Who is Steve?
It was also at age 8 that my dad came into my room and knelt down in front of me and told me that Mom was going to be in the hospital for a while because she was sick. I thought that was fine, because I knew that if you went to the doctor or the hospital, you would get better. Right?
But Mom died a couple of months later after having given birth prematurely to her fourth child. I’m the oldest. My mom died of kidney cancer that had spread all around her abdomen and spinal cord.
While she was in the hospital, and during her brief stays at home, she always had a red Sony Walkman with her, playing cassette tapes of worship music by Sandy Patty and Amy Grant. My mom was the first example of real faith to me, worshiping God while going through her sickness, and fearing that she wasn’t going to make it.
Before she died, my mom also made my dad promise to keep us four kids going to church, even if he never did. And my dad kept that promise. Every week, he would send us on the church van while he stayed home.
In 1992, when I was 12 and about to go into the youth group at church, I went on a weekend retreat with the youth pastor and four other 5th-grade boys. During our evening talk, the youth pastor told us, “Yes, there is a God that created everything. But more importantly, this God loved you so much, and wanted a relationship with you so badly, that He sent His Son to die for you.”
I thought, “If God is that serious about His relationship with me, I need to be that serious about my relationship with Him.”
Do you know that God is that serious about His relationship with you too? God created you and allowed you to live and sent Jesus to die for you because He wants you. He wants to be in relationship with you.
As my youth pastor spoke, that’s the moment I went from calling Jesus my Savior to calling Him my Lord. I gave everything to Him. I came home and told my best friend that I was really going to do it. I was going to live as a Christian! He said, “Good for you” and kept reading his comic book, LOL!
By age 14, I was reading my Bible every day and going to church and youth group every chance I could get. I started leading Bible studies at school and discovered I had a spiritual gift for understanding and explaining the Scriptures. I felt a call to become a youth pastor. I thought, “I want to do for other people what my youth pastor did for me.”
In my teen years, I also discovered alcohol. I knew the Bible said not to get drunk, but sometimes I would. I always thought I could stop before I got drunk, but then once I started, I wouldn’t stop. I didn’t have enough self-control in that area. But more about that in a minute…
In 1999, when I graduated high school, I started attending Mount Vernon Nazarene University, intending to study Religion for the purpose of becoming a pastor.
But in the second semester of my freshman year, I had a major crisis of faith. I was in a philosophy class, and the professor wanted to test our logical thinking by asking, “If God can do anything, can He make a rock so heavy that even He can’t lift it?”
I realized later that it was an illogical question, the same as asking if God could make a triangular circle, but at the time, it really bothered me that I couldn’t answer a question about God. I mean, I had been a devout Christian for a number of years now. I was even studying to be a pastor! So how could there be questions about God that I couldn’t answer?
I was also feeling angry at God for the first time regarding the death of my mom. I was living at a Christian college and seeing all my classmates going home for breaks to their Christian parents. I was going home to a dad who was not a Christian and did things I didn’t agree with. I thought, “God, why did You take my mom? She would have been a good influence on me. And maybe she would have been a good influence on my dad, and he would have gotten saved by now, and my younger siblings would all be saved.” All three of my siblings had stopped going to church and believing in God in any meaningful way in their teens. I was the only one who had kept going.
Have you ever had a time of doubting God? Of questioning God?
So, feeling this bitterness, and stumped by the professor’s logic question, I thought, “Maybe Christianity doesn’t have all the answers. Maybe another religion has some truth in it that I’ve been missing out on.” And I said, “I’m not a Christian anymore.” I started looking into other religions and philosophies and patriotism, anything to replace the zeal I had for Christianity. And I quickly got depressed, because nothing could replace the Truth of God’s Word. I almost started experimenting with drugs to try to have a mystical experience and enjoy myself. I had done some drinking so far, but nothing else.
This went on for about nine months. In the span of that time, I had met my future wife, Mindy, but she refused to date me because I wasn’t where I needed to be spiritually.
Meanwhile, I was still attending the Christian college. One night, I had a dream that I was in a shopping mall, and all the stores were the different religions and philosophies I had been looking into. My mom was there with me, and knowing she had been dead for 12 years now, I asked her, “What does think of me looking into all these other religions?” She looked at me lovingly but sternly and said, “He doesn’t like it.” Then I woke up, feeling like that dream had felt very real.
