The ATLAH Worldwide Missionary Church, established in Harlem in 1957, has long served as NYC’s closest Westboro Baptist Church equivalent. ATLAH mainly serves as a vehicle for raging bigot Dr. James David Manning. Below are some images of the sign for his church sermons.
However just this week, DNAInfo reported that ATLAH Worldwide Missionary Church will be sold at a public foreclosure auction after Pastor Manning failed to pay creditors more than $1 million. Currently, an LGBT spiritual group is attempting to raise funds to purchase the building.
The Rivers of Living Water (ROLW) spiritual group, established in Harlem 2007, launched a GoFundMe campaign one day after the foreclosure auction was announced. “ROLW is a church built on the Christian message of radical inclusion with a unique focus on ministering to the needs of the LGBT community, while casting a net wide enough to be a home to ALL seeking the liberating power of the Gospel,” they write on the page. “Now that the hate spewing anti-LGBT ATLAH church is going up for auction, we believe it would be divine justice to replace that church with our “radically inclusive and open and affirming” ministry.”
Currently, they have been able to raise about $18k in two days and have about $1,184,000 to go.
