I have a lot of internal duplicate content as intros to a series of articles, is this bad?

[ThridHour]

On a site that I'm working on there is a series of posts with the same beginning to their titles. All of the titles start with Christ's Church ("Mormons"):

And then about the first four paragraphs of all these posts is exactly the same, it is just explaining this series of posts. I'll link to a couple of examples so you know what I'm talking about. I know there are several other problems with these posts/site but I am specifically curious about the partial duplicate title and the first few paragraphs being duplicate.

http://www.mormonchurch.com/3259/christs-church-mormons-helping-out-a-friend

http://www.mormonchurch.com/2969/christs-church-mormon-happiness-is-found-only-through-christ

There are about 30 posts similar to these. Thank you, I look forward to your responses.

[Jonathan1979]

The pages are not loading for me.  Looks like the server is having a few problems.

[ThridHour]

Is it still giving you problems? Does anyone else have this problem?

[Linda-Vassily]

They load for me.

Would it be possible to put your introductory material as footnotes, after the articles, rather than at the beginning? Google tends to give "above the fold" material more weight.

[nortecit]

Perhaps reduce it down to a couple of lines - with a link to another page with the explanation. Also of the two pages you gave one has the content in italics, the other not. Whilst nothing to do with SEO - it just stood out.

[KaneJamison]

4 paragraphs is a bit much, but as long as there's significant content after that (more than 4 paragraphs) then you should be fine. The partial title shouldn't be an issue either.