Notes From the Forgotten Borough
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Cool Gear, Empty Identity
On my twelfth birthday, my parents gave me an unexpected gift. I don’t remember asking for a guitar, but that first acoustic delivered to me on that cold February evening turned into a lifelong obsession. I shudder to think of the time (and even more frighteningly, the money) I’ve spent on guitars over the last…
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Kingdom People
Missionaries have a difficult calling. Sharing the gospel is challenging enough among people we already know and love. Missionaries add unfamiliar languages, new cultures, and great distance from family and friends to that challenge. As a pastor’s kid, I remember our family hosting missionaries for dinner after they visited our church. Once the presentation was…
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Character over Charisma
When I started pastoral ministry in my 20s, the world was in an interesting technological moment that had a direct impact on churches throughout the United States. YouTube, podcasting, and social media sites were in their infancy, and church planters were quick to adopt those tools in their efforts to reach the lost for the…
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More Than a Chore Chart
My daughters are entering their summer break from school. Like every parent, we’re beginning this summer season full of optimism, hoping that the girls will do more than sit on the couch, wasting away the hours by watching mindless television and playing video games. We’ll have chore charts, activities, and responsibilities for them to balance…
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Order Matters
Do you remember learning about “order of operations” in middle school? Maybe the mention of PEMDAS just gave you PTSD! We suffered through countless homework assignments designed to remind us that it wasn’t enough to know how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide. The order in which we performed those operations could create drastically different…
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The King Among Us
One of the great films of the last fifty years tells the story of a young woman, the only child of a powerful ruler, who is completely detached from the people in her kingdom. She has grown up in privilege while others outside the palace walls struggle to survive. She refuses to eat when frustrated…
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Unity under Pressure
We all love the idea of unity. We repeat phrases like, “There is no ‘I’ in team,” or “teamwork makes the dream work,” or “we are only as strong as we are united.” Yet in reality, pressure often exposes how fragile unity can be. As difficulty increases, people naturally drift toward self-protection, isolation, and defensiveness.…
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Not Earned, but Worthy
In Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, an Army platoon risks everything to rescue a single soldier after his brothers are killed in combat. The film’s tension increases as members of the search party lose their lives during the rescue mission, forcing the rest of the team to wonder if saving Private Ryan’s life was worth…
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A Candle That Never Goes Out
On a cold October day in 1555, two English pastors were led to the center of Oxford to be burned alive. The first, Nicholas Ridley, was the highly intellectual bishop of London. Disciplined and sharp, he was incredibly influential in shaping the Protestant reforms in England and played a key role in developing the English…
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When Paul Corrected My Critique
I loved my time in college at Cedarville University. One of the things that distinguished it from other Christian colleges was its commitment to chapel every weekday at 10 a.m. Through my four years of college, I heard some of the greatest speakers in the country open the Word and preach. However, with roughly 1,000…
Got any book recommendations?
Pastor Jeremy Stephens 