Sermons from Pastor Steven Canfield

Intro to Scriptures’ Wisdom Literature What if Sunday mornings were like walking into a studio, a space where creative work happens and something is always being shaped? That's the image Steven opens with as he launches a new series on the wisdom literature of Scripture. He introduces the five collections of wisdom writing in the Bible, Proverbs, Psalms, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, and Job, and d...

Every garden has an invisible pulse, an energy that moves through every layer and makes the whole thing come alive. Pastor Steven says the church has one too. It's called grace. In this final sermon of the PLACE series, the E is Ecosystem, Part 2. Steven maps the layers of a garden onto the life of First Baptist Church: identity as bedrock, values as soil, public worship as the surface where peopl...

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. S...

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,...

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 Abra...

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 brokennes...

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" —...

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...

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 wo...

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 outsi...

Paul's vision in Ephesians is cosmic — Jesus filling all things, a new humanity growing up into his glory. But how does that massive vision land in a local church on a Sunday morning? Pastor Steven turns to the second of the fivefold gifts: the prophetic impulse. Prophets are the ones who walk up to the rest of us, tap us on the shoulder, and say, "Come look at it from this side." It's an impulse...

Paul's letter to the Ephesians carries a dream so big it's cosmic — all things gathered up in Christ, the kindness of Jesus on display for ages to come. But Pastor Steven doesn't leave us staring at the sky. He brings us to the image of a victorious king riding through the streets, throwing out gifts — not candy at a parade, but gifts that transform the way you live. That's what Jesus does as he a...

In John's telling of the resurrection, every detail is a symbol. The tomb is fit for royalty. The setting is a garden — an echo of the very first place God walked with his people. And when Mary mistakes Jesus for the gardener, she's wrong — but she's also right. Pastor Steven walks us through the rich imagery John layers into this moment, all building toward one repeated question: Why are you weep...

Palm Sunday is one of the most confusing celebrations in the church calendar — and if you're not yet confused, Steven suggests you don't actually understand it yet. Between the triumphal entry and the cross lies a week of riddles, symbolic actions, and a weeping king heading toward suffering. Drawing on the historical echo of Judah Maccabee's military triumph 150 years earlier, Steven shows how Je...

Anger might be the most complicated monster of all — because unlike the others, it isn't always wrong. It's wired into us as a response to threat and injustice, and it can move in either direction: toward bitterness and rage, or toward something that looks a lot like peacemaking. This week, as the series closes and Palm Sunday approaches, a question from the book of Jonah becomes the lens: Is it g...

Most of us aren't short on passion — we have plenty of it for coffee, sports, music, the small pleasures that light us up without much effort. The question this week is why that same energy so rarely finds its way toward God. The monster of apathy doesn't cause chaos by anything it does — but by everything it doesn't. It's the quiet cold that settles into the heart and makes the pursuit of God fee...

Excessiveness vs. the Art of Balance & the Beauty of Belonging Some monsters are loud and obvious. These three are often overlooked — not because they're rare, but because they've become so familiar we've stopped noticing them. This week covers gluttony, greed, and lust together, not as a moral checklist, but as expressions of the same restless human impulse: the drive to take more than we nee...

Of all the monsters lurking in the human heart, envy may be the most hidden — and the most corrosive. It starts as a familiar ache: I want what they have. But it can quietly slide into something darker: I want them not to have it. From King Saul's spiraling jealousy of David, to the older brother seething outside the prodigal son's welcome-home party, scripture keeps returning to this particular m...

We kick off Monsters of the Heart — a Lenten journey through the seven deadly sins — with the monster that underlies them all: pride. But this isn't a lecture on bad behavior. It's an invitation to look honestly at something quietly lurking in every human heart: the deep, subtle sense that we don't really need God. From the garden of Eden to a powerful Syrian general asked to humble himself in a m...

In this final message from our 7 Signs series, we encounter Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. After this incredible miracle, some believed—but others went straight to the religious leaders to report what happened. Reviewing all seven signs, we see a beautiful pattern: Jesus' glory meets people right in the middle of their mess. He touches desperation, helplessness, famishment, fearfulness, hope...

In this message from our 7 Signs series, we explore the sixth sign from John's Gospel—Jesus healing the man born blind. This powerful story does more than showcase a miracle; it busts theological myths and challenges our assumptions about suffering, faith, and what it means to truly see Jesus. Through the journey of a man who receives sight through an unconventional healing with mud and spit, we d...

Episode: Waterworks from Heaven (7 Signs - Part 5) In this message from our 7 Signs series, we explore the fifth sign from John's Gospel—Jesus walking on water and calming the storm. Just as "waterworks" can mean different things depending on the context, this miracle reveals something profound about who Jesus truly is. John intentionally chose these seven signs to show us Jesus's true glory, dept...

In Feeding Five Thousand: Jesus, Abundance & Limitations, we continue our “7 Signs” series—watching how each sign reveals Jesus’ true identity. In John 6, framed by Passover, Jesus meets scarcity with compassion, turns lack into abundance, and points beyond bread to himself as the Bread of Life.

John 5’s third sign uses story and symbol to reveal Jesus’ glory. The Healing We Can’t Find explores Bethesda, Sabbath, and healing as signs pointing beyond themselves to the One who restores creation at its core.

In week 2 of our “7 Signs” series (John 4:46–54), we explore Jesus’ long-distance healing of a dying son—and the deeper invitation to read the signs rightly, trust his “bare word,” and truly see his glory.