Act Five: Community Initiatives for Young Adults

Act Five as an Educational Project: What’s the Secret Sauce?

Jon Berends — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 15:00:00 +0000

The Aroma of Christ

I was sitting for dinner with two friends who have been supporters of Act Five since its early days. They have served on our board, hosted staff and residents, shared meals with our students, supported Act Five financially and become dear friends.

I asked them,

In five years, what is something you hope doesn’t change about Act Five?

The first spoke of Act Five’s neighbourhood presence and commitment to welcome that shapes the practice of hospitality in our students.

The second referenced the passage in 2 Corinthians 2 where Paul speaks of the aroma of Christ–this intangible thing about those odd people following in the way of Jesus, an aroma that felt inviting to those hungry for the life God offers and abrasive to those clinging to the dark. He said (I’m paraphrasing), “The Aroma of Christ, this is what I see in Act Five. This thing about those who come through that place… I think it’s the aroma of Christ.”

I sat across the table after they both shared, taken aback, humbled and thinking, ‘Wow, they get it. They see.’

Is there a formula?

Sometimes we get questions around the methods of Act Five. What’s the secret sauce? How does one grow the vision and practice of presence? Is there a formula that equals hospitality with neighbours and the aroma of Christ in Act Five graduates?

(Side point: We’ve even had fun asking ChatGPT what makes Act Five distinct, seeing what comes up. Try it sometime and see what you think!)

Maybe the formula is something like this:

Canoe Trip + Intentional Community + Spaghetti = Aroma of Christ

But what about the staff we hire? The rhythms of every morning? How we read scripture? There’s a lot… Let me add a few things to the equation:

Canoe Trip + Farms with poets + Good Bible Study + Prayer + Singing together + dancing in living rooms + El Salvador + Conflict resolution + Doing Dishes + Tech-free days + Volunteering + Storytelling + High character staff = Aroma of Christ + Hospitality

Is that it?

We could keep adding. Things like gardening and making art, or riding bikes and hiking in the forest. We could talk about mentorship, staff training and some really thoughtful assignments. Beyond this level, it is all saturated in the trust that this is the work of the Spirit, that we aren’t God and can’t transform anyone. Let me try one more time (the “…” represents all the things I’m not naming to save space):

(Canoe Trip + Mentorship + Farms with poets + Good Bible Study + … + High character staff) x The Holy Spirit = Aroma of Christ + Hospitality + Lots of other good that grows in our graduates

Is that satisfying?

Could we turn Act Five’s discipleship model into a scalable product with guaranteed success?

Of course not. This is always going to be a somewhat futile endeavour. I still always want to just say, “Come for a meal, maybe for a Spaghetti Wednesday, and I think you might see what I see.”

And yet, there are distinct things about Act Five. Our Biblical Foundations teacher, Jackson, said once,

“If you want to become like the person of Jesus, come to Act Five. And even if you don’t want that, it might just happen to you anyway.”

Act Five is far from perfect and is not a formulaic plug-’n-play transformative experience for everyone, but there’s something good that underpins what happens in this place and I am slowly learning how to articulate this.

Imagination and Formation

Outside of my poor math skills, let me attempt to say a few things.

First, there is substantial vision for a life with God and how we imagine the Kingdom of God. Among our leadership and other staff, there is a deep hunger for God and for the flourishing of a groaning creation. There is a high value for thoughtful biblical literacy within Act Five’s leadership and we want to let our faith and longings for the New Heaven and New Earth saturate every part of our life, heart, mind and work.

We long for shalom and grieve its absence.

As leadership and staff we share these things and work them out with each other regularly.

We see in the person of Jesus and in the biblical story a depth and breadth of love and Lordship that is more than we claim to understand.

Second, there are a few pieces of the underpinning educational philosophy that I’d like to try and name. These have grown through a range of contexts, experiences, and education many of us on staff had prior to Act Five, and it includes the way our learning and formation continues.

