Purpose Driven – Body Parts

Churches, just like the faith they represent, are places of sanctuary. They are a refuge for the weak, the hurting, the small, the defenseless. The unloved. So we Christians like to tell ourselves, at any rate. We open the church’s doors to folks who have nowhere else to go.

But what happens when opening a door to a person in need runs head-on with laws designed to protect the church’s smallest, most vulnerable charges? What happens then?

James Nichols is a convicted sex offender. Found guilty of taking “indecent liberties” with a teenage girl 11 years ago (when he was 20), Nichols paid his debt to society and says he turned his life around –thanks, in large part, he says, to his faith.

“Church helps me to not live my old ways,” he told Time magazine. He went w to Moncure (N.C.) Baptist Church twice a day –three times on Sundays – before police discovered he was worshipping there and thus violating a North Carolina law that says convicted sex offenders cannot be within 300 feet of any facility in which minors are supervised.

Now Nichols is challenging the law, and the American Civil Liberties Union has taken an interest in the case.

“It’s unbelievable that the N.C. state legislature and the people of North Carolina would not want someone to go to church for spiritual reasons and rehabilitative reasons,” says Katy Parker, legal director for North Carolina’s ACLU chapter.

Laurence Tribe, a constitutional-law expert at Harvard University, disagrees. “If the moment you enter a church you don a cloak of immunity from the rule of law, the churches will become sanctuaries for crime.”

It’ll be interesting to see where the case goes, but I gotta differ with Tribe on one point: For centuries, the church has indeed been a sanctuary for those in desperate need of one – even for people who didn’t deserve one. Church, as we know, isn’t for good people, but bad ones. My belief is that good churches make bad people better more often than bad people make churches worse. And frankly, I don’t hear many stories about crime-ridden places of worship. Far more often, we hear of churches in crime-ridden neighborhoods being beacons of light.

Which is not to say that Nichols should be allowed to worship at Moncure Baptist. According to Time, he’s found another house of God – one that specializes in ministering to former criminals and doesn’t have a children’s ministry. 

Still, this case isn’t a slam dunk for me, one way or another. What do you think?