In 2018, Jon moved to Hamilton to develop and launch Act Five. He lives here with his wife, Aimee, and their three young children, growing to love this place and be loved by the community here. Along with a background in high school education and a Master’s in Theological Studies, Jon brings to Act Five a love for young people, creative approaches to education, adventures in the wilderness and all that community life has to offer. Seeing Act Five grow in new directions these past few years has been amazing to witness, and Jon is grateful and excited to see what God has in store for more students, residents, and other communities inspired by what is happening here at Blake St. Jon was the first speaker in Act Five’s 2026 Winter Learning Series.
Stories To Begin the 2026 Winter Learning Series
Be wary of making heroes of humans.
We are walking a dangerous road when we turn the real, earthy, honest lives of those we celebrate, whether living or dead, into pinnacle forms of the faithful Christian life.
When we do this we risk misplacing our hope on versions of what it means to be human that are less than the reality of what it means to be human. We see these stories play out all the time. Modern day heroes live in front of crowds as reduced and archetypal models of what we believe we need or want showing us lives that are deemed good, faithful, “impactful”. Either an inevitable story of moral failure comes that seemingly necessitates his or her followers to either cancel the leader or justify the failure; or this point does not come and we are permitted to continue elevating a less-than-human form of the hero.
The problem here is beyond what this requires of this individual and what it does to his or her soul and story, but of what it is doing to our imagination around what it means to be human and to walk with God in this world. This marks the mess and dynamism of real life as fundamentally a problem to be solved. This in turn costs our souls, our own humanness and our ability to live well within communities. If this is what the good life should look like, then the mess of my own life, the mess of others around me, and the (messy?) uncontrollable ways of God become unacceptable.
In light of this, as I presented on the Clapham community and Arvo Pärt to open the 2026 Winter Learning Series, I felt the need to protect both of these stories from being heard and processed through the default lens of reducing them into flattened heroes.
Perhaps some of this is semantics. If we are to use the word “hero”, then heroes must be allowed to have mixed motives and blind spots, those who likely left wounds amidst the good of their story. All of us are the same, more collections of fragments than the kind of congruent whole people we wish to be.
On these conditions, with all this said, I loved getting to talk about the two stories I chose to open our learning series this past year.
I entered these stories as a learner. I am not a historian nor a scholar; I was a camp counselor turned high school science teacher turned theology student turned Act Five director.
The Clapham Community
The Clapham Community (Sect)
I was first inspired by the 18th/19th Century’s Clapham community (or Sect) from a high school history teacher and colleague of mine. His name is Harvey and he is one of the best history teachers I know. I heard him speak of this community and was captivated. I wanted to learn more and invite others into their story.
This community that included William Wilberforce, Hannah More and many others each encountered God in moments of deep personal transformation, they saw their positions of influence as opportunity, and they fostered a deep and wide vision that held everything from moral reform to missional fervour to their own sanctification. They imagined rivers of justice flowing among the poor, slave, woman, child, sick, prisoner and beast. They shaped paths of education, used the arts to shape culture, and they patiently worked to change policy at the highest levels of government. They were way ahead of their time, worked this all out in embodied community, and quite literally changed the world as they abolished the slave trade, started what became the seeds of free public education, reformed healthcare systems and modes of global missions against the harm of colonial bulldozing of indigenous culture, and even started the SPCA.
I mean, if there are to be heroes, this is it.
They were also flawed. They enjoyed their wealth. They experienced division in their community. They were far more for the poor than they were alongside the poor. They had harsh words for folks who sounded too revolutionary.
Their story matters. They tried with some real chutzpah, they gave their life to the causes the prophets and Jesus appear to take seriously, and they did so in no small part because of their communities that held them, and they were humble in their daily need for a deep and real grace.
I invite you to learn more of their story. You can find good books on Hannah More and William Wilberforce, key members of the Clapham community, and the characters of this group go far beyond.
Arvo Pärt
Arvo Pärt is about as close as someone can come to being a hero of mine. I had been captivated by him since he was introduced to me by my partner, Aimee, herself a brilliant musician, researcher, psychotherapist, learner and one who sees beyond most the possibility for the arts to shape and heal our world.
Pärt is an Estonian composer of the 20th Century who experienced both the Nazi and Soviet regimes of oppression on his people and his family, and whose story of transformation is encountered in watching how his music changed over time. He wrote with powerful conviction that gave voice to the gospel of a suffering God in the face of Soviet censorship. Most powerfully to his story, he found himself in an 8 year season where he encountered the depths of darkness; there, eventually, he discovered a light at the very heart of the deepest dark, where he encountered the simplest form of love that then transformed him and returned him to composing something new, cruciform in shape, and gentle in the face of the full force of empire. His story is powerful and his music is even more so.
I sought to tell a piece of his story and play a piece of his later music. The recording of our piece is available for you to watch / hear; it is what it is. What I would encourage is for you to listen to the story and then take a minute to listen to a proper recording of Spiegel Im Spiegel if you have the capacity to do so.
In some ways, this piece and Pärt’s story is a truer kind of heroism we perhaps can allow to shape our imaginations. It is the way that is low, encountering God in the dark, instead of versions of heroes that can wow a crowd and make us feel like we are winning some war we were never meant to be fighting as Christians. The piece, Spiegel Im Spiegel, can hardly be received without it moving our hearts to find rest in God while forming our loves more deeply toward our neighbour.
Whether we use the language of hero or not, I invite us to consider what we imagine when we picture the faithful life or a life worth telling through story. My hope in offering these two stories was, and is, to move the conversation in a fruitful direction.
https://youtu.be/TJ6Mzvh3XCc?si=mNzLquN7_QROvcPJ
