Dear Bert,

I’m stepping down as Editor of Christian Courier (CC) in a few months. Since you were the one who hired me back in 2008, I thought you’d like to know. After Christmas, Meghan and Maaike will be taking over as co-editors – part of a succession plan that’s been in the works for a while. You’d have fun meeting Meghan & Maaike! That upcoming transition, along with CC’s 80th anniversary, is stirring up a flood of memories.

Remember the first time we met? You served mint tea while Syl grilled me about current events and Reformed doctrine. Part job interview, part classical exam. CC had no website at the time. Subscriptions were down. The paper was black and white with one spot colour for headlines.

“Rose and Ineke are the engine of CC,” you said. It’s true: these days, five people divvy up the work those two women did faithfully for so many years. Of course, you didn’t mention one crucial detail when you hired me – that the Board thought CC would fold within six months. A few engine lights were blinking, I guess. But even if I didn’t know the whole story, I knew the gist. Who works for a newspaper in the digital age, anyway? Who reads one?

January 2009. Here’s the title of my first front page story: “Uncertain future, certainty of God.” It was an interview I did with a member of the Canadian Armed Forces and his family. As far as opening hooks go, it’s not bad. It conveys their steadfast trust in God alongside the unpredictability of military life.

Now I wonder if it also communicated my sense that the whole CC operation was running pretty close to empty. Maybe this is closer to the truth – that the first headline I wrote was my own tenuous job description and also, perhaps, a mission statement.

It was my Ebenezer.

It was my prayer.

Eight decades

So much has changed since Rev. Paul De Koekkoek typed and mimeographed the first issue of Canadian Calvinist in Edmonton in 1945. Stamps have gone from two cents each to $1.44. The Golden Age of Journalism has come and gone. Reformed Christians play card games and dance without fearing hell or even debating it. Pastors vlog.

Back in the day, a good news story would answer the five ‘W’ questions: Who? What? Where? Why? When? But that’s not CC’s mandate anymore. Now the Dutch immigrant community has well-established roots in Canada to the fourth and fifth generation. Christian Reformed churches have expanded and splintered and shrunk and closed and started over. Businesses run by Reformed Christians have grown and incorporated and gone under and made millions. Children and grandchildren born in Canada have questioned their faith, sexuality and identities and been shunned and welcomed and tolerated and celebrated. Communities have fractured and expanded and merged and moved to the country and left for the coast and gone to Florida.

We’re constantly on the move yet tethered to our phones. Rootless online, we are digital immigrants raising digital natives, trying to figure out a new world that refreshes itself every few minutes. And just as the Dutch immigrants realized, there’s no going back. Now CC articles are more likely to wrestle with one key question, relevant for any Christian in Canada: Given all this, what now?

What news can we offer each other that might bring hope to the faithful and faith to the hopeless? (Yup, I rewrote that old journalist’s adage to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”)

Give me some examples of people resisting the allure of Empire (Money. Power. Fame. Outrage.) and I’ll share my fumbling attempts, too. In the absence of complete agreement on every topic (which is, I know, impossible on this side of heaven, right Bert?), how can followers of Christ live alongside one another?

It’s not easy, but it’s not complicated either. The trust we place in God as followers of Christ, even when the future is unknowable, is the same. “Uncertain future, certainty of God.”

Even though the world has changed in pretty significant ways since 1945, as you know better than me, our human need for hope and connection remains the same.

Messy houses

Anyway, it’s been 16 years since you hired me, the first Editor of CC born in Canada. I’ve edited an estimated 312 issues and somewhere in the range of 9,500 articles. CC has a lively online presence. Our print version is full colour. And subscriptions are, amazingly, up 20 percent since this time last year!

I still remember how much my daughters, preschoolers back in 2009, would laugh when you called and they heard me say, “Hi, Bert!” They had never heard your name outside of our Sesame Street books.

It’s been five years since you made that final change to your mailing address, Bert. Pandemic restrictions prevented me from going to your funeral. But bits of wisdom you said over the years still come to mind regularly: “Use your writing like a spotlight, not a floodlight,” “Reformed folks don’t have a corner on the truth,” and “Children should live in messy houses.”

I am incredibly grateful to have served the CC community as Editor, a job that became a calling, dovetailed beautifully with parenting, connected me with so many brilliant, inspiring writers and thinkers, and shaped my own faith.

And on those days when the Fall looms larger than Redemption – to use Reformed lingo – I know that Restoration is coming. Reconciliation is possible. And we are a crucial part of it, each one of us in turn.

It’s my mission statement.

It’s my Ebenezer.

It’s still my prayer.

With love and gratitude,
Angela