Angela’s Articles: 10 Years of Grace

Frank McCourt won the Pulitzer Prize for his memoir of an impoverished childhood in Angela’s Ashes. If they gave awards to a writer who took a newspaper on the brink of folding, and with a shoestring budget, turned it into a beautiful and respectable journalistic community, I would nominate our own CC editor Angela Reitsma Bick. 

Now CC has a history of inventive editors, but as we round Angela’s 10-year anniversary with CC I want to take stock of a few of her accomplishments that have graced the paper.

When Angela began in January 2009, the board told her that subscriptions were plunging and the paper might fold in six months. Other print-based journals were already shutting down their presses, and things looked bleak. Yet somehow Angela and her crew steadied the subscriptions and CC is still here 10 years later!

What did she do? Here are a few things you may have noticed. There is a greater diversity of writers – more women writers, more younger writers, more writers from different backgrounds across Canada, and more writers from circles beyond the Christian Reformed Church. Angela also brought a fresh professionalism to the paper – careful attention to ethics, boundaries, and a tone that eschewed sensationalizing and probed controversial issues in a way that is bold, fair and credible. With her team, she experimented with more graphics, more colour, shorter articles, more interactive material and better readability overall. 

It was under Angela’s direction that our online presence first really developed – the webpage, social media and online donations. This was a bold step that has brought our “News, Clues, and Kingdom Views” to thousands of people who would never see a CC in print.

Behind the scenes
Angela has put CC on the national map in a new way: she has made sure CC writers and their columns have been featured at journalism awards conferences. CC writers have thus won numerous awards, including Angela herself on many occasions. One of her more significant awards was the A.C. Forrest Memorial Award in 2016 for “The Stained-Glass Ceiling: 100 Ordained Women in CRC Ministry Today.”

Angela’s writing is always meaningful and poignant, and she has a way of combining anecdotes and issues into prose that is eminently readable and profound at the same time. CC staff testified to her “excellent writing” as well as her “well-grounded Biblical perspective.” 

A contributing editor told me “she’s a quiet, servant-style leader, which is incredibly refreshing in an age of too much pomp, bombast and ego.” She knows how to smell out a good story, help a writer improve; she encourages risk-taking and creativity in “an unassuming and invitingly collaborative way.”

Angela is a behind-the-scenes organiser and readers can only imagine the work she pours into each issue. She tells me she gets about 50-80 emails a day, and is always juggling the next three issues in her mind as she manages her home and three children. Yet she remains “kind and gracious,” as another contributing editor testified. One staff member summed it all up: “Angela is amazing!”

This may be a little unorthodox, but I’d like to make a request of our readers. If you have been touched by this paper in any way, please send a letter to our wonderful editor on this her 10th anniversary. And if you have a cottage or timeshare that you’d be willing to offer to her family, she is worth it. Seriously. In a world of “post-truth,” CC remains dedicated to “truth and good writing” as Jim Dekker says. Cal Seerveld called CC “redemptive journalism.”

I asked Angela what warms her heart the most about the paper. “A real sense that God cares about CC,” she replied. “We report on God’s renewing work in creation, but we’re also somehow a part of that.” Yes, God has sustained CC in nothing short of miraculous ways, and we give thanks to God for the graces of Angela these past 10 years.