The Bible opens in a garden and closes in a garden. In between, Jesus is buried in a garden, raised in a garden, and mistaken for the gardener. That's not a coincidence.

In the first of a two-part finale to the PLACE series, Pastor Steven introduces the E: Ecosystem. The word itself comes from the Greek for "home" and the idea of an organized whole. National Geographic calls it a bubble of life. Steven traces garden imagery across the full arc of scripture, from Eden to Psalm 1 to John 15 to Revelation 22, and invites the church to see itself in these same terms: a living, interconnected community rooted in a particular place, where everything and everyone contributes to the flourishing of the whole. Part 2 next week will map that vision directly onto the life of First Baptist Church.

There's a moment on the edge of a diving board where everything in you wrestles; the part that wants to jump and the part that wants to stay put. A poet calls it less dive, more surrender.

In this fourth sermon of the PLACE series, the C is Catalyst. Pastor Steven asks what it takes to become the kind of person, and the kind of church, that provokes real change. It starts inside: listening to God, honesty before God, loving like God, participating in God. These are the practices that ripple outward from the heart into the city. But the deeper turn comes when suffering flips the whole story from "what can I achieve?" to "how can I give myself away?" Dante ended the Divine Comedy with a single image: the love that moves the sun and other stars. That love is what we dive into. And the ripples belong to God.

Before anything was made, there was already fullness. "In the beginning, God" — and to be God, Pastor Steven says, is to be eternally abundant in goodness, joy, and beauty. Everything that follows is overflow.

In this third sermon of the PLACE series, the A is Abundance. Steven traces the spillover of God's goodness from the eternal life of the Trinity into creation, through the covenant with Abraham, into a promised land flowing with milk and honey, and finally through Jesus — who blows open the doors so that all people can draw close to the source. The question for the church isn't whether God's abundance is real. It's what we do with it: stay in the pool, or let it overflow into the common good of our city.

Archimedes once said, "Give me a place to stand and I shall move the world." Pastor Steven takes that ancient intuition and asks: what if a small church in downtown Pittsfield believed the same thing — not about physics, but about love?

In this second sermon of the PLACE series, the L is Leverage. Using the lever as an analogy, Steven maps out what it takes to move the weight of a city's brokenness: a community acting as one body, a place to stand, ideas that match real gifts and real burdens, and a fulcrum that holds it all — Jesus, the chief cornerstone. On Pentecost Sunday, the reminder is that the same presence of God that once dwelt in the holy of holies now lives in the people who walk these streets.

God begins by creating a place — and the place where you find yourself matters to the kingdom of God.

In this first sermon of the PLACE series, Pastor Steven opens with the P: Pliability. Tracing a thread from Genesis through Jeremiah to Luke, he shows that God has always cared about where his people are planted. When the prophet Jeremiah spoke to a displaced people, his message wasn't "resist" — it was build houses, plant gardens, seek the shalom of the city. So what does it look like to stay rooted right here — not rigid, but pliable? Like a palm tree bending almost to the ground in the storm, held fast by deep roots.

If you were a kid growing up in ancient Israel, Pastor Steven says, you'd have two action figures on your dresser you'd never trade: Moses and David. Both literal shepherds before they became shepherds of God's people. That image runs all the way through Psalm 23 and into Jesus calling himself the good shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep. But what does that look like in a local church? A shepherd provides, guides, and protects. And the poet Thomas Merton reminds us why that matters: we all have paper flesh. We're fragile. We need people whose gift is true listening and genuine presence, people who cultivate the kind of caring culture where the rest of us can actually grow.

Every practice has its fundamentals. Bump, set, spike. Bait, cast, wait. For the early church in Acts 2, it was four rhythms: the apostles' teaching, the breaking of bread, the fellowship, and the prayers. Pastor Steven zeros in on that first one and asks what it actually means to be a community built around listening and learning. Teaching, he says, isn't information delivery. It's imagination work, inviting people to see the world, and the scriptures, as they truly are. But it comes with a weight. James warns: "Let not many of you become teachers." Not because the gift isn't needed, but because speaking on behalf of God is something you carry with humility, not confidence.

What if the biggest barrier to sharing good news isn't courage but language? Pastor Steven compares the church's familiar phrases to Pittsburgh-ese, the regional dialect where "Jeet yet?" means "Did you eat yet?" and "Kennywood's open" means your fly is down. If you're not from there, you're lost. And that's exactly what happens when the church talks to people using insider vocabulary no one outside these walls can parse. The evangelist's real gift isn't running through a script. It's building a pathway between the cosmic reality of what Jesus has done and the broken, ordinary life right in front of someone, and doing it in words that actually land.