This week, we reflect on what it means to be made in the image of God—as told in Genesis 1. Rather than treating imago Dei as a theological abstraction, Eric invites us to consider the deeply relational, grounded, and human dimensions of bearing God's likeness. To be made in God's image is to live with dignity, creativity, vulnerability, and connection.

Through stories, scripture, and honest reflection, the sermon challenges the cultural pressures that distort our sense of identity—urging us to resist performance, perfectionism, and isolation. Instead, we’re reminded that our truest selves are already enough. This is a message of grace and presence: an invitation to live fully human, fully seen, and fully loved.

Easter 2025 - This Sunday Stephen delves into Genesis 1:2, exploring how God's Spirit hovers over the "formless and void"—the Hebrew tohu vavohu. The message acknowledges how many people today feel formless, empty, or overwhelmed by chaos. Drawing connections between ancient scripture and modern experience, this sermon offers a tender invitation to imagine God’s Spirit not as distant, but as hovering close—even over the mess, uncertainty, and sorrow of our lives.

Rather than rushing to fix or fill the void, what if we embraced the God who lingers in the silence and stays present through the unformed places of our souls? What would life look like if we learned to trust that God begins His creative work precisely where things feel most uncertain? Stephen gives a gentle call to patience, vulnerability, and the radical hope that even in chaos, new life is being shaped.

Moving beyond debates about literalism or science, this week we focus on Genesis 1 as a poetic and theological proclamation—a “song” about God’s nature, creativity, and intent for the world. Eric unpacks how Genesis offers a hopeful alternative to the violent origin myths of the ancient world, presenting a God who creates through presence and peace, not chaos or conquest.

Rooted in both scripture and personal reflection, the sermon calls listeners to live as “Sabbath people”—those who embody God's image by practicing presence, community, and rest. Through meditations on love, vulnerability, and the invitation to resist consumer-driven rhythms, the message becomes both a reinterpretation of a sacred text and a practical call to wholeness in everyday life. This is not just a story about the beginning of the world—it’s an invitation to reimagine our place in it.

In this first monthly service of 2025, we take a moment to revisit and reaffirm the identity of Trinity Heights Church. What does it really mean to be "a community of Christians and skeptics exploring the Christian narrative together"? Is such a community even possible?

Drawing from personal stories, conversations with skeptics and believers alike, and an exploration of Acts 17, we consider the challenges and opportunities of fostering a space where faith and doubt meet. How does Paul’s engagement with the Athenians shape our understanding of evangelism today?

And how might we begin to view ourselves less as bringing God to others and more as working to collaborate with God wherever he might be already working - both in people’s lives and in the world around us?

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Join Stephen and Eric in the first of many Mezzanine Conversations to come! 

Today Stephen and Eric discuss the Lost Art of Conversation and how too often Christians and Skeptics alike are not taught how to have good conversations with each other. 

They talk about the "God-like claims" that we often make that determine how we approach discourse with each other. 

They also offer some helpful insights on how to have better conversation and how the community at Trinity Heights is practicing this.

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The story of original sin is monotonous and boring, while also being deeply tragic. The same injustices, abuses, inequalities, violences and oppressions perpetrated by a fractured humanity year after year, generation after generation. 

And so what hope is there? What hope do any of us have? Well, to return to the words of John the Baptist, as he announces Jesus, "Behold, the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!"

The birth of Jesus and the whole Jesus project - his life, death, and resurrection - has always been about the reordering of things on a cosmic level.

Jesus showing up in the midst of our broken reality was always meant to be understood as a universe-sized intervention, a bottom-up reordering, a putting to rights of all that's gone wrong in our reality.

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One of our mantras at Trinity Heights is "there is no idea or identity that I possess that is more important than me loving the person in front of me."

One of my atheist friends recently, in another conversation with me, was saying that this has become for him sort of like a litmus test.

I like that. And maybe we can use this as a litmus test as well.  

Is there some idea that you've got that you actually would say, "this is more important than loving you in front of me."

Because when that happens, if there's some idea that is actually making it hard for me to love and care for and make a person feel loved and cared for in front of me, then that idea has grown to monstrous proportions and it needs to be put in its place.

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There is a certain kind of rigid certainty exists within the church and the broader culture today. We live in one of the most diverse societies, constantly bumping up against different people, beliefs, and views. And so we're constantly confronted with certain levels of discomfort and cognitive dissonance.

But what do you do when you bump up against people who disagree with you? Do you discredit, demonize, deny, and distance them? Do you surround yourselves with an echo chamber? People who just agree with you all the time? Can we take other information and integrate it into our lives in a more healthy, holistic way?

Often times our illusion of certainty, or our commitment to a kind of rigid or calcified certainty, always ends up blowing up in our faces.

There's always collateral damage.

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Imagine if all the scholars of music in the world got together, and all these academics of music, they got together, and they had this big council, and they made this official decree, and they all signed this paper and some documents saying, "Mozart and Bach are great musicians." 

We would sort of all look at them and shrug our shoulders and go, why are you wasting your time with this? You're telling us something that we already know.

This is the kind of relationship that the canon and the books that are in there had with the church. 

Again, it was not an authoritative list of books. It was a list of authoritative books. And the church did not confer authority on them; they could only recognize the authority that these works had already had as they had circulated amongst the congregations over several centuries.

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Tune in to hear Eric and Stephen discuss the new format for Trinity Heights Church.

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