But off to morning class I went. Before lunch, I had to go to Chapel. It was a requirement that all students go to Chapel a certain number of times per semester, and I had used up all my skips. That day, a guest speaker named Brennan Manning was preaching. As he spoke, he said something, “God is like the sun. You can’t look straight into the sun, because it’s too much for you. In the same way, you can’t understand all there is to know about God because you’re a human, and He’s God, and He’s too much for you.”
At that moment, I felt truth knocking. I prayed for the first time in nine months, “God, if this is what You want me to hear, I need to know that right now.”
Then I felt like the walls of the chapel were closing in on me, and the speaker wasn’t there anymore, and my friends sitting beside me weren’t there anymore. It was just me and God in this little room. And He said, “I need people to think about those questions you’ve been having. But don’t let that get in the way of our relationship. I just want to dance with you.”
And when that time with God was over, chapel was dismissed, and everyone was getting up to leave, and I thought, “That’s what I needed to hear. I’m back.”
God is faithful, isn’t He? Again, God wants that relationship with us. That’s what He desires above all else. Has God ever called you back to Himself?
Some months later, once Mindy felt like she could trust that my faith was genuine, we started dating and were married in 2003 once we both graduated college.
Mindy was from Beavercreek, so I moved to the Dayton area. We had a couple of apartments in Kettering, then a house in Beavercreek, and now we live in a travel trailer parked on our friends’ farm in Xenia.
A year after Mindy and I were married, the Lord reminded me of my call to ministry. It felt like Him tapping me on the shoulder and saying, “Hey, do you remember that thing I wanted you to do? It’s time to get back to that.”
So I started going to seminary (pastor school). The most significant experience I had during my time in seminary was serving as a hospital chaplain. I had to respond to emergency calls, day or night. The hospital would call me in the middle of the night sometimes, and I would get up, Mindy would help me get my suit on, and I would drive to the hospital, knowing that I had no idea what the situation was I was walking into with a patient or grieving family. But every single time I responded to one of those calls, Jesus gave me the words to say. It was a faith-building exercise for me. He was working in those moments, not me.
When I graduated seminary, I became the children and youth pastor at a Presbyterian church in Piqua. The pastor and I had two services to lead on Christmas Eve of that year. In between services, she invited me to her house for dinner. We had wine with dinner. As we went back to the church and I stood behind the pulpit to lead the service, I realized I had drunk too much wine. I was drunk trying to lead a church service. I don’t think anyone else noticed, but I knew.
I wish I could tell you that was the last time I drank alcohol, but it wasn’t. I continued to struggle with the idea, thinking that I could exercise self-control over my temptations, until I finally realized, as Mindy had always said, that it was safer for me to avoid it completely.
A little over a year at the Presbyterian church, I found out through working with her children that one of the church board members was living with her boyfriend. I told the pastor about the situation and suggested she let this board member know that she would not be qualified to serve on the board again when her term was up. It was now about a month away from electing a new board.
The pastor agreed and spoke to the board member. But then the board member spoke to her parents, who were also long-standing members of the church. They demanded I apologize. I could not. On her last working day at the church, the pastor, wanting to appease the members, told me to apologize or resign. I said I would do neither. They would have to fire me. They fired me. The pastor’s last day was also my last day.
I thought briefly about apologizing and smoothing things over with the family. I was doing good ministry with the kids and youth and adults. I was very likely about to become head pastor, and there would be the opportunity for me to continue discipling this church. But I couldn’t say I had been wrong to call out the board member’s sin. More than continuing at this church, I wanted to uphold the standard that the church was supposed to be the Church.
I was called in for a disciplinary meeting at the regional denominational office. They could block me from ordination for not following the orders of the current pastor. None of this was surprising to me, because this particular Presbyterian denomination was continuing to move in a more liberal direction. They were starting to ordain practicing homosexuals, and many churches were starting to leave the denomination for more conservative bodies.
After my disciplinary meeting, Mindy and I decided to leave that denomination and rejoin the Nazarene church. I still felt the call to pastor but knew I would be starting over in the process of being fully ordained.
Mindy and I started attending a small Nazarene church near our house, pastored by Rev. Pete Vecchi. Pete and the church board quickly got to know me and voted to grant me a local minister’s license. Within a few months, I went on staff as the children and youth pastor. I went through all the denominational steps and was about halfway to being ordained.
Mindy and I were happy there, and we saw a lot of ministry success with new members being saved, but it remained a small church, and eventually it ran out of money and had to close.
