From Wandering to Shepherding: Steven Larson's Story

Two Sundays from now (March 8, 2026), we will ordain and install Steven Larson as an elder at Knox Baptist Church. This is a solemn moment, but it is also a joyful celebration of God’s grace toward His church.

Jesus promised, “I will build my church” (Matthew 16:18). After His ascension, He gave shepherds and teachers to equip the saints and build up His body (Ephesians 4:11–12). And He is still doing so today.

Over the past season, Steven has already been a great blessing to our church as he has been trained, tested, and formed for pastoral ministry. We are grateful for the evident work of God in his life and look forward to the ways the Lord will use him to strengthen this local body and to carry the glorious Gospel of Jesus Christ beyond our walls into a dark and needy world.

Steven’s testimony is a powerful display of God’s mercy and grace. It reminds us that God calls, God saves, God keeps, and God sets apart men for ministry.

We invite you to read his testimony below.

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I was born into a Christian family, with a father who is a pastor. All of my earliest memories revolved around God and the Bible, plus sports, as we were also a big sports family. Right from an early age, I remember being fascinated with the Bible stories I’d hear, and it made me love God, who seemed to do so much for us. I was always excited to be in church, read the Bible, and hear stories or watch videos about the Bible.

Around the age of eight or nine, I began to sense the work of the Holy Spirit in my life. I started to understand more clearly who God is and what the Bible means. This led me to want to dedicate my life to Him and be baptized. My dad, wanting to make sure I was doing it for the right reasons and not just because my older brother had just been baptized, told me I should wait a bit to really pray and think about it. After some time, I returned to him with the same conviction, and that summer I was baptized at a church gathering at O’Brien’s Reservoir—a place full of memories for our family.

Around that same time, I began to feel a call to pastoral ministry and to sharing God’s Word with others. Within a year, the calling had grown from a random thought to a constant desire in my mind. Around this time, I also had many people ask if I would be a pastor someday, as they felt like God had placed this calling on my life. I took this as confirmation that what I was thinking wasn’t just a random thought of a child, and it became what I desired to be, to dedicate my life to following God’s will.

However, shortly after this, I started feeling a lot of pressure from the secular world to turn away from God and to follow other things. I started being teased and picked on for how naive I was about a lot of things, and because of my dad being a pastor and me being a Christian. And sadly, instead of standing firm in my faith, I was weak and let myself be led down a path seeking worldly pleasure, where the most important thing in my life became trying to fit in with my peer group. Looking back, I think of it as my Jonah moment since it seemed every time I felt God calling me back to Him, a new temptation came along that caused me to flee from God’s calling in my life.

This led to around 20 years of constant running from God, which led me through many different forms of struggle with addiction. The worst was an 18-year battle with alcohol, where there were times I felt I wouldn’t wake up in the morning. It was about 10 years of a constant battle to quit, but I was never able to. Being trapped inside a prison that was created by my own mind and desires is something I’d never wish upon anyone, and it was a terrifying thing to deal with.

However, through it all, I always felt God near me, and I never completely lost my love for Him. Even though I knew I wasn’t living the life He wanted, I felt the constant draw and call on my life from Him. There were many times during this time I felt the peace and the presence of God with me when I prayed to Him in a situation where I had put myself in a terrible spot and needed a way out, and He always provided a way. After many years of crying out to God, and through many tears and failures, I finally woke up one morning, and all my desire and need for alcohol was gone. Which was a miracle and an answer to a lot of people’s prayers, but especially my own.

After this point, God really started teaching me and showing me errors in my own thinking of what it meant to be a Christian, and that instead of relying on my own will to turn myself to God, I needed to rely on God alone for strength. When I truly understood the Gospel that it was not by anything I did that brought me my salvation, but it was only because of God’s grace and the new heart and faith He gave me that made me His child, it felt like a huge weight was lifted off of me.

Since that moment, I’ve started really diving into the Bible and learning from God’s Word as much as I can. During this time, I met Liane, and she introduced me to the local church she was a member of, which was the first place where I learned to truly study the Bible on a much deeper level. I married her roughly 8 months after we met, and within a week of returning from our honeymoon, we packed all our belongings and moved to Calgary to help plant Knox Baptist Church.

Within the first few weeks in Calgary our pastor, and great friend, Nino asked if I ever felt a calling to be a pastor. I hadn’t felt that call in my life for a number of years at that point, but when he asked, it came rushing back stronger than it ever felt before. Since then, I have dedicated my life to learning as much as I can from God about His Word, be it from extensive reading and meditating on the Bible, or from learning from theologians or from Nino in many different aspects of life and the Bible. All with the intention of growing as much as I can, not only in knowledge, but in the understanding and love of what it means to be a shepherd of God’s Church, to be well-equipped in whatever God calls me, and to be prepared to help whoever God brings into my life. But most importantly, I’ve dedicated my life to pursuing God’s will in my life.

Looking back at time, it still amazes me as I think of some of the things I went through, and often wonder why it took so long to overcome some addictions in my life. However, the beauty and the freedom that God gave to me, and the grip of sin that He saved me from, are things that I truly stand in awe of and am amazed by constantly. I pray that I keep my sights set on God’s Will for my life, and to immerse myself in His love so that I can truly reflect it to others. I can’t wait to see what God has in store for me in the next many years.

Soli Deo Gloria