The Mural on the Condemned Wall

In 2019, a Progressive congregation in Portland discovered their century-old building had been condemned. Rather than fight it, they invited the neighborhood to paint the exterior walls before demolition. A transgender teenager painted a sun rising over water. A retired veteran added birds in flight. A single mother who had never set foot inside a church painted her daughter's hands reaching upward. A man experiencing homelessness contributed a door standing open in a field.

When someone asked the pastor why she let nonmembers, non-Christians, people the church had historically excluded, transform their sacred space, she read from First John: "Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love."

Then she said something Rachel Held Evans might have appreciated: "We spent a hundred years deciding who belonged inside these walls. Maybe God sent the wrecking ball so we could finally see that love was always painting itself on the outside."

The building came down. The congregation kept gathering, in parks, living rooms, coffee shops. They discovered that when you stop guarding the walls, you find God has been working in every hand that dared to create something beautiful.