I think it is often confusing to know what is good, and what isn’t. Have you ever heard someone say they loved some Netflix series, and inside you are thinking – I thought that was rubbish!
But in the end, what is good is not just personal taste, it is adjudicated by some standard or value we trust. Those standards and values are up for grabs in our culture; we are deeply divided about what is good and bad, wrong or right, oppressive or anti-oppressive, because there are many distortions of what is good that compete to shape our judgement.
The sponsorship of The Goodness Project this summer was a way in which we as a faith community sought to discern where goodness was evident in the ordinary lives of our Guelph neighbours and citizens. Identifying, recording, and publishing those stories is a way of helping shape a robust and healthy vision of what it means to be a good human in our community!
I’ve always been intrigued by the story where Jesus is called good teacher by the rich ruler and Jesus says to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.” (Luke 18: 18-19) For followers of Jesus, that’s our starting place – the good God seen in Jesus. He was deflecting attention from himself in this encounter, but in the end, he became the standard by which we judge what is good and what is not. Our ‘project’ so to speak, is to attend to his life, learn and share his goodness, then celebrate and honour where it is played out every day in our world.
Watch the Goodness Project video featuring our very own John Martin-Holmes:
(Many thanks to Ben Wallace, Sember Wood, and Dan Veldhuis for their great energy and gifts in putting the whole project together.)