204 Chapter 6 other hand. In the second meeting, the conversational community decided that faithfulness and openness should be considered two critical elements that, throughout the action research and in the citizenship formation of students, should always go together. Students often think of them as mutually exclusive, the conversational community concluded in several meetings, but they also can go together: P1: So, that openness and that faithfulness, of course you could say that they are always at odds: the more open I am, the less faithful. But you could also say: maybe they belong together. It might be my faithfulness that means I am really there for that child, even though that child thinks very differently from me, and that I really pay attention to how he or she experiences things. P2: Yes. P3: It could also be that if you become more closed-minded, then you actually become less faithful. P4: Exactly. P3: Because what you said really touches me. About not wanting to be right but showing Jesus’ love... when you are with people from different denominations, but all Christian, together, sometimes it is more about the differing denominations than what binds you. Because you’re not in the full society anymore, you go into small things. So I think precisely when you know how small we are in this society that we also have to give that to our students: you are in your bubble, but that bubble is getting smaller, look beyond, you just need it. That can also, in a way, impart more faith. It is particularly interesting to see how the terms openness and faithfulness emerged during the early discussions of the conversational community. Both terms appear in the literature as critical: critical faithfulness (Swinton & Mowat, 2006) and critical openness (Thiessen, 1993). In the next chapter, which addresses epistemological formation, this will be further explained and explored (7.1). For now, it is useful to notice that, at the time, the conversational community was only familiar with the formal term ‘critical faithfulness’ and just mentioned ‘critical openness’ as its logical counterpart. The discussion during the second meeting ended with the concluding remark that high diversity can be considered not only a threat but also a chance. This led one of the participating school directors to respond: ‘But isn’t that exactly the story of what we want to do, the question we want to answer?’ During the course of the conversational community’s existence, with regard to this question, the aim was to honour both critical faithfulness and critical openness to invite students
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