Desires, stories, fears, wounds and relationships are the heart of what motivates humans. Not by simple and well-articulated thoughts and statements. Any good marketing professional knows this. Jesus clearly knew this.
Humans change over time, with rhythms that form our habits and our desires. We cannot rush time and process. We need companions and models for the road who hold us, inspire us and are with us.
Ordinary time is the site of most of our formation. Times away from the ordinary are essential to see clearly, to be shaken out of our slumbers, and to experience something new; but this leads to real change when it lands in the ordinary.
Humans are shaped by those with whom they are proximate. Let’s invite proximity with others who are hungry for life and for God, those different from us, mentors older than us, neighbours over shared meals, and those on the margins.
Environments shapes humans. Let’s get to wilderness spaces, shape a home for young adults that considers our pictures of the “good life” as followers of Jesus, spend time on farms and street corners, and visit churches outside our comfort zones.
People are formed through challenge, conflict, defeat, and taking risks with peers and faithful guides along the way. Hard does not necessarily equal bad, and we have work to do in growing these muscles in all of us, not just young people.

Through God's grace

Does this educational philosophy paired with our theological vision equal what grows in our graduates? In some ways, yes.

But again, it’s not enough. We cannot produce our own righteousness or author a transformed and good life for another. This leads to a final note, one worthy of the last word.

Grace.

As staff, we sit on the porch and pray a lot or just sit quietly and watch the trees. We respond to questions with new questions and wonderings. We don’t need to control outcomes and we aren’t afraid of how long processes take in our students (this is all a daily work in progress). We are resiliently committed to hope.

All of this is because we have encountered and trust in the undergirding force of grace and love as the fullness of who God is that holds all of creation, all of us, and the whole story of our world together. We are all on some way of being discipled and formed toward an ever-deepening life with God as those faithfully improvising in this world, held by God’s grace every day.

And so,

Theological Vision + Educational Philosophy + Grace = Hospitality and Aroma of Christ?

Let’s not do that.

Maybe it all still just does come down to Spaghetti Wednesdays. You should come sometime.

In grace,

Jon Berends

Keep exploring

Discover Act Five’s Gap Year and Residency Programs, join our community events or learn more about our mission and vision.

Act Five exists because of the generosity of people who believe in forming young adults for lives of purpose and service. Make a one-time gift or become a monthly supporter.

The post Act Five as an Educational Project: What’s the Secret Sauce? appeared first on Act Five: Community Initiatives for Young Adults.

Ep 56: Campus Ministry, Lament, and Reclaiming Childhood with Sara DeMoor

Madi Eckert — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 21:33:36 +0000

The post Ep 56: Campus Ministry, Lament, and Reclaiming Childhood with Sara DeMoor appeared first on Act Five: Community Initiatives for Young Adults.

Ep 55: Proximity, Calling, and Biking with Jeff Neven

Madi Eckert — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 20:16:19 +0000

The post Ep 55: Proximity, Calling, and Biking with Jeff Neven appeared first on Act Five: Community Initiatives for Young Adults.

Time to Become

Evan Maxwell — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 14:00:00 +0000

Evan Maxwell serves as Admissions Coordinator at Act Five. However, he began his work with Act Five as a Resident Leader. In both of these roles, he has had many opportunities to reflect on how Act Five transforms students, and what may make it different from other programs or pathways.

Rooted and Growing

In the process of looking into how gap year programs ‘market’ themselves or communicate what they do, I found something that made Act Five stand out. Other programs have taglines on their websites or promotional material beckoning you to come ‘do this’, or ‘do more.’ As I was looking through our website, I was struck by our tagline on the home page. It’s not calling you into doing more or being more, instead it’s “Rooted In Faith, Growing In Community, Living With Purpose”. These values and convictions are what people are experiencing and embodying as a part of Act Five’s community – it’s not just a beckon, it’s an invitation to become a person of character, within community.

At Act Five, community isn’t just a by-product of doing a program together. Experiencing the community and the indwelling values are the deepest parts of what Act Five is, and the reason students leave having been transformed.

