You’ve probably noticed over the last year that Canadian Mennonite has moved to having a theme to the feature of most issues. As we begin each new issue, we share the theme with our correspondents and columnists, although sometimes they instead pursue articles connected with their region or another story.
Once we start to get an idea of the articles that will be part of the feature, Will and I sit down with our designer, Anne, and we brainstorm ideas for the cover image and words. We want to capture your attention and make you want to open the magazine. We try to avoid cliched images, but we don’t want to be confusing or obscure. We also have to think about what will work on newsprint. (We were pretty nervous about the all-black cover for our December issue.)
This conversation is one of my favourite parts of my work. It’s creative and collaborative. Our January cover was especially fun—we knew we were writing about intergenerational households, and what popped into mind were the children’s picture books by Richard Scarry. Could we commission something similar? It turned out we had the perfect person to do so—artist Dona Park did a wonderful job of bringing the issue to vivid life with her cover.
This month, the conversation was more challenging. In our March issue, we wanted to tackle a lot: how conflict and bad processes in the church have really hurt people and even caused some to leave, what tools and strategies help, where this has been done well. A big question was whether to focus on the problem or the solution. We didn’t want to minimize a real challenge in every church and faith-based organization or to dismiss the pain of real people. But our articles also offered good insights into how to prevent such ruptures, and what to do when they happen.
Usually, our cover conversation is a single, fun brainstorming session, and then Anne turns our words into a brilliant image. This month’s issue took a lot of conversations and disagreement and eight different cover images from Anne—and even still we didn’t have something in place until 48 hours before we went to press!
We considered a meat grinder. We wondered whether we could use burned matches. Should we use bright colours or did this call for a dark cover? If we wanted to suggest that sometimes the church throws people overboard, how did we convey this visually? Did we want to show rescue?
Did we overthink it? It sure felt like it at times, but I also think this whole matter is one the church needs to give more rather than less attention. As Betty Pries writes in one of our feature pieces, “those in faith-based institutions may believethat merely by virtue of being faith-based, challenges between people will not happen. Or that if challenges do happen, they will take care of themselves because people of faith will be people of goodwill. The problem, of course, is that we do run into challenges with one another. We do say things we regret. We do bump into each other. Even when we are people of goodwill.”
That happened to us.
Betty asks: “What does it mean to be a person of faith? How do we relate to one another when frustrations run high? How do we address one another when things go wrong between us (as they inevitably will)? What does it mean to disagree well together?”
She reminds us that “when we disagree with one another, we are not yet in conflict. If we could regard disagreement simply as thinking, how would this change our conversations?”
We got to walk the talk as we worked on this issue. We got to disagree well.
It reminded me of my two of my favourite church moments. One took place when I sat on a pastoral search committee, and the other was when I was a leader in an interdenominational student group. In both cases, there was significant disagreement, and in one instance, if I’m honest, some personality challenges. What made these such good experiences was that our unity in Christ and our shared purpose pulled us together.
Sure, it’s nice to agree and to do life with people who think like us, but when we insist on that, well, that’s when we throw people overboard, or at least don’t care if they are swept overboard. But when we have a shared mission—in our case, a magazine with a message we think is important—and unity as fellow believers, we have to figure out how to disagree well together. That takes the Holy Spirit and the gifts of the Spirit.
Betty Pries offers three responses to the conundrum of conflict.
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