Editorial
Stéphanie Potter
This article was originally published in the September 2025 issue of FOCUS Magazine.
In my household, this has been a year of change and transition. One year post kidney transplant for my husband, our early caution has turned into a joyful reintegration into our community. Our oldest completed high school. She is also getting long-awaited braces. Our mortgage came up for renewal. I’ll be starting a one-year program on non-profit leadership at our local community college. So much change bundled into one year. The world is changing inside our household and outside of it. Some of it we had control over and some we didn’t.
To avoid being overwhelmed by all the change, we’ve made an effort as a family to stop and take stock of our lives. When my husband’s kidney failure really began five years ago, we found our lives became smaller and more focused. We changed the rhythms of our lives and invested in building up our relationships with each other and with God. Those strong relationships carried us like a lifeboat on stormy seas. Now, five years later, we want to build from that strength and also stretch ourselves.
In the last few months, we’ve assessed our finances, personal health, and individual trajectory. All in all, most things have stayed the same. We’re continuing to homeschool our kids, though now with one less student in our little classroom. We’ve turned our attention to a few overdue personal health needs, including braces for the first of many kids, wisdom teeth out for me, and made an investment in personal fitness for us older folks. We’ve rekindled old friendships and invested in new ones. Professionally, I am taking the opportunity to gain new skills so that I can contribute more to CMDA Canada. Overall, our world is growing intentionally bigger and our lives are fuller.
CMDA Canada is in the middle of a similar season, thanks to our strategic planning process. As an organization, we’ve stopped to look back on our progress over the last five years, while also looking ahead to the next five years. We’re examining how the world around us has changed and also how we ourselves have changed.
Under the Lord’s guidance, we have researched and explored the world outside us. We looked at trends in culture, morality, finances, and more. This External Analysis revealed a lot of useful information and opportunities for our organization. We also turned inward, both by surveying you – our members – and by assessing the data on relevant trends in our membership, finances, and engagement. (We will be sharing some of the most interesting data with you in the next issue of FOCUS and at the National Conference in Calgary next year!)
This issue of FOCUS takes time to wrestle with some of the key issues that arose during our External Analysis. We are blessed to have articles from a variety of perspectives. First, Dr. Adam Stewart, a sociology professor at Crandall University, highlights our unique position as relational people in a society that seeks to depersonalize us. Our Executive Director Larry Worthen provides us a realistic but hopeful examination of the state of our democracy and how necessary our public witness remains. The Senior Producer for Salt + Light television, Pedro Guevara-Mann, shares stories of enduring hope, infused with faith in Christ. We also have an excellent think piece from the Cardus team about religious hate in our country. In each of our features, we find a hopeful perspective, rooted not in blind optimism, but in an abiding trust in God’s goodness and faithfulness.
In our analysis, one thing became clear – the world we planned for five years ago during our previous Strategic Planning process was dramatically altered by the cultural and historical moments of the last five years. We experienced a global pandemic, and an aggressive shift of cultural views of gender and sexuality. And yet, our Strategic Plan, developed after prayerful consideration of life in 2019, was a relevant and valuable guide throughout what could have been a season of great upheaval for CMDA Canada. We not only weathered the storm, but came through more laser focused on our shared mission – to engage, encourage, and equip Christian doctors and dentists to glorify God by integrating faith in practice. We turned to Him in trust, and He came through – like He always has.
Our trust in God was not unmerited. After 55 years, it’s hard to deny that God has been ever-faithful to this community of faithful Christian doctors and dentists. As we seek God’s will and leading for the next five years, I have no doubt that He will make something even greater than we had hoped. While we might be tempted to despair over a society that seems to be going wrong, we are invited by God to see that darker days have produced even greater goodness. Just as the Cross has become an enduring sign of our salvation, we can trust that when we look at even the darkest days in our society, we will see in time how God’s light shone and His goodness poured over us in those days.