Through the process of experiential learning, community, and discipleship, people slowly begin to change. When you allow yourself to be a part of something fully, investing time and energy into it, you are slowly shaped by it. It’s like how we start to sound like our friends or family members after being around them for a long time; we are shaped by the people around us.

This is exactly how Jesus helped to shape his disciples. There’s a reason Jesus didn’t create a system where they’d meet him once a month and talk about life and God – transformation takes time, just as community takes time, intentional time.

Building Connection

As a Resident Leader in Act Five, I had time in my afternoons, and I began to try to bake cookies. I am not a natural baker. These skills did not come easily to me. Regardless, I wanted to gain some baking skills, and an ability to eat fresh cookies more often. This meant that I spent a considerable amount of time and ingredients in the main kitchen, focused. It wasn’t muscle memory, so I wasn’t able to put on a podcast or a show in the background. I was just there to bake. This meant that I was approachable to people, especially to students who were just hanging out.

I wasn’t projecting my best self, in fact, it was just the opposite. I was able to be vulnerable; too focused on trying to figure out baking to notice how I might’ve looked. There was more than one batch that I had to use a hammer to separate the cookie-like substance from the baking sheet. I had not yet learned the value of oiling the baking sheet or of using parchment paper. During all these moments I was baking, I had deep, honest conversations with others and we were able to delve into hardships and difficulties the students were wrestling with.

Becoming Transformed

This is just what I was saying earlier about transformation; we don’t become a community by enjoying only peaceful moments together. We become closer, deeper and richer communities by experiencing challenges and overcoming them together, weathering the storms together and giving time to be shaped by the whole of a community and our own place in it.

It is a gift to be able to spend time with people who are after the same thing, and an experience most people don’t have the opportunity to be in every day after their university or college years. And through re-discovering our website’s tag-line and reminiscing on many burnt cookies, I am reminded of how powerful a thing like Act Five’s Gap Year or Residency program can be. When we allow ourselves to be shaped and transformed, and to experience hardships alongside others (even when that hardship is as simple as being bad at baking!), we become more embodied humans, with richer experiences and deeper understanding of what it means to live like Jesus.

Keep Exploring

Discover Act Five’s Gap Year and Residency Programs, join our community events or learn more about our mission and vision.

Act Five exists because of the generosity of people who believe in forming young adults for lives of purpose and service. Make a one-time gift or become a monthly supporter.

The post Time to Become appeared first on Act Five: Community Initiatives for Young Adults.

Ep 54: A Changing Relationship with Hope, The Role of Music, and Becoming a Dad with Eric Fusilier

Madi Eckert — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 14:20:58 +0000

The post Ep 54: A Changing Relationship with Hope, The Role of Music, and Becoming a Dad with Eric Fusilier appeared first on Act Five: Community Initiatives for Young Adults.

Ep 53: Summer Resets, Renovations, and Practicing Hope

Madi Eckert — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 19:55:54 +0000

The post Ep 53: Summer Resets, Renovations, and Practicing Hope appeared first on Act Five: Community Initiatives for Young Adults.

Resurrection Everywhere

Act Five — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 14:00:00 +0000

Jasmine Frost worked as the Renovations Assistant at 75 Blake St. during the summer of 2026. She is currently pursuing a Masters of Theological Studies at Wycliffe University.

I was a stranger to Act Five prior to March of this year. A perpetual student, moving from one MA in philosophy to another in theology, I happened across the summer job posting for a Renovations Assistant. Up to this point, I had been job hunting in Toronto for months to no avail, and my laptop was dangerously close to being hurled across the room at any given moment. But when I learned that Act Five’s vision of being “embodied in place” corresponded with what I had already been planning to research in the Fall, and I got to know the hearts of the staff during the hiring process, I became quietly grateful that God had frustrated my earlier efforts.

