or spent. And so just slow because everything else is just so heavy in people's lives, things that used to be a bit more simpler are just more taxing.

At the same token, it's incredibly hopeful because what we get to have is kind of a front row seat and see a lot of stuff that's happening throughout the city, and it's amazing despite the challenges and really the trauma that the city's been through. There's networks that are burgeoning during this time, pastors are rooting for each other and encouraging each other and wanting to see each other succeed because I think if anything, the pandemic showed that whether we want to face it or not, we will all rise or fall together whether we want to or not on some levels.

Yeah, I think the hopeful part is that where if churches before the pandemic or church plants before the pandemic were Sunday-centric only, the pandemic definitely shut that down, and so churches that are on the other side of the pandemic and are somewhat thriving, despite the challenges is because during the pandemic they learned some skill sets of being engaged in the community, and so now coming out of it, some churches are enjoying the experience of more people knowing about them in the community than actually attend their church on Sunday because now they're seen as a valuable neighbor in the community. I can keep you here for a while. There's incredible stories that have given me a lot of hope despite how difficult the season is. No, the gospel's still moving forward. The Holy Spirit's still at work. So yes, slow and hopeful. That's how I would put it.

Brandon O’Brien: Robert, do you have anything to add to that?

Robert Elkin: I think I agree with the slow and hopeful thing. I think that pastors coming out of this who see the need for more of a collective effort have a much better shot of healthy missional fruitfulness, and I think we're seeing that with... There are a lot of pastors that I'm starting to get together, not just me and them, me and one leader, but me and several leaders, and just you see it, them coming alive in that moment. So if you can get people together, the stuff that happens when you do is really beautiful, and I think that's been a shift for us. I used to spend so much time with individual church planters and now I try to spend as much time with a small group of church planters as I can, get them sharing what they've experienced together, what they're learning together, what their pain points are together, and that does kind of fast forward the fruitfulness of ministry, I think.

Brandon O’Brien: I want to make a little turn here from pandemic, although I know that's a major reality or condition, but you mentioned hopeful and slow, and it made me think about church planting in New York City without a pandemic. It's probably a pretty good description of the sort of metrics or what's different about planting/pastoring in the city.how do you think of success in ministry in a place like New York City? What does it mean to be successful in ministry, in a place like this?

Kristian Hernandez: Go ahead, Robert. You have PhD work in success.

Robert Elkin: Staying married if you're married. No, I mean... Goodness. I think that that used to be the question that planters had that no one wanted to talk about, and now it's the question that planters have that they all want to talk about. And I know you said pandemic aside, but I think it was just really clear, get 75 people in a room on Sunday, try to get enough of them, as many of them as you can serving and as many of them as you can giving, and you might have a chance.

That was the metric for a while, and we all kind of knew, "There's something messed up about this, there's something broken about this. We're not sure what to do. We're going to be aware of it and we're going to see what happens," and I think that more and more planters are measuring fruitfulness by the depth of discipleship, the commitment to evangelism and the real impact in a community, And some of that's combined obviously, but I just don't hear planters really thinking and talking much about how many people are coming on Sundays. They really want to know people are being drawn to Jesus, non-Christians are interacting with Jesus, that Christians are growing in their faith and relationship with Jesus and their own following of Jesus, and that they're making some kind of difference in a community.

I used to say this five, six years ago, when I first started training, "What would it look like if you started a church that if it disappeared, the neighborhood would say, 'Wait, where'd the church go?'" And I feel like for a lot of planters, it just went over their head, and now everybody's like, "Yeah. Of course. That's what we're here for." And so that's a big shift and I don't know where the end is of that because it's really hard to say, well, okay, how committed we are at evangelism and depth of discipleship and impact in the community. Those are long game things. They were for Jesus. They were long game things for Jesus, so they have to be long game things for us, but I see that shift happening and I think it's really good and we got to keep chasing it and we got to keep waiting on Jesus and see how it takes shape.

