The Goodness Project

The Goodness Project video features a story on how a common interest in sporting competition creates opportunity for young people to learn effective skills for navigating life. That’s all good, but, what I found most inspiring was the notion of mentoring. In this ‘goodness’ story, here was a clear relationship identified where a wiser and experienced individual took an active interest in passing on what he had learned to younger people needing direction. 

Robert Bly’s book ‘The Sibling Society’ laments the loss of mentoring. The great flattening of our world, where the ‘freedom’ to be ourselves eschews structures and ancient ways, in order to be authentic. He argues that no one is being called into a life of growing up, becoming an adult. What we fail to see is that we are always being formed by forces and pressures that overtly, and perhaps more often subtly, have an agenda for us.

The question to be asked is, what will we allow, or choose, to form us? This requires a great deal of careful thought and attention. At Two Rivers Church, we believe that the life of following Jesus benefits greatly from thinking of ourselves as his apprentices, being trained and formed in his ways. That means finding wiser and more experienced mentors to help us in that task.

Are you looking to be formed in a meaningful way? Consider joining us on the journey of being mentored in the life of Jesus for the sake of a healed and beautiful world.

Glen Soderholm 

Watch The Goodness Project video — Shaker and Ayden Adeyanju-Jackson

Shaker talks about starting his basketball training program, creating more courts, and the inspiration he draws from the kids he's worked with that have overcome adversity. Ayden, a basketball player and student at Queen's University, speaks about the role basketball and Shaker have played in his life.

Closer to God

One of the practices we try to encourage at TRC is culture making. Every human is a culture maker, because each one is required to make something out of all the raw materials that life gives. Here is a great reflection on making by Jeff Tweedy the frontman for Wilco:

“I just like writing songs. It’s a natural state to me. I like to believe that most people’s natural state is to be creative. It definitely was when we were kids. When being spontaneously and joyfully creative was just our default setting. As we grow we learn to evaluate and judge. To navigate the world with some discretion. And then we turn on ourselves. Creating can’t just be for the sake of creating any more. It has to be good. Or it has to mean something. We get scared out of our wits by the possibility of someone rejecting our creation.

It bugs me that we get this way. It bugs me a lot. I think just making stuff is important. It doesn’t have to be art. Making something out of your imagination that wasn’t there before you thought it up, and plopped it out in your notebook or your tape recorder, puts you squarely on the side of creation. You’re closer to God. Or at the very least, the concept of the Creator.

If a work of art inspires another work of art, I think it’s accomplished its highest sense of duty. People look for inspiration and hope. And if you have it, you share it. Not for your own glory but because it’s the best thing you can do. It doesn’t belong to just you.

No one has ever laid on their deathbed thinking, ‘Thank God I didn’t make that song. Thank God I didn’t make that piece of art. Thank God I avoided the embarrassment of putting a bad poem into the world.’ Nobody reaches the end of their life and regrets even a single moment of creating something. No matter how shitty or unappreciated that something might have been.”

Jeff Tweedy

Watch The Goodness Project video — Thin Places: Heffernan St. Bridge

The Heffernan Street bridge has a long history dating back to 1914. Its elevated position provides not only an excellent point to look out over the river, but its high arches are beautiful to view from the shore as well, casting impressive reflections into the river below it. The song playing in the background is a cover of the song “Places We Won't Walk” by Bruno Major, performed by Sember Wood.

‘Our Days Have Always Been Running Out’ by Margaret Renkl

(From a New York Times article by Margaret Renkl)

Autumn light is the loveliest light there is. Soft, forgiving, it makes all the world an illuminated dream. Dust motes catch fire, and bright specks drift down from the trees and lift up from the stirred soil, floating over lawns and woodland paths and ordinary roofs and parking lots. It’s an unchoreographed aerial dance, a celebration of what happens when light marries earth and sky. Autumn light always makes me think of fiery motes of chalk dust drifting in the expectant hush of an elementary school classroom during story time, just before the bell rings and sets the children free.

In fall, the nights are cooler and clearer, too, with the harvest moon floating steadfast in the night sky, the most reliable promise in our lives. Along the roadsides, wildflowers are blooming: ironweed and white snakeroot and the glorious goldenrod, all as high as my head and all food for the monarch and painted lady butterflies, and the ruby-throated hummingbirds, on their long migrations. Every kind of New World warbler is on the wing now, heading south like the raptors and the water birds, but they linger a little while before moving on again, and for a time Tennessee is filled with exotic songs.

(If you want to read more, check it out here: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/20/opinion/our-days-have-always-been-running-out.html?referringSource=articleShare )

Watch The Goodness Project video — Stories of Our City: Susana Miranda

Susana talks about being in a touring theatre group in Cuba, the help she received from her friends during her move to Guelph, and her involvement with ballroom dancing.

Cultivating a Community of Resilience

The image of church as garden appeals to me. There’s a lot you can do with that, which is why I like the word cultivate for the kind of thing we are trying to do here. Cultivation is about preparing space and tending to plants in a patient, hopeful, and non-manipulative way. We also know that plants can be bred to be hardier stock when tough conditions threaten. 

We’re all agreed that we are in tough conditions right now. Our intention is to learn from one another, as a community, about what it means to be resilient. Most of us have experience that we can draw from to encourage and teach each other. This will be the theme upon which we will hang talks and discussions in our Living Rooms, Liturgies, and Learning Rooms this Fall. 

Resilience is not synonymous with victory, overcoming, or success as the world defines it, it is about persevering, remaining, and abiding while everything else is falling apart. We do this with courage that God is with us, and that it will form the kind of church we dream of being, and that it will create a haven for all those looking for a way to make sense of their place in the world in turbulent and uncertain days.

Watch The Goodness Project video — Thin Places: Speed River Kayak:

Sharing Goodness

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.)

The Goodness Project Guelph

This summer Two Rivers Church had the pleasure of sponsoring two students, Sember Wood and Ben Wallace, in developing a video series highlighting local stories of goodness in Guelph. Over the next number of weeks and months, we’ll be sharing videos from their series on our blog. Here’s their introduction to the project:

The Goodness Project Guelph

Created by Ben Wallace and Sember Wood

Sponsored by Two Rivers Church

The Goodness Project is a video series about how people connect and feel fully alive in our city. We’ve tried to visit the places that are often overlooked, connect to the spiritual sources of beauty, and make sense of how we can still work towards goodness despite brokenness, injustice, and the negative impacts of a pandemic.

Stories of Our City

Short interviews of people from all walks of life: waitresses, musicians, administrators, dog walkers, and everyone in between. We’ve talked with people from across the city to find out what they love about Guelph, how they’re involved, and where they’re hopeful for change. 

Thin Places

Eight meditative videos that view locations in our city in a new light. Each video starts with a quotation to prompt thought and reflection. Some of the places featured should be familiar to most people who call Guelph home, but some may be more unorthodox. If you watch all eight in order, you should get a sense of time progressing through the day from sunrise to sunset. 

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Beginning Again

We are committing to a consistent presence here with weekly contributions. Stay tuned!