By the time you read this, many people will be talking about where they were when the Twin Towers fell 25 years ago. Bells will toll. Long lists of names will be read. We will remember, and never forget.
The realization that its anniversary is upon us raises the question— Has anything really changed since September 11, 2001?
Some of my memories of that time are admittedly trivial. There was a quick trip to Walmart to buy a bigger TV to see what happened up close, and a drive-through for a sack of Big Macs before McDonalds closed for a week.
My wife and her siblings were stuck half-way through the relocation of their parents from South Florida to Mississippi. The airports closed. I would eventually drive from Chicago to the Gulf Coast to fetch her, without the promise of open gas stations along the way. One of her brothers would hitch a ride to his home in California on a bus with a rock-and-roll band, although he never said which one.
Those memories are vivid.
Even more so is my work trip to New York two months later. My reporting colleague and I interviewed grieving people and firefighters and relief workers and pastors who all told stories of surviving tragedy through faith and ministering in its aftermath. In triage centers and prayer meetings alike, the story was the same: The world as we knew it came crashing down, and everything changed.
My colleague and I got within two blocks of Ground Zero. It was still smoldering. I ventured into a nearby church where George Washington once worshipped. On that day rescue workers were sleeping on ancient pews during their brief breaks. The air was still chalky. Dust from that great cloud at the World Trade Center was caked on the black iron fence surrounding the church grounds and graveyard.
On our last day there, my co-worker and I agreed to meet up in Times Square after completing our interview assignments. Broadway had just reopened. At the iconic red-and-white TKTS booth, they were selling tickets to Les Miserables for $35. Good seats. We went. It felt patriotic. Somehow emotional singers before smokey rubble on a turntable stage summed up both the French Revolution and our 9/11 experience.
Do you hear the people sing?
Singing a song of angry men?
It is the music of a people
Who will not be slaves again—
Returning to the airport, we stood in long lines, complied with searches, watched as pilots were barricaded into the cockpit, and we prayed that no terrorists had sneaked onboard. We flew to the relative safety of our Midwest home, thinking a lot had changed. And not much.
Now, 25 years later, I’m drawing the same paradoxical conclusion.
A whole generation has grown up not knowing a world without a war on terror, worried about every itchy finger in the Middle East, suspicious of people who don’t look like the great mass of Americans.
A whole generation has grown up thinking it’s normal for half our Southern Baptist missionaries to serve under assumed identities because their lives are at risk just by being in the countries where they are called, that we can’t see their pictures, and even relatives at home cannot easily text to check on them.
A whole generation has grown up with Christians as a religious minority in a pluralistic society, an evangelical movement that alternately rallies and retreats, and a moral majority that is neither.
A whole generation thinks the anger, fear, anxiety, intrigue, stealth, and distrust of our times have always been this way. A lot has changed. And not much.
Our reporting assignment in the hazy days after 9/11 was to see how churches coped, how Christ’s Body served, how the gospel moved forward, and how God was glorified despite—and through—the aftermath.
I remember church planter Taylor Field told me how he bicycled more than four miles through smoke and dust on that fateful Tuesday, from his gritty Lower East Side “Graffiti Church” to the magnet school half a mile from the World Trade Center to find his son. God guided Pastor Field on his rescue mission. I asked if he or his wife, Susan, considered going back home to Oklahoma.
Field was on stage at the SBC Annual Meeting in Orlando this summer. The family stayed in New York City. He’s still working with the SBC’s Send Relief and planting churches.
The world feels different now, even here in the relative safety of our Midwest home, but the gospel of Jesus Christ is unchanged. The call to make him known to 5 billion of the world’s 8 billion people is still our mission. Perhaps it is even intensified in the post-9/11 era. As the revolutionaries sang,
Will you join in our crusade?
Who will be strong and stand with me?
Beyond the barricade
Is there a world you long to see?
A lot has changed, but not that much.
Eric Reed is editor of Illinois Baptist media.