“God Belongs In My City” Video

Brooklyn, NY – Youth pastor Daniel Sanabria, a co-founder of the “God Belongs In My City” prayer movement, and other Big Apple youth evangelists have pooled their diverse resources to create a new recording label, In My City Records.

The company slogan is: “Sounds that connect people to God and invoke change.”  Those vibrant sounds are youthful rhythms that span the gamut of faith-fueled Hip Hop songs to rock-edged praise and worship anthems. Various artists affiliated with the movement or the label are hitting the concert trail in August and the first recorded offering will be the October 15th digital release of Korean-born female rapper HeeSun Lee’s debut CD “Stereotypes.”

The God Belongs in My City movement began in October of 2009 when members of a Christian youth group saw a billboard in the New York City subway system that asked the question, “A Million New Yorkers Are Good Without God. Are You?” They were so angered by the ad that they complained about it to their youth pastor who in turn started to ask area church leaders, “What are we, as the body of Christ going to do about this?” Those leaders galvanized young adults from all five New York boroughs to hold a prayer walk where participants wore T-shirts simply declaring, “God Belongs in My City.”

On November 14, 2009, over 1,500 youth trekked down from Harlem and up from Battery Park and met in the middle – Times Square – to make their voices heard through public prayers and music. “It’s like the civil rights movement but from a spiritual perspective,” says In My City Records CEO Jeremy Castro. At that assembly, a rapper named Andy Mineo, free styled the song “In My City” that’s become the movement’s anthem. A You Tube video has nearly 700,000 hits. See the video below.

TBGB Note: What is most striking about the movement is the multiculturalism of the marchers. One can only hope that someday the U.S. will live up to its creed, E Pluribus Unum (out of many, one).