I moved into my role ready to ask this wise and wonderful team all sorts of questions during my short time with them, and I anticipated with eagerness the new paradigms and resources I would most certainly come away with (academics compulsively collect such things). And, at the end of this summer of wood and weeds and sandpaper and spraybottles, I am: I have a stack of freshly-penned sticky note quotes and a whole new reading list to pour over from these brilliant individuals I now get to call my friends. But, much to my surprise, these hoarded words did not seem to be the cause of the quiet and hopeful stirring that accompanied me during my time at 75 Blake Street. There was something fresh and mysterious in this place…something that left an impression of deep goodness that my acquisition of aphorisms could not account for.

It wasn’t until a few days ago that I could put words to that fresh and mysterious thing. On August 31st, Wendell Berry died. I have read much less of his work than I’d like to admit, but I have often found myself returning – as I did this week – to his short but provocative poem, “Manifesto: the Mad Farmer Liberation Front”. Its last imperative is, incidentally, an Act Five pillar: “Practice resurrection.” That was it – for the first time in my life, I had been surrounded by people living in a way that consistently sought and presupposed the possibility of life, and perhaps even flourishing, where there was (or could be) death.

It seems to me that this practice of resurrection took at least three forms in the Act Five community. The first was the almost totally habituated commitment of thought and time to the service of populations and plots of land that many would be tempted to forsake: those struggling with addiction or homelessness, community gardens rendered innert by industrial polution, streets whose reputation frightens away investment. Nearly everyone seemed to keep at least one finger on the pulse of the individuals serving these people and places, and to be ready to mention their needs to those who might be able to meet them. These were not automatically regarded as fruitless endeavours, as states of affairs always and only to be grieved.

The second form, perhaps less obvious, was the culture of giving and borrowing within the community. Throughout the summer, I either witnessed or benefitted from the borrowing of a van, a mitre saw, a french press, books, a folding table, and a canoe, among other things. What surprised me the most, though, is that it wasn’t unusual for these exchanges to occur between members of the community who had had only limited interaction with each other before that point. Suspicion and reticence are so often the default posture we are encouraged to have towards even the semi-stranger; this shared willingness to regularly risk disappointment or loss resurrected the possibility of trust within a community of people who don’t all necessarily have existing relationships with each other and who must place trust in the judgement of their peers.

The third form was the culture of invitation – I was constantly being beckoned to share in events, meals, favourite spots in the city. The very act of inviting both presupposes and promises a future: it says to the other, “I am convinced that this thing has enough life, or potential for life, left in it to stake not only my own participation on it, but yours also, so that we might share the delight of that life when we find/co-create it.” From all of these arises a way of being in the world that gently and graciously rejects narratives of terminality.

I, too, was given an opportunity to practice resurrection: I was restoring antique brass doorknobs that had been repeatedly painted over, building new garden beds to take up the mantle of the old ones, etc. But, I had quietly regarded many other deaths as final: for example, the death of the hope of forming a sense of community in my suburban neighbourhood, where arterial streets that stretch on into the horizon generate walls of sound and speed that repel conversation, that send even friendly pedestrians endlessly in opposite directions. The death of our church garden. The death of meaningful career prospects. Are they really, after all my grief, “only asleep”? I suppose that practicing resurrection – practicing both in the sense of inhabiting it beyond contemplation, and of trying again and anew after failure – is the best way to find out. And I thank God that I’m not doing it alone.

Keep Exploring

Discover Act Five’s Gap Year and Residency Programs, join our community events or learn more about our mission and vision.

Act Five exists because of the generosity of people who believe in forming young adults for lives of purpose and service. Make a one-time gift or become a monthly supporter.

The post Resurrection Everywhere appeared first on Act Five: Community Initiatives for Young Adults.

What’s The Rush?

Act Five — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 14:00:00 +0000

Rosanna Soh is the mother to 4 children, 3 of whom are Act Five alumni (Jacob, ’19-’20, Ellie, ’22-’23, Nathaniel, ’23-’24). She also served on the Act Five board from ’24-’25.

Witnessing Change

He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ
Jesus.
— Philippians 1:6

What started as a gap year for one child became something much bigger. Over 4 years, three of our children journeyed through Act Five and changed our family in ways we never expected.