In the meantime, I had taken a second part-time job as the youth pastor at the nearby United Methodist church. I would go to both churches on a Sunday morning, and then hold youth meetings separate nights of the week.
It was a mistake for me to go to this second church. I didn’t research the United Methodist denomination, or the church leadership itself, before accepting the position. About a year into it, I started teaching a series on sexuality to the high-schoolers. I taught (graciously) against homosexuality.
A parent volunteer was there for that teaching and complained to the pastor. He called me in for a meeting with himself and the rest of the staff. In a very confrontational manner, he said I was not submitting to his authority in what I was teaching.
I led youth group that evening and resigned with an emailed letter to the staff and church later that night. I never went back.
I did not leave that church well. But I wonder, have you ever tried to do something for God, and then got frustrated? Or burnt out? After having three church positions end, two of them badly, I decided I was finished pastoring.
Mindy and I joined Xenia Nazarene, and at the pastor’s strong suggestion, we joined a new young-ish adult Sunday School class that was forming. There we met and bonded with a group that became some of our best friends. Having moved away from my hometown when Mindy and I got married, I had not had actual friends for over a decade. I had people I worked under, and people I led, but not friends. These people in my Sunday School class could be my friends and peers, because I had no responsibility over them.
I relinquished my pastoral credentials and happily continued at this church and in this group for about five years, until the current couple who was leading the group decided to move out of state. I then felt the call and desire to step up into the leadership of this group.
2019 and 2020 saw the outbreak of COVID, and the temporary closing of many churches to maintain social distancing and try to limit the spread of the disease. Our church was closed for a couple of months, and our group tried to maintain our relationships and spiritual growth by meeting on Zoom. But it wasn’t the same as meeting in person.
When the church reopened and we were able to meet again, another member and I had started to feel the call to start a House Church, an unofficial church gathering that would be harder to regulate under quarantine protocols. We could choose if we wanted to meet, or if it was wiser for our group to not meet.
With the pastor’s blessing, this friend and I proposed the idea to our Sunday School class. I told them that if there was ever a group I wanted to start a church with, they were it. But we also said that we would meet on Sunday evenings rather than Sunday morning so that if they wanted to come to House Church but also wanted to keep attending our current church, they could.
Most of the group decided to join and eventually made House Church their only church. At the time of writing, we’ve been a church for nearly five years.
In 2020, I started volunteering at a local Christian ministry that housed and discipled men seeking to break free of addiction to drugs or alcohol. Later that year, I was asked to take over as Executive Director of the ministry.
Addiction ministry was a good fit for me because I was comfortable with the crowd. My dad and his brothers and sisters were abusers of drugs and alcohol. My youngest brother had struggled for years as a young man with addiction and legal problems. And as I’ve said, I had a temptation to drink too much. It was through working with this ministry that I met Pastor Dan at Xenia Grace Chapel, the current superintendent for our CCCU district.
I still volunteer in addiction ministry, teaching Bible study one evening per week. But now I want to tell you how I felt led to come to Fowler Road Church.
Pastor Pete had been filling in preaching at Fowler Road but didn’t feel the call to pastor the church. He reached out to me and asked if I would be interested. I was willing to come preach and see if the Lord put it on my heart to come. When Pastor Dan called and asked the same thing, I again said I was open to the idea of doing whatever the Lord asked me to do and would be glad to go preach a couple of times.
The week before our first scheduled Sunday to preach, Mindy looked up on Google Maps where Fowler Road Church was, and saw that Faith Ignited also meets here. I had attended Faith Ignited a few times and gotten to know the pastor, and they used to meet at one of the addiction ministries I worked for but had moved out of that location a year prior. I didn’t know where they were meeting now.
But when Mindy said they were meeting at Fowler Road, I felt a very weighty feeling in my heart that this was my sign that God was calling me here. I felt Jesus saying, “Are you paying attention now?” And all I could say in my spirit was, “Yes, yes I am. I got the message.” And I told Mindy we would be going to Fowler Road.
1 Corinthians 15:10 - But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them—yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me.
Steve’s Goal for the Site
My goal for this site, as well as all of my projects, is to disciple others to a better understanding of the Christian faith. I think it’s important to do that with as few barriers as possible. That’s why money is never an issue for using the content that I write. As Jesus said, “Freely you have received, freely give.” So, what the Spirit teaches me, I make available for others to read and use.
Thank you again for visiting, and may God’s Spirit be with your spirit! - Steve
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