Initially I didn't have much interest in Holy Trinity; the church had a full band that played contemporary Christian worship music, primarily rock. I had grown up with exposure to both classic hymns and contemporary music in my family church and I enjoyed both, but in my 20s I felt more comfortable with the hymns - the music was easy to follow, the lyrics were all in the hymnal, you seldom had to learn anything new.
But there's more to any church than just the music that's played. The music made the strongest impression on me when I first visited the church; I only made occasional visits to the parish because it was my sister's parish and she had offered to bring me with her once per month.
In time I was able to adapt to the choices in music, but the reason I continued to accept rides to Holy Trinity from my sister was that I had come to enjoy the sermons Stephen was preaching. I don't think I had been getting a lot from the sermons in what was my home church at that time - it was all very heady and theoretical. Stephen was quite down-to-Earth and practical. At the time he would print out a sheet for sermon notes using a fill-in-the-blank format that encouraged the congregation to pay attention to what he was teaching so that they would write out the key points of his sermon.
In time the fill-in-the-blank aspect went away - heck, eventually the sermon notes and even the physical bulletins went away - but Stephen remained consistent in the way he taught the Bible at Holy Trinity. He always took pains to explain the context behind the scriptures heard in the service, rather than using scripture in isolation. And he would always challenge the congregation to see ourselves somewhere in the readings we had heard, then apply it somehow into our lives. I was impressed that he remained so consistent, so grounded and that he saw the purpose of his sermon as a means to inspire the congregation into action, not remain passive listeners.
Stephen and I are both introverts so despite almost 20 years of his pastoring I don't have many personal stories about him - he was guest at my house twice, I was a guest at his only once; our conversations have often been perfunctory and brief. The two trips I made to Sierra Leone (in 2012 and 2014) alongside Stephen are probably responsible for more closeness between the two of us than anything else in the last 2 decades. To some extent, I wanted to remain a little apart from him - I think I feared that a little too much familiarity would make it harder to adopt the lessons from his sermons.
Stephen made the phrase "One more person, one more step" a core teaching and practice in our congregation and in whatever manner the parish adapts in the future under new leadership, I hope that remains our ideal - to be always looking out for the needs of people beyond our building, to be present and active in the world around us. I've enjoyed having him as my teacher but I'm excited for our future.
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