In 2018, when our oldest child, Jacob, was considering post-secondary education, we encouraged him to take a year to explore and gain some independence.
He was only 17, and we thought, “What’s the rush?” We wanted him to take the time to grow both spiritually and personally before stepping into the next season. Our search for a Christian discipleship program led us to Act Five. Inspired by Jon Berend’s vision and hope for Act Five, Jacob enrolled in the 2019 inaugural cohort. He was drawn to community living, the mission trip to Zambia, and a year of hiking and canoeing. In 2021, Ellie joined after witnessing the change in her older brother. Then, the following year, when Nathaniel was considering his next steps, he saw an opportunity for self-development and exciting adventures. While each child entered Act Five with different personalities, strengths, and challenges, all three left with a deeper appreciation for people and connection, more confidence in navigating life, and a stronger understanding of who they are in Christ and how God has uniquely gifted them.

4 Different Experiences

As parents, we hope for many things. At the top of the list is seeing our children
grow into men and women who walk with integrity, love, and grace, and whose lives
reflect a deep devotion to Christ. We pray they will know who they are and bravely live out their faith with conviction and purpose. To our utter disappointment (said with much humour), Act Five did not come with a parenting shortcut, nor was there any magic formula. Instead, it provided them with intentional opportunities to practice responsibility, serve others, think deeply about important questions, and mature through difficulty and encouragement.

Three different children entered 75 Blake Street. Three different experiences
unfolded, but one common thread emerged: a love of adventure, the joy of meaningful
relationships, and a growing desire to look beyond themselves and serve others. We
look back on our journey with Act Five with deep gratitude. The values we longed to instill in our children were not only reinforced but also beautifully reflected in the cultureand heart of the program. However, the impact of Act Five did not stop with the three children who attended. There is one more part of the story. Our fourth child, Abby, chose something different and decided that a gap year was not for her. Yet, in many ways, she still experienced it. She listened to her siblings tell stories from their many trips, share what they were learning, and talk about the highs and lows of community living. Through those stories and in everyday conversations, she caught glimpses of their values. While Abby never walked through the doors of 75 Blake Street, she was still shaped by what happened there.

The Impact of Act Five

As each child continues to grow into adulthood, still discovering their place in this world, we see the seeds that Act Five has planted. The lessons, habits, and experiences from their year have continued to take shape and nudge them forward. In a world full of competing voices and distractions, we notice small moments that show us what has stayed with them and continues to bear fruit. Each in their own way and at their own pace, we see our children invest in relationships and community. We see a willingness to pursue reconciliation, to stop and pay attention, to wonder and appreciate the beauty of God’s creation, and to sit with both the joy and the messiness of life while trusting that God is at work.

In many ways, the impact of Act Five has been quiet and small, yet deeply significant. It did not come in dramatic moments or instant transformation, but through ordinary moments accumulated over time. What started as a gap year for one became something that will forever be a part of our story.

Thank you for joining us in the learning of our community. We regularly publish new reflections and conversations. We’d love to have you continue the journey with us.

Keep Exploring

Discover Act Five’s Gap Year and Residency Programs, join our community events or learn more about our mission and vision.

Act Five exists because of the generosity of people who believe in forming young adults for lives of purpose and service. Make a one-time gift or become a monthly supporter.

The post What’s The Rush? appeared first on Act Five: Community Initiatives for Young Adults.

Following Jesus in the Shadow of Empire – FR. Joash Thomas

Act Five — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 14:00:00 +0000

Born and raised in India, Fr. Joash served as a U.S. political consultant and lobbyist before pivoting to global human rights advocacy. Now based in the Toronto area, he holds a master’s degree in Political Management from The George Washington University, and two master’s degrees from Dallas Theological Seminary in Christian Leadership and Theology. An ordained Priest in the Diocese of St. Anthony, he is the author of the #1 Amazon Canada Bestseller in Liberation Theology, The Justice of Jesus (published by Brazos Press / Baker Publishing).

