519 Church is all about the neighborhood it serves

What’s in a name?

When it comes to a house of worship, a name can be a powerful signal to those on the outside about what they will find on the inside. For those already inside, it can help to define the faith journey.

That’s why new churches carefully consider naming options when the church planting process is underway. For the founding members of 519 Church in the Triangle, their name is meaningful in more ways than one.

“We were trying to think of ways to name who we were and what we wanted to be but in a slightly nontraditional way,” said Owen Barrow, a Raleigh native and campus pastor at 519 Church.

519, a church in the Methodist tradition, is one of four faith communities that make up the Apex United Methodist Church family. In 2011 Barrow and other founding members were brainstorming what to call their new location in west Cary. Many names were considered and rejected.

“We were talking about how cool it would be if you could make church smaller and more local to a community,” Barrow said. “So we started talking about what it would be like to have a version of your church in every ZIP code.”

That’s when the church’s ZIP code – 27519 – began to make a lot of sense as a starting point for a name. The team went with the 519 component and began looking for Scripture containing 5, 1 and 9 that also complemented the name.

“One of the passages of Scripture we had already been looking at was the story of Luke 5:19,” Barrow said. “We had been reading it and talking about how it had been our experience to some degree that the doorways of the church had been clogged for us and hard to get in to meet Jesus. Luke 5:19 is the actual verse where they lower a guy down through the roof because the doorway to the house is so clogged because everyone is trying to hear what Jesus has to say.”

In its early days, 519 Church met at a Cary elementary school but has since moved to a larger space in Morrisville. Barrow said the change has helped church leaders take a broader view of their neighborhood and who they serve. The church is faithful to the Methodist tradition with its own special style.

“I sometimes will say it’s richly traditional and casually contemporary,” Barrow said. “We have a very conversational style of being together. It is not formal but we respect and delight in the rich words of liturgy.

“We have provided a place for a lot of folks who left church a long time ago. I think it’s because we remind them there were good parts of their church experience growing up that may have been shaded or shadowed in other ways.”

The guiding mission is to love well and live differently.

“Loving well and living differently is both a way we try to name what Jesus has invited us into as part of the mission he started called church, and it’s a way we talk about what it looks like to be a follower of Jesus,” Barrow said. “Because of its active word of challenge it’s a way each of us in our own way can hold ourselves accountable to that. We hope our faith is not just something we talk about or pray about it on Sunday morning, but it’s something that really affects and shapes and changes our everyday lives.”

For more information, go to 519church.org.

This story was originally published June 26, 2017 at 9:52 AM with the headline "519 Church is all about the neighborhood it serves."