Resurrection City Church - St. Paul Minnesota

Becoming Who We Are | The Bottom Jenga Piece

Christianity is unique in the it’s not just good advice, like a wisdom to live by, but a recognition of something that happened in history: a dead man named Jesus who had seemed like a special person in God’s purposes who all of a sudden came back to life. Everything we do is because of that mysterious surprise smack dab in the middle of history. If we take that piece out of the Jenga tower, the whole thing comes toppling down, and the pursuit of holiness that 1 Corinthians is all about is revealed to be useless.. In this final sermon in the series, Pastor Joel walks through this powerhouse of a passage to wrap up the first letter to the Corinthians.

Becoming Who We Are | The Speaking God and His Church

Communication is vital. Think about how much it matters to hear words like “I’m pregnant” “I love you” “Will you marry me?” “Not guilty”, “You’ve got the job”, “I believe in you.” It can totally fill someone with life and save them from despair, or even death! Communication is vital. And it matters to God, too. In this sermon, Pastor Joel shares how the Corinthians were misunderstanding the gifts of tongues and prophecy and God’s words for them as a church as a result, and why it matters we understand God wants to speak to us…and what can happen when we don’t care.

Becoming Who We Are | Love: The True Mark of the Spirit

1 Corinthians is a famous passage about love that you often hear at weddings. In this sermon, Julie walks through why love is the true mark of the Holy Spirit and why it matters that we show this kind of radical love to our church family. The message ends with practical ways to grow in love by reflecting on God’s love  for us as shown through Jesus.

Leadership Team Roundtable Podcast | Where are we going as a church?

Res City is four and half years old, and has gone through several phases in our life: from the church plant launch stage, to the survival stage of covid, and now to a spot where we can start to think about the future. But how do we think about the future? What counts as success? Do we have any goals?

In this conversation among the Res City Leadership Team--made up of Krista Schroeder, Miles Trump, Brett Ripley, and pastors Julie and Joel Stegman--we ask these questions and explain the vision behind how we define "success" as a church and how that directs our goals for the future.

Becoming Who We Are | Unity Through Diversity

In 1 Corinthians 12, Paul talks about how the church is designed to function with unity in diversity. Even though those ideas seem to contradict each other, Paul shows how true unity comes through a diversity of spiritual gifts and diversity of people all working together in the church body. In other words, the church needs YOU, and you need the church! We encounter threats to our unity through diversity in multiple ways: uniformity which creates a monster, not a body, self-focus which pulls us away from proper focus, and hierarchies which subtly fracture the church. Pastor Julie walks us through this idea and how we can avoid threats.

Becoming Who We Are | Do This in Remembrance of Me

“Your worship gatherings do more harm than good.” Yikes. Not what you want to hear if you’re a leader in a church, but it was true in Corinth. As the letter goes along, we’ll explore all of the reasons this is the case, but in this passage we see two reasons for it: theological problems between how men and women viewed themselves, and a total meltdown of the Lord’s Supper. In this sermon, Pastor Joel tells us what we need to keep in mind if we want to keep ourselves from worship gatherings that do more harm than good by making them all about ourselves.

Becoming Who We Are | Amateurs and Pro’s

At the beginning of the gospel story of Jesus, we’re told about another prophet who gave up the celebrity and authority he had so that Jesus and his kingdom might grow instead. This small but important story sets a pattern for all who follow Jesus—the same Jesus who went even further and gave up not just comfort, authority, rights, and freedom for us, but his very life. In this passage in 1 Corinthians 9, the apostle Paul explains how he too does the same, and invites us to consider how we can follow him in being not amateurs about our faith, but serious professional “athletes”. In this sermon, Pastor Joel walks through a couple of examples for what this might look like for us to follow suit.

Becoming Who We Are | When Being Right Makes You Wrong

It can be fun to be knowledgeable about something, but it can also present a real challenge to our holiness when we let knowledge replace love. In this passage from 1 Corinthians, the apostle Paul talks all about how being the smartest person in the room can make us poor at having a more important knowledge than just facts: the knowledge of love. In this sermon, Pastor Joel breaks it all down.

Becoming Who We Are | On Singleness

Despite stories that have been told in church and in the world at large for a long time, the gospel is good news for single people because of who we are in Christ. Together we can cultivate a high view of singleness that is founded on a holy identity in Christ. In this sermon, Res City missionary Andrea Kidder guides us through how to have a deeper understanding of singleness than the ones we are regularly fed.

Becoming Who We Are | Living in the Pattern of Our Baptism

On Res City's baptism Sunday 2023, we study a passage in 1 Corinthians where Paul responds to the idea that someone getting baptized and partaking in the Lord's Supper could keep them immune from the effects of partaking in regular idol feasts. Paul's response invites them to think back on the history of Israel in the wilderness, and Pastor Joel challenges us to ask ourselves if the path we take after baptism lines up with baptism itself.