Fr. Joash serves on the leadership team at St. Stephen’s University as Director of Fundraising & Advancement and Instructor in Public Theology, Peace & Justice. You can keep up with Fr. Joash’s writing on his Bestselling Substack, Masala Chai Theology

Joash was the sixth speaker in Act Five’s 2026 Winter Learning Series.

An Interview with Joash Thomas:

This past Winter Learning Series, Fr. Joash Thomas invited us to consider a challenging question: What does it mean to follow Jesus in a world shaped by power, injustice, and Empire? We caught up with Joash after the event to reflect on the evening and the conversations it sparked.

Your session explored the relationship between Jesus, justice, and Empire. What are the key takeaways you hope people left with?

Jesus lived and taught under the shadow of Empire. Forces of Roman occupation, economic exploitation, and religious collaboration with power shaped the world of the Gospels and continue to shape our own. I wanted to invite people to read the life and teachings of Jesus through the lens of justice, power, and Empire. We need to ask what it means to take Jesus seriously in a postcolonial world marked by domination, inequality, and resistance.

Throughout the evening, we drew on the Gospels alongside postcolonial theology, political theology, liberation theology, and voices from the global Church. Together, these perspectives help us examine how Christians have historically confronted systems of oppression and articulated a vision of justice that challenge empire-shaped ways of thinking and being. Along the way we explored themes such as nonviolence, colonization and decolonization, race, ecumenism and interfaith hospitality, and the Church’s complicity with power. We also looked at both ancient, precolonial Christians and contemporary church leaders who faithfully resisted the empires of their day.

My hope is that people left with tools for critical biblical interpretation, theological reflection, and faithful public engagement. This evening was especially for those wrestling with Christianity’s entanglement with Empire and seeking a more liberative way forward.

Was there anything you wish you had more time to explore?

I’m incredibly grateful for the time we had together. The one thing I wish we’d had more of was Q&A. It was clear that people were wrestling with the content in deeply thoughtful and contemplative ways, and I would have loved to make more space for those conversations.

If I have the opportunity to serve the Act Five community again, I’d love to reorient the second half of the evening toward an extended Q&A session so we could explore those questions together.

I also really appreciated the opportunity to celebrate the Eucharist as a newly ordained priest to close out the Winter Learning Series. It was an incredible way to connect the dots between historical spiritual practices that we often see as ordinary parts of Christianity and the reality that they were always intended as peaceful, nonviolent resistance to Empire. The Eucharist breaks down the divisions that Empire enforced within both the Church and society.

Any final reflections on your time with the Act Five community?

I’ll close by expressing my deep appreciation and gratitude to the Act Five team—not only for creating spaces like this in my home city year after year, but also for the incredible community they steward and lead throughout the year.

It was a gift to share a meal together, and I hope I’ll have the opportunity to continue serving this community as a local priest and resource in the days to come.

As someone who has the privilege of teaching and serving as a missional priest in churches and at conferences around the world, there was something especially meaningful about the final night of the 2026 Winter Learning Series.

Thank you for joining us in the learning of our community. We publish new reflections and conversations every other week. We’d love to have you continue the journey with us.

keep exploring

Discover Act Five’s Gap Year and Residency Programs, join our community events or learn more about our mission and vision.

Act Five exists because of the generosity of people who believe in forming young adults for lives of purpose and service. Make a one-time gift or become a monthly supporter.

The post Following Jesus in the Shadow of Empire – FR. Joash Thomas appeared first on Act Five: Community Initiatives for Young Adults.

Where Language Falls Short – Angela Reitsma Bick

Act Five — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 14:00:00 +0000

Angela Reitsma Bick is a writer, speaker, and co-author of Blessed are the Undone: Testimonies of the Quiet Deconstruction of Faith in Canada (New Leaf, 2024). She teaches through the ICS’s Free to be Faithful program – dialogue-driven seminars that explore powerful themes of faith, deconstruction and hope in contemporary music and literature. In March 2026, Blessed are the Undone was released as an audiobook and is now available on more than 30 platforms.

