The population of Long Island rivals cities like San Diego, Dallas, and Miami. Individually, Nassau and Suffolk Counties are in the same league as Philadelphia. Long Island is so much more than another suburb of NYC.

• Nassau County has the 11th highest median income in the U.S., and Suffolk is ranked 26th out of over 3,000 U.S. counties.
• Both Nassau and Suffolk are in the top 5% in the country for the number of persons with graduate or professional degrees.
• Suffolk has the 21st highest labor force in the country and Nassau has the 24th.

Long Island is filled with some of the most educated, affluent, and influential people in the country. Everyone knows that NYC is one of the most influential cities in the world. But many of the people in those positions of influence in New York are living and raising their families here on Long Island. What happens on this Island has far reaching effects.

Unfortunately, Long Island is also a spiritually desolate and dramatically underchurched region. According to the Association for Religion Data Archives (ARDA), in 2000 there were roughly 207,000 Evangelical and Mainline Protestant congregations in the U.S. serving a population of 281,421,906*. That is close to 1 church for every 1,300 persons. The same study shows that there were only 631 Evangelical and Mainline Protestant churches in Nassau & Suffolk Counties, serving a population of 2,753,918. That is less than 1 church for every 4,300 persons.

We long to see the gospel permeate every inch of Long Island with the hopes that it will go out from here to the rest of the world.