Good Work is the convergence of two impulses.
First, we wanted to take what we’d been taught about God, the world, and history, and push it into areas of life outside of the church and the classroom. Jesus Christ died and came back to life and sits at His Father’s side, ruling the world. Through His blood, we are saved to do the work He prepared for us, which includes everything from education to government to feeding your family on a budget. When Jesus returns, He will ask us to give an account for how we handled His affairs. In other words, the world is our responsibility to learn about and care for with diligence and humility. We our not saved by our work, but we are saved to do Good Work. We wanted to create a publication that showed people what that Good Work looked like and inspired them to do it themselves.
The second impulse came in 2020, when we finally gave up on social media. To paraphrase Donald Knuth, “Social media is great for people who need to stay on top of things; I want to get to the bottom of things.” We wanted time to think and observe and write without the pressure of the internet’s eternal Now. We thought other people would want that, too, and we were right. To those used to the thin soup of social media, reading a print magazine is like biting into a piece of fried chicken. More work, but infinitely more satisfying.
It’s funny that such a home-spun publication can feel so radical. We’re not advocating revolution or taking down “the Man.” We don’t tackle current events. Mostly we print creative writing and poems, with the occasional critical essay. We hope that the content will be just as fresh in five years as it is today. Our dream is that people will collect them the way they used to hoard old copies of National Geographic or Reader’s Digest.
It’s important to us that Good Work remain free. Right now, the zine is a gift from us to our readers, and we’d to keep it that way.
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Good Work 