The church of my heart

Today I found the church I’ve been searching for. It’s called Mount Zion, it’s in the roughest neighborhood in downtown Raleigh, and it doesn’t even look like a church. It looks like a run down house. It’s possibly the most beautiful thing in the world. Its just such unfiltered Jesus I can’t get over it. It is the most cramped sanctuary I have seen and he says every week they have twice as many people as that which can be comfortably seated. I just love it. I talked to the pastor and he just talked about the difficulty of distinguishing between his biological and adopted family. He takes people in. Literally. They literally feed their community however they can, they clothe them, it’s a desperate mission of restoration, justice, crying out to Christ to make something lovely of our messy lives. 

I come back to campus and overhear conversation of gossip crazy partying Facebook. And I realize the tragedy that the huge majority will never even leave the school, and the majority that do will do work at a distance. But the time has come to enter fully into people’s lives. Here is what Christ forcefully advances in me: I cannot forsake the students here for the poorest of the poor 2 miles down the road. It’s both. God is ached for in the slums and he is ached for in prestigious, gleaming conference rooms and he is ached for in trendy coffee shops. The naturally move is to write people off to lessen the magnitude. We cannot. The multitudes are not to be marginalized. There are 27 million victims of human trafficking in the world right now. There are 31,000 students at North Carolina State University, most of whom are searching for real life and deep truth. WE are all searching for it. There is pain in the church and in the brothels. There are broken halfway around the world and there are broken in our neighborhood. God’s speaking this into my soul because he knows me, he knows my tendency to pick favorites, to pick some people and ignore others. And I cannot possibly begin to understand the needs of Raleigh NC, let alone this world.

 So therefore there is one response and one only. To look to the One who can. The one who already knows the width and length and breadth of the brokenness and knows that His love is deeper and stronger and wider and taller. The battle has been won, yet war wages on.  I cannot love well without Him. Paul said and I know its true: “Nothing good dwells in my flesh.  I delight in the law of God but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin.“ And the next thing he says is that there is NO condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. What if that is how the church was viewed? What if people said all I know about them is that there is no condemnation in their Jesus. They do not condemn me. No matter who you are. It gives me chills. I haven’t heard many say that when asked to describe the church. And we should never ever suppress the truth or deny that there is good and there is sin. But no condemnation is truth as well. The truth that people may have never ever heard. We have been set free by enslaving ourselves to Christ. We have placed ourselves in the law of liberty. We can now be held captive by the law of the Spirit of life. God has done what we could not do. And this is our message to bear, this is our air to breathe, this is our life to live.