- Discipleship & spiritual formation
The iPad in Julie Stegman’s hand will say it all.
Recently, leaders of a food and resource distribution center in St. Paul, Minnesota, told Stegman how helpful a digital tablet would be. They use paper to track metrics about their operations before manually entering that data into a computer.
But not for much longer: Resurrection City Church cares, so they will buy the center an iPad to help them be more effective.
“We care, and we are on the same team,” Julie Stegman said.
Teamwork is tremendously important for Stegman and her husband, Joel, who co-pastor Resurrection City Church.
The Converge North Central congregation started in 2019 so the Hamlin-Midway neighborhood and St. Paul could be restored by the same God who brought Jesus back to life.
“God did something that is unprecedented,” Joel Stegman said of the resurrection. “We are people of resurrection, and we can have resurrection happen to us in the present.”
The gospel’s message brings hope here
Life always comes with significant challenges, doesn’t it? That’s true around America and in Hamlin-Midway. About 12,000 people make up the community in transition after massive unrest created by George Floyd’s murder.
People here feel pressure daily to be extraordinary performers in every aspect of life, at work, at home and online.
The Stegmans have heard about the anxiety, busyness and stress of being a transplant in a transient community. St. Paul, one of the nation’s most diverse cities, has many families from other countries looking for help of various kinds.
Related: Converge helps churches reach the nations coming to America.
To people in such different life circumstances, the church shows that God cares. So Resurrection City seeks common ground with its neighbors to co-create a new future.
“We want to be known for caring about the good of our neighborhood,” Joel Stegman said.
The gospel informs that desire since Jesus compassionately served people, most of all on the cross. Resurrection City Church strives to organically connect what God has graciously done with an opportunity for believers to give away the same transforming grace they’ve received.
The church recently gave each community group $500 to organize an event, such as a pickleball tournament, to which they could invite people. Through such activities, relationships have formed with single moms, neighbors from other countries, the neighborhood coalition, the parks department and a nearby university and elementary school.
Resurrection City’s members are eager to listen and learn how they can help with the needs around them. So it’s natural that Julie Stegman went to the church’s leadership in July to see if finances could be redirected for the iPad to help the food center.
Joel Stegman explained that the church’s heart has become for their community so that disciples can build bridges between their post-Christian neighbors and friends and the Lord.
“We want people to see us as a presence for good in the neighborhood so they believe our news is good,” Joel Stegman said. “We want to see the city made new again in Jesus.”
