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SMALL BEGINNINGS

Graffiti Fellowship began in 2015 when Stephen Trainer moved into the Coney Island section of Brooklyn, New York City to begin providing educational programming designed to break the poverty cycle in the inner city. Informal tutoring in a construction site trailer would become the Graffiti Ministries Learning Center, which now serves as many as 100 people per day, but the vision was always to meet the spiritual needs of the community as well. Just as the Learning Center was meeting the more tangible “felt” need, Graffiti Fellowship would meet the equally important spiritual need by bringing the hope of the gospel to those without it.

A MINISTRY CALLED GRAFFITI

Why “Graffiti” in the names of our two organizations? We are part of a network of churches and ministry centers that began in New York City in 1975. At that time, people were continually tagging graffiti on the building of that first ministry center, and so people began calling it the “Graffiti Church.” Graffiti Churches and Ministry Center in Brooklyn, New York are each autonomous and independent but have a similar heartbeat to see lives changed in communities of need. When we started the work that would become Graffiti Fellowship, we wanted to include the Graffiti name that tells such a beautiful story and has such a powerful legacy of making disciples in the inner city.

people holding hands