Kristian Hernandez: I mean, Robert started by talking about am I still married as a metric for success, and I think it's everything he just said about ministry plus how healthy is my marriage, are my kids thriving, is my own emotional health well, and in a city like New York, it's such a competitive dog eat dog vibe all over you that very easily you can get that in your head and in your heart when it comes to ministry, and so before the pandemic, there was certainly a lot of focus on the metrics of Sunday gatherings and how big is your church and your budget and all this other stuff, but now there's definitely a more softness and openness to say... We've seen so many examples on very popular podcasts these days and documentaries, et cetera, of things that grew fast and grew big, but were so unhealthy, and so just the wake up call of if we keep chasing those things and avoid what Robert said.

Is there a death of discipleship? Is there evangelistic fervor and focus? Does the community know we're there? What he shared, if we did shut down, would they miss us? And at the center of that, is the leader actually growing in their love and their submission to Jesus and the process? Because I'm sure you've met leaders, as I have, where they had all the trappings of success that everyone would measure, but in their honest moments, their walk with God was very, very broken and not active and vibrant, and their family life was something that they wouldn't want anybody to emulate, and so I think the scorecard of success is definitely shifting in a better direction and I hope we can keep it there.

Brandon O’Brien: If those shifts are happening for pastors, what does that mean for coaches, trainers, people who support pastors in the work that they do? What kinds of things need to shift in order to support that shift in focus or need from the pastors?

Kristian Hernandez: I think because we've experienced this where when we're talking with planters on the ground and we're sharing with them, "Hey, you can't just plant a Sunday gathering. You have to be engaged in the community. You have to have an evangelistic focus and pathways for folks to come to Christ, otherwise you're just going to keep retreading Christians," and when they buy in and they say, "Yes. Yes. Yes," then on the side I say, "Man, I wish my denomination actually was on the same page. I wish they actually..." Because they're putting kind of external pressure on, "Hey, that sounds all great. We agree with that theologically, but we're funding you. Where are your results? Where's your core team? Where's your Sunday gathering?" And so it feels like there's still some vestiges of some of the old metrics still in the structure of things.

Because on the ground, when folks see it and they're convinced and they want to live into that, sometimes they don't always have the external support, and so I think that's still an area where folks that are not on the ground practitioners and seeing the city in that way, if we can somehow accelerate their view of it and get them to understand, "No, you have to have the long view, and the long view is going to require a different pace, a different set of metrics, and this isn't going to happen overnight despite how much you may want a church of a certain size in three to five years." If we put that aside and actually see it for the long haul and really put the right priorities at the center, then church planters might feel less of the external pressure to produce something at a rapid pace that won't be end up being healthy in the long run.

Robert Elkin: Yeah, I think that depending on what stage a church planter is at, if they're at the early stage, they probably still... If they're very early, they still think they can get 150 people on a Sunday, especially if they've got some Bible training and some preaching experience and they were an A-plus preacher somewhere else, whatever. So part of training and coaching involves knowing when to kind of say, "Hey, you know you're experiencing this, that's because of this," or trying to push them into saying, "Hey, you can't just come and start preaching and thousands of people are going to come here. You got to just actually just get to know the guy at the bodega behind the counter. You got to do missionary practices, not get a Sunday gathering going practices," and so there's disorientation that training has to walk with leaders on for that because they don't know when they show up, "Hey, all these metrics I have, I'm going to chuck all these, I'm going to come up with all these new ones."

They're in process, so training is you're staying in process with them and allowing them to grow in the way that God wants them to grow and walking with them in that process, and then when they grow in a certain way and they say, "Oh, I'm going to make this shift in my time and my effort in my whatever, or I'm going to push resources this direction," and then they find out that they're going to get push back from a denomination from somewhere else, then you stay in that with them too. And so part of it is just knowing that they're all on a journey and just being willing to try to push. And the thing is, we don't always know what their journey needs to hold. So I think it's sounding like, "Oh, we know what they're going to learn." We don't often. So we have to walk with them and really be agile with them because there just isn't... They have to be agile, but denominations generally aren't very agile. They know what they think needs to happen.

And some of that pressure's good, some of that... That's not all bad, right? But being agile with leaders is a really important part of training and coaching, and making sure they know they're not alone and they're not crazy because that's, I think, one of the number feelings church planters still have in 2022 is, "Am I the only one experiencing this? I must be crazy, right?" That's the beauty of the transdenominational training space is you're finding out you're not the only one who's doing this and that you're not crazy, and you're giving language for it.

