Sermon transcript:
Good morning. I want to thank Rev. Gaspar and you, the congregation of Parkminster, for this opportunity to share a little about my faith journey, relate it to where I stand now, and reflect on how it has empowered me.
Before I can share my faith journey, I need to share a little bit about Waterloo Wayside. This approach feels a little bit like putting the cart before the horse, because Wayside in many ways is the product of that journey. But in reflection, Wayside has been the horse that has pulled me for the last 10 years, so in fact talking about it first, does put the horse in front of the cart!
Waterloo Wayside started out as a set of independent outreach projects at Emmanuel United Church. The Bridgeport Café started in 2007, almost 20 years ago in partnership with the Working Centre. Its origin story was pretty humble, not much more than a pot of coffee and a few boxes of cellophane-wrapped pastries in a church gymnasium. But what made it special, and I have to credit the Working Centre for this, was that it was based on dignity and respect. Anyone who walked through the doors of the Café was asked their name, invited to sit down or help and join everyone else there. Sometimes there would be a euchre game, other times, somebody would bring in a DVD from the library and we would watch it. The bottom line was that the Café was a welcoming and inclusive space where people could connect as peers.
Following that success, Emmanuel responded to the needs it discovered through its new community connections. A clothing redistribution program was started that we called Sharewear, borrowing off of the technology homonym of software that is openly shared. Again, it had a simple start with a few bins and racks with coat hangers to organize donations until someone from the Café found something they liked and was close to fitting them.
In a similar way, the Food Bag Program started. In partnership with the Waterloo Regional Food Bank, the Food Bag Program was an authorized depot charged with issuing a one-day emergency supply of food in a bag. There was a learning curve to that program as well, as demonstrated by one of the funniest stories from the first days of the program. It turned out that the cans of food that we had been so happy to distribute couldn’t be opened by many of our guests, because they didn’t own can openers. Thankfully, some generous souls ran out to a store so that we could hand out can openers to anyone who needed them, but it really demonstrated the lived experience gap between the organizers and those facing food insecurity.
In 2014, in a moment of desperation and clarity (it’s funny how those states of being occur at the same time), Emmanuel realized that it was no longer the resource-rich church of the past and it needed to create a path for the broader community to join in our work. We rebranded that set of programs — the Bridgeport Café, Sharewear and the Food Bag Program — as Waterloo Wayside, a secular, emerging organization that was stepping outside the faith shadow at Emmanuel.
And that’s when a lot of the magic happened. The community embraced Wayside. Businesses, neighbours, and the universities forged working relationships with the Wayside community. One unexpected result was that, by running the programs outside of a faith context, other churches started to join our work. Knowing that we were not trying to use our community space to proselytize the participants allowed churches to embrace the work and the Wayside community.
Fast forward to today: Waterloo Wayside is a registered charity with almost one hundred volunteers from the neighbourhood, local churches, and the universities, delivering an oversized impact in Uptown Waterloo. In 2025 alone we served or distributed over 200,000 pounds of food valued at over $750,000. We supported over 2000 individuals and families, with over 500 new families supported in 2025 alone.
I. The Evolution of a Relationship
So what kind of faith journey ends in being part of Waterloo Wayside? As mentioned in my introduction, I have had a life long association with the United Church. I can honestly say that the values and principles that I hold most closely were born out of that connection.
My faith journey probably followed the same trajectory as many of you. God was a benevolent old man in the sky, much in the same way that Santa was a benevolent old man that delivered toys at Christmas. My childhood prayers would be directed and shaped by that image, probably longer than I would want to admit.
Eventually, I started to think of God in a more abstract way, as a spirit, still in the sky but less closely bound to anthropomorphic imagery. The complexity of life, war, death, and suffering was reflected in this idea that God was present but not necessarily in complete control or even understanding of the situation down here on earth.
I am happy to report that I didn’t go through a faithless phase in my years studying science and engineering. Unlike many others, I really did believe that there was a space where science and faith could coexist, much the way that the three blind men could experience the elephant.
