Congrats to our award winners!

In May, Christian Courier received accolades for our art, poetry, design and writing at the 2024 Canadian Christian Communicators Association Awards. Every year, we compete against publications with circulations ten or twenty times higher than ours and jump for joy when our team pulls off a win!

First place wins

We won first place in the best headline category for this zinger: “The prosperity gospel hates disabled people, but God doesn’t.” Our team also won first in the email newsletter category. This win recognizes the hard work recognizes the hard work Maaike VanderMeer, Angela Reitsma Bick and I have put into our new digital outreach strategy. In August, Canada’s Online News Act blocked our Facebook and Instagram accounts in Canada. Overnight, we lost about a quarter of our website traffic, so we doubled our email newsletter output and prayed for the best. We were amazed when this paid off: within a few weeks, we regained all of our lost traffic! This award is a welcome affirmation after an uncertain season.

Second place wins

You may remember Angela’s March 2023 editorial, “The Problem with Powerful Men.” Her argument that churches need to hold powerful men accountable brought in a landslide of letters both in support and disagreement. Your responses were so strong, Angela felt compelled to write a follow-up editorial titled “Saints in the Family.” Both of these articles (along with your lively responses) secured us a laudable second-place finish in the best editorial category. According to the judge, Angela’s editorial “should be required reading for church councils in similar situations.”

Artist Amanda Le Blanc won second place in the highly competitive original art category for her piece “Gone Fishing.” It was published alongside Maaike’s interview titled “Unsettling Iconography.” The judge wrote “using watercolour in the style of Audobon – generally, a scientific illustrative style – adds a layer of meaning to these works by creating conflict between a gentle medium and a weighty subject. Excellent work.”

Our December photo essay “Eucatastrope in the Holy Land” also won second in its category, featuring art by Sliman Mansour and photos taken by Ineke Metcalf and Leanne VanderMeer. The image that tied it all together and “underscore[d] the newsworthiness of the piece,” according to the judge, was of a bullet casing taken by ActiveStills, a collective of Israeli, Palestinian and international photographers.

Third place wins

Robin and Alba Bick won third place in the student category for their guest editorial “What matters?” in which they lamented the cancellation of a youth conference because some parents disagreed with the choice of keynote speaker. This was the third most popular article on our website last year.

The CCCA awards introduced a new category for poetry submissions in 2023 and both years we’ve been recognized for strong entries. This year D.S. Martin’s poem “As a red-headed finch alights at the feeder,” earned third place. “This poem uses wonderful specific imagery and employs effective use of alliteration and spacing/line breaks,” wrote the judge. “It is beautiful to read aloud and offers a lovely moment of pause and reflection.”

Our June front page featuring art from the Return to Thunder Bay podcast tied for third place in the best front cover category. “The eye-catching anchor photo immediately grabs attention and entices me to delve into the story,” wrote the judge.

Congratulations to all of our winners and a big THANK YOU to our readers for making our creative work possible!