Kristian Hernandez: A church planter that we work with, young church planters, they just recently launched, and so they had their first Easter Sunday gathering and it was amazing of course, but this is their first go around and so they didn't know what other planters and season leaders know, that the very next Sunday is very depressing . So it was interesting catching up with them and they were actually very disoriented like, "What have we built? What's happening?" Because nobody showed up. And the relief that came, it was like, "Oh, that's actually very normal," is like, "For real?" And so just to Robert's point, when folks don't feel isolated, when they don't feel like they're the only one and they get that sense of, "Oh, okay, I'm not going through something unique or extra. This is par for the course," when they experience that in community, it can be really, really encouraging.

Brandon O’Brien: There's a subtext I'm picking up is that people bring in with them expectations of what ministry might look like somewhere else and hope that replicates, or just assume that it replicates when they do similar kinds of things in the city.What kinds of things do people assume when they move to the city?

Robert Elkin: I mean, there are a bunch of tactical things that they don't know, but I think that the biggest theological, frankly, sin that they bring with them is the idea that God's showing up when they show up. Number one. And I did it in 2005, even though my wife was from here and my wife's dad had been a pastor for a long time. In my neighborhood, I thought God was showing up in my neighborhood when I showed up, and it is wrong and it's harmful, and I think that's a really big one that when people show up and it's because you got to kind sell that.

“Look at the dark city where Satan rules, but we're going to go and save it, a little part of it.” God's here long before any of us showed up. He's here now without me, and He is going to be here long after I leave. And so that's number one. We could get into lots of tactical stuff, but I think that one, if that one isn't kind of repented of, then it doesn't really matter what else you do, there's going to be something always there that's unhealthy. Always. So we could also get into tactical stuff, but that's a big one.

Kristian Hernandez: As a native New Yorker, I grew up here, came to Christ when I was 14 and I'm 42 now, seen church ministry for a lot of years, and the phenomenon of from 2001 post-9/11 till now, influx of church planters from different parts of the country, different parts of the world kind of coming in to plant their flag, and at first being hopeful, sometimes suspicious what's going on, and then seeing so many of them not make it pass a couple years, at most year seven, to the point where, for me... Robert, he's passed the threshold. He's here 15 years, but before he passed seven years, I was suspicious. Am I going to see him forever? Because it's just the trend was so high. Good, really solid leaders, one by one different things would normally pick them off.

And one of the things that I feel like if church planters could shift in the sense that if you don't learn to love the city and to live in the city as a New Yorker first, then it's going to be really hard to try to plant in the city because, one, New Yorkers will sniff that out. They'll know, "You're not going to be here forever, so why am I going to journey with you, invest and go all in?" But two, if you don't figure that living here and loving here apart from ministry, then you're always going to have this exit strategy potentially in the back of your... And it's that ripcord that a certain moment, when the pressure gets tough, you will exit, you will leave, and sometimes it's God for that to happen. Better that happen than your family fall apart with stuff, but other times it's honestly just a lot of... They came in wrong.

Some people say some things don't go wrong, they start wrong. They come in wrong from the sense of they parachuted in and there was this pressure to plant and get a viable, sustainable church within a couple weeks, months at most, and they haven't figured out, "How my kids going to thrive here? Where's the doctor for me to take my kids if something happens? Or our life together as a married couple," just the practical things that if you don't figure out how to live here, it's going to be very hard for you to be here for the long haul.

Brandon O’Brien: Maybe this is a little more relevant for Robert, as someone who moved into the city for ministry, but if the 2022 you could go back and have a cup of coffee with the 2005 you, or the early in ministry you, Kris, what would you want to tell that person who's just starting out about the journey they're setting out on?

Robert Elkin: I've actually thought about this, and usually when I do, I get emotional because I just want to say, "You just have no idea what you're about to go through." There's no way I could have handled that. So I think that I would just give myself as much gospel as humanly possible. As much as I would take in and could absorb 2005 me. And I knew the gospel, I had read Tim Keller and all this stuff, but I would the best that I could try to figure out ways to get the gospel through whatever mechanisms I have for trying to dodge it with my own ego or my own giftedness or my own plans or my own whatever, my own ADD, but I would try to figure out ways to get it to penetrate, which I know the Holy Spirit has to do that, but...