Angela was the fifth speaker in Act Five’s 2026 Winter Learning Series.

Bearing Witness

I was driving to church last week just slightly over the speed limit, and imagining the conversation I’d have with the police when I got pulled over.

“No time to talk – sorry officer! I have to be at church for 10 a.m.!”

“That’s no excuse. Plus, it’s not Sunday.”

“I know. My friend is being . . . excommunicated, and I have to be there.”

Explaining excommunication would make me even more late, and it’s not really the right word for this scenario anyway – so that would be doubly frustrating.

But sometimes you drive too fast on a Tuesday morning, and walk in after a regional church meeting has already started, and slide into the pew beside your friend and her husband just in time to hear the final stage of her departure as a pastor in this denomination get announced as an item on the agenda, like it’s no big deal. Though she had already been ordained as a minister in a different denomination, making this more or less a formality, still . . . there are good (and bad) ways to say good-bye. It actually was a big deal. A debate and then a vote were going to impact the wording (not to mention the experience) of her official departure. And I wanted to hear all of it, even though I had no influence or role to play, other than to bear witness.

That’s why I was speeding.

It would have been pretty hard to summarize to the police.

And it’s also why I’ve started to think more about the places where language falls short.

It’s falling short in the denomination of my childhood and in my home church. It’s falling short in the conversations I’m having with friends and family, and in the ones I’m overhearing. There are membership classes and welcome cards for new people visiting church. What’s being offered to the people who are leaving?

Exit Interviews

In 2021, I began a research project with Peter Schuurman that looked for patterns contributing to decades of church decline in Canada. We interviewed 28 Canadians who self-identified as having gone through the experience of faith deconstruction, which we defined as having your affiliation with God, the Bible and the Christian faith fall apart, usually prompted by failures of the Church, while simultaneously being distanced from your religious family, community and tradition.

Our findings, published in Blessed are the Undone: Testimonies of the Quiet Deconstruction of Faith in Canada (New Leaf, 2024), did identify common themes in the experiences of Canadians going through faith deconstruction. But we added a second layer, which is that the stories of individuals deconstructing their faith are a prophetic call for the Church-with-a-capital-C to own up to its failures and seek restoration. Our book frames deconstruction as normative, arguing that people of faith are perpetually constructing, deconstructing and reconstructing various beliefs. Put simply, religion is a human activity lived out by regular people, trusting in God’s grace for the bits we get wrong. And – thank the Lord! — deconstruction isn’t the end of the story for a God who makes all things new.

Still, there are good (and bad) ways to say good-bye. “Cleaning up the membership list” is the closest thing I can think of to excommunication in my denomination; the phrase is shorthand for asking members with lapsed attendance to return or be deleted. There’s no easy category for hurt, questions, or concerns. I know that “excommunicate” has to do with communion, but I can’t help but hear in that word a kind of communication ban as well. Ex-member? No communication. Have you ever seen a good-bye package, round of applause or farewell prayer for departing members? When it comes to leave-taking, I wonder if even our theology falls short. And maybe naming that is a good place to start.

Sometimes you drive too fast on a Tuesday morning, and arrive a little late, and slide into the booth at a coffee shop where you’ve agreed to meet a friend. You don’t have an agenda or arguments lined up; you’re just going to say, “I haven’t seen you in a while. How are things going?”

And you’ll stay to hear it all.

Even if you have no influence or role to play, other than to bear witness.

Continue to follow along with us as we invite you into the learning of our community. We will share more reflections from speakers of this past year’s Winter Learning Series in the weeks to come, and the 2027 Winter Learning Series is already in the works!

Keep Exploring!

Discover Act Five’s Gap Year and Residency Programs, join our community events or learn more about our mission and vision.

Act Five exists because of the generosity of people who believe in forming young adults for lives of purpose and service. Make a one-time gift or become a monthly supporter.

The post Where Language Falls Short – Angela Reitsma Bick appeared first on Act Five: Community Initiatives for Young Adults.