At Covenant, we assume that everyone, whether religious or irreligious, is searching for something in life. To be human is to be on a quest for a song you’ve only heard faintly, a beauty you’ve only glimpsed, a home you’ve dreamt of but never been to. We can collectively and repetitively sing the words of that 20th-century anthem, “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” Not only are these words true from our human experience, they are core to Christian theology.

For thousands of years, Christians have mourned along with the rest of humanity what is commonly called “loss” and what the Bible calls “exile.” As the 20th Century myth-maker, J.R.R. Tolkien, once wrote: “We all long for Eden, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most humane, is still soaked with a sense of exile.” 

Christians have mourned this loss throughout the ages, yet alongside the mourning, they proclaim something seemingly too good for our hearts to believe: We lost our home, yes, but home has come for us. This is the good news of Jesus that Covenant aims to know, treasure, and share with anyone in Richmond, whether religious or irreligious. In Christian theology, neither religion nor irreligion can give us what we’re searching for because neither religion nor irreligion can take us home. 

Christians have instead looked to Jesus as the “Song of Angels,” the “Fountain of Beauty,” the “Treasure of Heaven,” who came down to us that he might make his home among us. This alone would have been incredible: a great King has come to be among us! But this gospel goes even further, even lower and darker. Jesus did not come to us in all his glory but in humility. He came as neither king nor treasure but as a peasant. Not beauty, but plainness. No song, but cries that would sound out from his cradle to his cross, as if to cry out along with all humanity, “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.” And yet it was this humility and humiliation, this homelessness of the High King of Heaven, that all humanity throughout the ages has turned to as the ultimate display of God's glory, beauty, and goodness; we’ve cuffed our ear to listen to it as the good news. 

The Christian writer C.S. Lewis once summarized the good news of Jesus when he wrote, “The Son of God became a man to enable men to become sons of God.” He called it, “the central miracle…the very thing that the whole story has been about.” At Covenant, we believe that all of us, religious and irreligious, have a story written into a much grander story–one of loss and gain, of Heaven and Earth, of Cross and Resurrection, of God and Man. We believe the good news of Jesus is–for those searching–the way Home.

What does the human soul long for? One of Covenant’s answers to that question is that we long to find real, authentic community with other people. God made humans inherently relational–we need other people; we want other people. This is because we are the image-bearers of the triune God–the Father, Son, and Spirit–the perfect and ultimate community. “It is not good for the man to be alone,” God’s words concerning our first parent, Adam, echo into our hearts today.

This truth plays out in many different ways at Covenant. For one, we see friendship as the standard way of relating to those inside and outside the church. Christian friendship is not merely contractual but covenantal and thus sacrificial, which is where it gets its power and beauty, as Jesus said, “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

Secondly, we see neighbor love as the Christian’s greatest and most difficult calling. This is particularly difficult for those of us who grew up in a Christian background that separated belief from practice, where a relationship with God is personal and ethereal, and thus not very meaningful. But Jesus has shown us that following him is inherently tactile and communal: God became a man and lived among us; God created people as spiritual-physical beings; God will bring redemption to both the physical and spiritual world. Perhaps most emphatically, Jesus showed us that real love for real people in our real lives is at the center of following him, and when we must “carry your cross,” as we all do, that cross is often our neighbor.

The culmination of covenantal friendship and neighbor love is what we call “Life Together.” It is the standard mode of our church and often the first thing people sense about us. This does not mean our community is perfect by any means–quite the opposite. It means that we are broken, needy people, yet we attempt to embrace one another in our brokenness and neediness. It is our attempt at following the New Testament commandments to “bear one another’s burdens,” “rejoice with one another,” “pray for one another,” “forgive one another as Christ has forgiven you,” and so forth. Sometimes, this looks like something overtly spiritual: a bible study,  a prayer meeting, worshipping together. At other times, this seems utterly mundane: sharing the dinner table, helping with children, finding a lost dog (true story). However it looks, what’s underneath it is the central ethic of Jesus’ call to “love one another.” And many of us have found the words of the reformer Martin Luther to be true about Christian community: It is the “lilies and roses” of the Christian life.

The poet Robert Frost once penned, “Nothing can make an injustice just but mercy.” Poets always make things more beautiful. As it turns out, Frost, in all his brilliance, did not come up with the truth of his line. Thousands of years earlier, an author of the book of Psalms, in a poetic fashion, wrote of God’s mercy, 

He raises the poor from the dust 

    and lifts the needy from the ash heap, 

to make them sit with princes, 

    with the princes of his people. 

The story of how Christianity changed the Western World’s view on poverty, orphans, widows, and “the least of these” is quite remarkable. (See Tom Holland’s book Dominion, for example) In short, Christianity has been a stimulus and incubator for making injustice just by mercy.

At Covenant, we believe that helping the hurting is at the heart of being a church. Jesus’ first sermon exemplified this; to quote him: 

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, 

     because he has anointed me 

     to proclaim good news to the poor. 

He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives 

     and recovering of sight to the blind, 

     to set at liberty those who are oppressed, 

     to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

The city of Richmond and the region of eastern Kentucky have their fair share of the poor, the captives, the blind, and the oppressed–we have our fair share of injustice. But God intends for his people–his Church–to be the hands and feet of Jesus, caring for the hurting as Christ himself did while he walked the earth. In fact, we believe Jesus still cares for the hurting in quite the same way he did 2000 years ago. We believe Jesus is still among them, listening to them, holding them, feeding them, and binding up their wounds; we know this for certain, for he is among us. The poor and hurting are never a “they” for Christians, but an “us.” As the ancient psalm says, God lifts the poor and needy to sit “with the princes of his people.”

From our beginning, Covenant has focused its ministry on the downtown area of Richmond. This is not to say that all of us live downtown, nor that all our efforts are devoted to it, but that we have emphasized and intentionally given ourselves to its people and neighborhoods, including Eastern Kentucky University, which sits adjacent to downtown.

There are a few ways we have aimed to do this: 1. Many of the people who started the church moved to downtown neighborhoods to become neighbors of those we desired to minister to; 2. Our church location (i.e. where we worship) is downtown. For the first three years of our existence, this was at Madison Middle School, which sits in the heart of downtown, overlooking EKU and downtown proper. Our permanent location is the former Richmond Register building on Big Hill Avenue, across the train tracks, literally and figuratively. 3. The ministries of our church have focused on the schools and housing projects in the downtown area. We’ve aimed to serve these places in ways that help them accomplish their desired goals along with our understanding of God’s Kingdom: helping create better learning environments for children to learn about God’s world through science, math, social studies, biology, etc.; children with social anxieties given focused mentorship from adults; a more connected housing project through cookouts, games, and worship services; friendships offered to the lonely and marginalized.

This attention to place comes from our conviction that God is Lord of Heaven and Earth, the spiritual and physical. When Jesus taught us to pray, he said to ask that God’s will be done “on earth as it is heaven.” This means a lot, but at the very least it means that God’s Kingdom comes to real, tangible, actual places. God, we believe, cares more about eastern Kentucky, and Richmond specifically, than we do. There will be a “New Heaven and New Earth” when Christ returns, and our prayer and aim is that the good of downtown Richmond and EKU will be one small part of it. To reword Mr. Tumnus’ explanation to the children of how that which was destroyed in the old world appears in the new, “You are now looking at the Richmond within Richmond, the real Richmond just as this is the real Narnia. And in that inner Richmond, no good thing is destroyed.” Amen.