Community Spotlight · Steve Rogers
Steve Rogers & Into the Room | The More I Know, The Less Worthy I am
Steve Rogers has been part of Needle's Eye since the late 1990s, but the story he tells starts with a card on a table. In 2003, at a Needle's Eye anniversary dinner, Steve filled it out almost on a whim, asking for a mentor. That small decision changed the shape of his life.
Buddy, one of the ministry's leaders, called him personally and connected him with a mentor named Bill, who recommended William Barclay's Daily Study Bible on the Gospel of Mark over lunch. Steve picked up a copy on the way back to work and couldn't stop reading. He bought the next volume, and the next, until his wife Kathy gave him the whole Barclay New Testament set for Christmas. For a couple of years, that's simply what he did: read, read, read. That reading turned into community. In 2004, Buddy started a small group that Steve joined, then handed him leadership six weeks in. A few years later, Buddy asked him to step away and start an entirely new group, the one Steve still leads today.
Ask Steve about God's faithfulness, and two moments come up almost immediately. The first was 1996. After working for a large accounting firm, a rough season in his late twenties, and three years teaching school, financial pressure pushed him back into corporate work. He was waiting on an opening at Dominion, the utility he used to audit, and the process dragged for months. One day, sitting in his office, he closed the door and prayed, "God, if it's your will, let me know." He opened the door. The phone rang. It was Dominion, with the job, a company that would go on to put him, as he says, "in touch with so many believers."
The second came in 2010. Steve's daughter, a high school senior, was on a field trip in Staunton when she fell, hit her head, and went into a seizure. She was airlifted to VCU with bleeding in her brain. That evening, Steve sat in the hospital cafeteria with a close friend. A stranger walked up, asked if Steve read the Bible, said "God is good," and started to walk away, then turned back and asked, unprompted, whether Steve had a child in the hospital with a head injury. He said "God is good" again and walked off, then returned a third time and told Steve to read Psalm 91 every day until "she" came home, correctly naming his daughter's gender without ever being told. Steve read it every day. She fully recovered. Psalm 91 has been his anchor ever since.
The years around those two moments were hard ones too, with several hills and valleys along the way. What Steve didn't see until later was how much anger he'd absorbed as the protector holding his family together through it all. That weight didn't lift in a moment. It lifted, unexpectedly, through a book.
Steve retired from a long CPA career in 2016, including eight years as Dominion's corporate controller, specifically to write. He spent the first stretch practicing: short stories, an unpublished manuscript, drafts working out something he couldn't yet name. Then came a flight to Israel he'd almost skipped. Somewhere over the Atlantic, a question landed in his head: what would happen to an alcoholic, fresh out of rehab, forced to take this same Holy Land trip? He invented the character on the spot and journaled in his voice through every stop. When Kathy asked what he'd been doing and he said it wasn't his genre, she pushed back: "You're not published yet, you don't have a genre." He wrote the book anyway. It became Into the Room, the first of what's now a trilogy.
It was only later, prepping to speak about the book, that Steve realized he wasn't angry anymore. Writing it had, in his words, "cleaned out my heart." Since then, his spiritual journey has moved on a different axis, less about what he wants to do, more about simply asking where God wants him. That posture shows up everywhere now: in a workplace philosophy of "I don't need a human resources manual, all I need is the golden rule," in a growing confidence to talk openly about his faith, and in the course he now teaches for Christian authors, Who Do We Write For? He also screens manuscripts part-time for a publisher, jokingly calling himself the "acquisitions janitor," and speaks whenever he's asked.
Through it all, Steve keeps coming back to Needle's Eye, not just for the Bible study he still leads, but because he's watched what it means for a ministry to survive into a second generation. He stays involved because he remembers having the need himself, and wants that door open for whoever's next. None of it, he believes, would have happened if he hadn't filled out that little card decades ago.
Want to read Steve's story for yourself? Pick up a copy of Into the Room here!