As I entered full adulthood, I did start to question the relationship between faith and religion. You know the drill. Heated meetings going late into the night related to the colour of the stage drapes. My one resolution was to make sure that I never let religion get in the way of serving out my faith.
Another bump along the way in my faith journey was reconciling the exclusiveness that formal religions claimed in their relationship with God. How could any faith tradition claim that? Growing up in northern Ontario, I was exposed to a world that included First Nations spiritual traditions and artifacts, making it even harder to understand how Christianity could claim the exclusive path to God. I have actually had a number of interesting conversations with Rev. Gaspar about this very thing. With his help, I have come to an understanding that all faith traditions are valid and useful in giving us access to a vocabulary and reality construct to experience the spiritual realm. Just as every language gives us words to describe numbers and reach the same mathematical truths, every faith tradition gives us a unique vocabulary to reach the same Divine.
And this is that path that got me to where I am today, accepting God as an omni-present force of inclusive love that permeates this world and each one of us. It is this unstructured, questioning and inclusive view of of God that opened me up to the possibility of Waterloo Wayside.
II. The Architectural Shift: Attractional vs. Missional
In 2013, as I worked with Rev. Bruce Sweet at Emmanuel United Church to create the underpinnings of Waterloo Wayside, we stumbled across research and writing about church models. We learned about the Attractional model, which was based on the understanding that God was in our church building and as Christians, we were called to bring people into the building to experience God. This 500-year old model was really effective until the last 50 years or so.
In contrast, we learned about something called Missional church, in which the underlying premise is that God is always working in the world and that we are called to join that work. A lot of things really clicked once I starting thinking about all the implications of missional church.
First, how could we be so presumptuous to think that God was only in our building? There was a real comfort in acknowledging that God is always working in the world, regardless of what we are doing.
Second, the idea of missional church releases God from Sunday mornings in a pew. Knowing that God is always working in the world forces us to be always looking. Faith is transformed into an active exercise. Instead of going out Sunday morning to be “churched” by just sitting passively to receive a message, missional church demands that we are looking for God in the world. Missional church transforms “hosting God” into “hunting for God”.
And in looking for God working in the world, you start to see things. There are relationships that embody a spiritual love that aren’t necessarily recognized in the church but I have come to know as “God” relationships. Examples include the relationship between a person and their dog or cat, the relationship between a grandparent and grandchild, the relationship between close neighbours who support each other, or even the relationship between two people experiencing each other’s company in a coffee shop even if they don’t know each others name.
III. The Theology of ABCD
In 2014, Waterloo Wayside was officially launched and promoted to the KW area as an emerging secular organization that found creative ways to bring groups together for positive change. We started an after school Math program that connected university students with children aged 11-13. The junior high students learned arithmetic and the university students, many suffering from burnout, stress and self-doubt became heroes in the eyes of those children for 4 hours a week. All Wayside had to do was create the space.
We did something similar with an Adopt A Grandparent program, pairing lonely seniors with high-energy children to sit together while the Waterloo Public Library ran an activity. Again, all Wayside had to do was create the space.
After seeing this same pattern over and over, we started to research and found something called Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD). In traditional community development models, an inventory of deficits like illiteracy, diabetes, or domestic abuse is identified and then paid professionals are brought in from outside the community to “fix” people. This approach can sometimes work but invariably, once the money dries up and the professionals leave, the community is in the same state it was at the beginning. In contrast, ABCD develops inventories of gifts, skills, and talents that the community already has and then creates a space for people or groups with complementary needs and assets to connect.
And if the relationships that form through ABCD sound like God relationships, it’s not an accident or coincidence; they are. By building interconnected, interdependent and resilient communities we are working in the realm of the Divine.