And I think part of that would... I would love to tell myself, "God's going to hold onto you," because I couldn't say, "You have no idea what you're going to go through," but I could say just, "God's going to hold onto you," and that has been the one thing that has been true the whole 17 years I've been here, God's still holding onto me. I don't have any other explanation.

Kristian Hernandez: I hope I could tell myself, that earlier version of myself, to prioritize intimacy with Jesus above anything else that along the journey I'm going to be told I should prioritize and should make important, because when all else fails, especially even the last two years, seeing churches thrive to now, they're barely getting by, and these are good solid churches and just people that you knew that you thought you were going to journey with forever.

But they're no longer here, but what does remain at the end of the day is ministry being a tool to help you grow closer to Jesus. So I hope if I could tell myself that and also my family matters more than ministry will ever tell me. Church culture can be really crazy sometimes. You'll get a raise, you'll get promotions, you'll get celebrated while your family is going down the drain. So just prioritize those things, intimacy with Jesus and your family and trust God with the rest.

Brandon O’Brien: If somebody's moving into a city, whether it's New York City or someplace else, with a sense that God's calling them there to plant a church, to be on mission in a neighborhood, how would you advise them to figure out the places that God is already at work, and not just that He's there in a theological sense, but that He's also there practically in the ministries that are already happening?

Robert Elkin: It's an interesting question because I think it's hard for planters to come with that question on their mind. I think that's actually a hard question to get them to. I think about the sending out of the 72. If you find anybody that welcomes you, just park there, and I think what Jesus is saying is that we have to be the people who don't create kind of the kingdom sweet spot, but we're the people who discover the kingdom sweet spot, and so I think most planters show up thinking they have to create it, and so I think if more planters did show up saying, "Okay, where's God at work?" That alone, asking that question alone, would be such a huge win. But I think generally it's go where the long timers are. Walk and pray, look, be aware of where the marginalized people and people groups are. There's certain things that you can do, go sit at a pub or coffee shop and just start telling people that you're thinking of starting a new faith community and see how people respond.

There's all sorts of things that you can do to start finding out what's happening. Where are the nonprofits already at work? What's the church that's been here for 50 years and has just been plugging away, giving out groceries every Wednesday, and there's a line around the block every Wednesday? Where is that? There's a lot of different things that you can do, but you got to walk around and you've got to talk to people. And ask questions. Ask a lot of questions. So that's a lot of random advice.

Kristian Hernandez: That's great. Yeah. No, one of the things that Robert is in our different Incubator spaces, he's challenged planters to just do the simple act of finding the crossing guard in your neighborhood and park right next to them talk and ask them to give you kind of a guided tour of the neighborhood, but what Robert said in terms of finding the marginalized and seeing where ministry is happening in those spaces, I think that would be really informative for a church planter because what they would see is not what is typically celebrated in ministry or the idols that we're told to pursue in ministry of big budgets, big crowds, but you're going to see real ministry in those spaces.

And then another helpful thing is it's kind of an imaginative exercise, but if you imagine that Jesus came and started walking in your city, if you're coming new to a city, imagine where would He walk, and if you followed Him, where would that take you? And it might take you to the pubs, it might take you to some really difficult spaces and it might take you also to some really posh places, but also revealing the lack of wholeness in some of those spaces that people envy and want to obtain, yet it's empty and it lacks what they're pursuing. Yeah, if planters could walk their neighborhoods and be in those marginalized spaces and figure out, "If Jesus was here walking and I was following Him, where would He go?" That would really be transformative.

Brandon O’Brien: This has been a pleasure to be with you. thanks so much for your time.

Kristian Hernandez: Likewise. Thank you.

Robert Elkin: Thank you, Brandon.

Brandon O’Brien: If you’re in ministry in New York City and want to know more about the training programs and opportunities City to City offers you can learn more online at citytocity.nyc.

We have a special treat for you next week. Our next episode was recorded on location in Frankfurt, Germany, by a group of gentlemen who represent different agencies and denominations and who work together for a gospel movement in Frankfurt. They share their story and some principles they’ve learned about collaboration.

How to Reach the West Again is a production of Redeemer City to City. Today’s episode was recorded at Gotham Production Studios in New York City and edited by Lee Jerkins. It was produced, written and hosted by Brandon O’Brien. Our associate producer is Braeden Gregg.

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