“I have not come to bring peace, but a sword,” Jesus famously tells his apostles when he sends them out to preach, heal and cast out demons (Matthew 10:34)—startling them with these words, perhaps, as much as he startles us. There’s a sense in which the Good News will not be easy to hear; it will be subversive, disruptive, divisive.
Division, too, has always been a part of the life of the community Jesus founded, with the Anglican Church of Canada no exception. One of the places it appears is those once-every-three-years meetings of the church known as General Synod. When the issues are especially contentious—the many forms that debate over sexuality has taken over the last few decades, for example—passion can break through decorum; there’s shouting, and there are tears.
This time around there was no such hotly divisive resolution on the agenda. There was lengthy debate around some of the issues that have been usual flashpoints for the east/west, south/north, urban/ rural, centre/periphery divides that run through the church as well as the nation—gender and climate change, for example. But at least on the floor, tensions seemed low. Whatever may have been expressed privately, there was concern, yes, but little visible display of outrage over the most surprising event of the synod (even more surprising than the announcement of a “re-vote” that met attendees as they gathered one morning at General Synod in 2023, after the previous day’s failure of a resolution to extend the primatial term). This, of course, was the revelation that an accounting firm had been brought in to investigate how a lease for new office space had been signed by senior managers at Church House without input either from the Council of General Synod or the financial management committee. The news left us all with many questions (and it made me wish the Journal had dug deeper when we covered the lease announcement back in May 2024).
No, this was a relatively harmonious General Synod, and the mood translated into, for the most part, overwhelming majorities on almost every vote. This was even—perhaps especially—true of the vote on the “Pathways” report of the primatial commission—a document that calls for dramatic change in the church; the working group whose creation the report proposes will be asked, for example, to consider whether the church really needs a national and provincial level of governance, as well as how—not whether—the number of dioceses can be reduced (and of course, the continued print publication and journalistic mandate of this newspaper). A resolution urging the primate and officers of Council of General Synod to start working on the report’s recommendations was among those that passed with near unanimity—199 in favour to 14 against, or 93 per cent.
Many Anglicans in Canada are worried as never before about the survival of their parishes, and so there’s a new urgency that the church divest itself as quickly as possible of whatever isn’t necessary for that. But voting for change in principle was the easy part. The devil, as always, will be in the details: deciding exactly what to keep and what to get rid of. While there may be a lot in the church’s current structure that is not necessary for parishes to survive and function, there’s still much that adds some value and whose loss is likely to be felt. What would a church with no national voice, in the form of General Synod, and no national office, be like? Is it worth eliminating things, like the ecclesiastical provinces, that already function at very low cost? And how will Anglicans agree on the merging of dioceses? Who wants to lose their bishop and synod office, and which bishops want to lose their jobs?
Meanwhile, the clock is ticking. The resolution passed on the Pathways report asks the primate and officers of Council of General Synod to report back to General Synod with recommendations in 2028 (though at one point during this summer’s meeting the possibility was raised of an extra meeting of General Synod before 2028, with the goal of accelerating change.) The church’s financial future is—to put it mildly—not certain, with many parishes across the country at a tipping point. Change may be forced on the church if it doesn’t act quickly enough.
All that said, there’s also reason for hope in these discussions. Perhaps it’s even possible that, through the difficulty of these previous contentious debates, Anglicans honed their ability to listen to one another. These are skills that will likely stand the church in very good stead in the tumultuous time to come.