There are two core principles associated with ABCD that help make that happen. First, connections are relational; they are liminal and change over time based on the context of the situation and needs and abilities of the participants. A parent joining a support group for children with autism is on the receiving end when they arrive at the group while years later after developing and applying tools and strategies they start supporting the new parents. That’s how a relational connection works and it’s in contrast to a transactional connection, which is time-constrained with a defined flow or exchange of services or goods for money and under a prescribed set of conditions.
The second principle of ABCD is that relationships are based on reciprocity. The idea is that the benefits flow both ways, ensuring the everyone retains their dignity and is equally invested in the relationship. It is when I encounter relational, reciprocal connections, that I find those “God relationships”.
IV. Scriptual Anchor: Mary and Martha
To bring this all together, I want to look at a familiar story through this missional, ABCD lens: the story of Mary and Martha from the Gospel of Luke. Most of us know the setup: Martha is in the kitchen, working tirelessly to be a good host. She is the “service provider”—focused on the tasks, the meal, and the physical needs of her guests. Across the room, her sister Mary is simply sitting at the feet of Jesus, listening and connecting. Martha eventually snaps. She asks Jesus to tell Mary to get up and help. But Jesus offers a surprising redirection. He tells her, “Martha, you are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen the better part.” Through my journey with Wayside, I’ve realized that Jesus wasn’t criticizing the work; full disclosure: there would be no Wayside without the “work” of cooking and cleaning that creates that community space; Jesus was criticizing the priority of the transaction over the relationship.
I saw this “better part” in action just this month at our Bridgeport Café. I was sitting at one of the last open tables around closing time. I had been busy all day and had to skip lunch. The Café is a great fallback on those days because it’s open until 3pm. All the tables were empty except two. One had a middle-aged man looking down and focused on eating the food on his tray.
The other table had Mike and Henry. Mike is a quiet senior who shared with me that he likes to stop by the Café to beat the loneliness of living alone, just to talk about current events and sometimes politics. Henry is a retired math teacher with a big spirit but failing body that requires a lot of pain management. I chose to sit with Mike and Henry because I wanted to catch up with them while eating my bowl of chili.
About 5 minutes into my visit, one of the guests at the Café, who had been sitting on a couch along the wall stood up and approached me, yelling that he was the second coming of Christ and that I had to kneel before him. While I was speaking calmly to the man, I was interrupted by Henry who knew this gentleman and had even taught him Grade 11 math! Henry was able to calm the man down in just a minute or two and even got him to sit at one of the two empty chairs at our table.
As you can imagine, the mood at the table was a little tense but quiet. And then something remarkable happened that I still can’t explain: that person sitting alone at the next table simply picked up his tray, sat with us, in the last empty chair, and continued eating. He didn’t say a word; he was just content to be with us.
And that to me was the God moment. Our table was complete. Each one sitting at the table was broken in someway but together we were whole. None of us could be “fixed”. We weren’t thinking about unrealistic, aspirational fixes for our physical or mental ailments. We were just content to be together and complete. It took several minutes of quiet before any of us decided to speak.
In that moment, that unnamed man sitting alone chose “the better part.” He recognized that what was needed wasn’t a service, but a presence. He turned a moment of crisis into a “God-relationship” simply by sharing the space. When we prioritize the “Mary” moments of connection, we create a space where dignity isn’t something we give to someone—it’s something we discover together.
V. Closing
What I have shared with you has taken me 60 years to learn, understand and apply. I can completely understand if some of what I have shared has pushed you into an uncomfortable space or maybe pushed you out of a comfortable place! I know my journey has pushed me in some difficult places. I can offer you this: once you can regularly see God working in the world and understand that our relationships and connections with others are Holy, the solution space for today’s problems explodes. You no longer look at someone living unsheltered as someone who only needs housing but someone who needs a God relationship, and you have the tools to begin that connection. This is not a silver bullet. It took me years of sitting and visiting at the Bridgeport Café before I fully understood my privilege, and learned how to be present for others. But on the other side of that was a world that has hope, belonging and a path for the future.
— David Petro