The Neighborhood Podcast

Send us Fan Mail Text: 1 Kings 19:1-18 Preaching: Rev. Dr. Stephen M. Fearing Faith fatigue can sneak up on you right after you’ve done something brave. You fight for what is right, you try to love your neighbor, you try to follow Jesus with your whole life, and then the world still feels cruel and out of control. That emotional crash is where Elijah lands in 1 Kings 19 and it’s where many of us r...

Send us Fan Mail Text: 1 Kings 18:20-40 Preaching: Rev. Dr. Stephen M. Fearing A drought that will not break. A nation hedging its bets. A prophet who refuses to let the crowd hide behind silence. We sit with 1 Kings 18 and the unforgettable showdown on Mount Carmel, where Elijah puts the real question on the table: who do you actually serve when the stakes are high and the sky stays empty?  We wa...

Send us Fan Mail Preaching: Rev. Dr. Stephen M. Fearing Text: 1 Kings 12:1-17 A single bad listening decision can split a community, a workplace, even a nation. We open with 1 Kings 12 and the moment Rehoboam steps into power, hears a desperate plea to lighten the burden Solomon left behind, and chooses the advice that flatters him most. The result is as dramatic as it is familiar: harsh words, wo...

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Send us Fan Mail Text: 1 Kings 8:22-30 Preaching: Rev. Dr. Stephen M. Fearing God might meet us in a breathtaking sanctuary, but that does not mean God lives there. We open with 1 Kings 8:22–30, Solomon’s Prayer of Dedication, and sit with the surprising honesty at its center: “Even heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, much less this house that I have built.” That single line reframes...

Send us Fan Mail Text: 1 Kings 3:3-15 Preaching: Rev. Dr. Stephen M. Fearing God gives Solomon a blank check, and the most surprising part is how little Solomon asks for. We start with the raw backstory behind 1 Kings: David’s decline, a household already marked by violence, and a throne gained through ruthless moves that feel closer to a crime saga than a children’s Bible story. Then Solomon fina...

Send us Fan Mail Fire spreads, rules tighten, and Moses refuses to panic. We’re preaching Pentecost through a story many people skip: Numbers 11 and the unexpected prophets Eldad and Medad. Moses is exhausted from carrying the weight of leadership in the wilderness, so God shares the Spirit with seventy elders to help guide the people. It’s orderly, practical, and honestly pretty reasonable. Then...

Send us Fan Mail Preaching: Rev. Dr. Stephen M. Fearing Text: Philippians 4:1-9 A Dave Matthews Band lyric open a door into one of the most quoted and most misunderstood passages in the Bible: Philippians 4. “Stand firm” can sound like stubbornness, but we hear it as something closer to a helmsman’s call in rough water: hold your heading, keep moving, trust the vessel is sound. We sit with the rea...

Send us Fan Mail If you’ve ever said “I can hear you, I just can’t understand you,” you’re not alone and you’re not imagining it. We talk with Dr. Eneida Agolli, senior audiologist with AudioNova, about why hearing loss is often gradual, why families notice it first, and why waiting 6 to 7 years to get help can quietly raise the stakes for your health. We get specific about the science and the liv...

Send us Fan Mail Preaching: Rev. Dr. Stephen M. Fearing Text: Philippians 3 If you’ve ever felt like you’re doing everything right and still falling behind, you’re not alone and you’re not broken. We’re talking about the hidden “ledger” so many of us carry: the internal scorecard that measures our worth by achievement, productivity, spiritual credentials, or how well we keep up with everyone else....

Send us Fan Mail Guest Speaker: Joe Thompson, Interfaith Housing Initiative Affordable housing isn’t a buzzword when you’re short 14,000 units, and it’s not solved by good intentions alone. We take Mission Sunday seriously by linking Scripture’s call to service with a practical question: what happens when churches decide to build housing instead of only talking about it? We walk through the ways o...

Send us Fan Mail Text: Philippians 2 Preaching: Rev. Dr. Stephen M. Fearing We spend so much of our lives trying to get to the top and we’re taught to call that “success.” More followers, more money, more influence, more control. But Philippians 2 confronts that story head-on, not with shame or scolding, but with a song. We walk through Paul’s sharp pivot from tender encouragement to a clear exhor...

Send us Fan Mail Preaching: Rev. Dr. Stephen M. Fearing Text: Acts 20:7-12 Someone really does fall asleep during a sermon in the Bible, and it’s not just a quirky story. We start with Eutychus in Acts 20 and sit with the uncomfortable truth behind it: many of us come to worship exhausted. We’re worn down by nonstop news, heavy schedules, and the pressure to carry more than feels possible. When we...

