City
Raleigh is a “nice place to live,” a “great place to raise kids.” Raleigh has consistently been rated in the top 10 cities for raising a family, finding a job, quality of life, sunny days, temperate climate, etc. It is easy to love Raleigh for any of these reasons. But all of these right reasons can quickly become wrong reasons.
As followers of Christ, we recognize that this is not our home. We are pilgrims. We are sojourners. We believe that “we have no enduring city here…but are looking for a city to come, whose architect and builder is God” (Hebrews 11:10, 16). Raleigh is not our home. Raleigh is not heaven—no matter what the magazines say. We live in a city where people are making the same mistake as they did in Babel, trying to build “heaven on earth,” trying to “make a name for ourselves.” This leads to entitlement, selfishness, a “Not in my back yard” view of citizenship. But Christians are different: we have a citizenship that is in heaven; we are living for a city that is yet to come. So, in this beautiful place, in this comfortable place, in this place where everyone and everything is “nice,” CtK seeks to love Raleigh for the sake of Christ, while not trying to live here as if it is heaven on earth. There’s another heaven and it is real and is to come.
God has called us to seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which he has called us (Jeremiah 29:7). And so we seek to truly love Raleigh—not for the perfect slice of the American dream that it promises, but to love the people of this place for the sake of Christ and his kingdom. We seek to point to Jesus as the real King—instead of the kingdom of self. We seek to live with inverted values in this place for the glory of Christ.
CtK's primary mission focus is downtown Raleigh. You don't have to live there to be a part of this church, but much of our collective efforts in terms of mercy and justicewill be focused on AND our main fellowship events will be focused in downtown Raleigh.
Subscribe to our weekly newsletter via email.