Send us Fan Mail Preaching: Rev. Dr. Stephen M. Fearing Text: Philippians 1 Joy is easy to talk about when life is calm. It’s harder to trust when the bills stack up, the news cycle stays violent, and your own energy feels gone. We turn to Philippians 1 and listen to Paul do the impossible: rejoice from a prison cell, not because his circumstances are fine, but because Christ is still present and...

Send us Fan Mail Preaching: Rev. Dr. Stephen M. Fearing Text: Matthew 28:1-10 Easter starts at a tomb, but it doesn’t stay there. We open with prayer and Matthew’s resurrection story, then sit with a line from Mary Oliver that changes the frame: Easter is not a day for answers, it is a day for astonishment. That single shift gives us permission to stop pretending we’re fine and to bring our whole...

Send us Fan Mail Preaching: Rev. Dr. Kathryn G. N. Campbell Text: Luke 22:47-53; 23:33-38, 44-46 Good Friday is the day we want to fast-forward and we’re convinced that’s exactly why we shouldn’t. We start with prayer and Luke’s Passion narrative, then we tell a true-to-life story that exposes our impatience with the cross: a church that scheduled “Easter Sunday” on Friday night. The reactions are...

Send us Fan Mail Preaching: Rev. Dr. Stephen M. Fearing Text: John 13:1-35 Judas at the table is hard enough. Judas with clean feet is worse. We start with an honest confession: we don’t naturally know how to live in a world where the betrayer receives the same kneeling love as everyone else. And yet that’s exactly the world Jesus creates with a basin, a towel, and a quiet act of service that refu...

Send us Fan Mail Text: Mark 11:1-11 Preaching: Rev. Dr. Stephen M. Fearing Power rarely looks the way we expect it to. We start with prayer and Mark 11’s Palm Sunday scene, then sit with an uncomfortable truth: we often fail to recognize what we most need. We miss grace when it is right in front of us. We overlook beauty when the world feels too broken. We ignore our bodies asking for rest because...

Send us Fan Mail Preaching: Rev. Dr. Stephen M. Fearing Texts: Matthew 23:23 & John 8:2-11 Nuance didn’t disappear by accident; we traded it for speed, certainty, and the rush of being right. We feel the fallout everywhere: online arguments that turn into rage, politics that punish compromise, and even faith conversations that mistake harshness for conviction. We’re trying to name what that do...

Send us Fan Mail Mark ends his Gospel with an empty tomb, a breathtaking claim, and then one of the strangest final lines in the Bible: the women run away and say nothing because they are afraid. That’s it. No closing appearance of Jesus. No tidy wrap-up. If you’ve ever felt like faith is supposed to end with certainty but your real life ends with questions, this conversation is for you. We walk t...

Send us Fan Mail The simplest commands can be the hardest to hear: make room, share what you have, protect the overlooked, welcome the ones society treats as interruptions. We start with a prayer for open space in our hearts, then let Deuteronomy 24 and Matthew 19 press on the places where we still want to ask “How?” “When?” and “Where?” instead of simply listening and obeying. We talk about what...

Send us Fan Mail Communion can feel familiar until you stop and ask what it actually means and what it demands. We run a tight, 28-minute crash course on the theology of the Eucharist using the 1982 Lima Document, a landmark ecumenical statement from Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, and Anglican leaders who asked a bold question: what can we agree on about baptism, Eucharist, and ministry? We walk...

Send us Fan Mail Preaching: Rev. Dr. Stephen M. Fearing Texts: Ephesians 3:20-21 & Mark 6:32-44 What if the miracle isn’t only in the multiplying, but in the mobilizing? We open with breath and blessing, then step into Ephesians 3 and the feeding of the five thousand to explore how Jesus turns spectators into participants. Instead of amplifying his voice by force, he lets people carry the mess...

Send us Fan Mail Preaching: Rev. Dr. Stephen M. Fearing Texts: Matthew 25:35-40 & Luke 7:36-50 A quiet act can carry a whole sermon. We open Matthew 25 and step into Luke 7 to watch a nameless woman kneel with an alabaster jar, turning tears into hospitality and scent into witness. Around a table guarded by status and unspoken rules, she offers what the official host withholds—water, a kiss, a...

Send us Fan Mail A hymn sing can be a history lesson, a prayer meeting, and a freedom school all at once. We gathered to honor Black History Month by lifting African American spirituals out of the margins and into the center, pairing each song with the stories and scriptures that shaped it. With piano, liturgy, and rich context, we traced how melodies carried maps, how verses held warnings, and ho...