Mississauga, Ont.
The 2026 budget for the Anglican Church of Canada makes cuts to line items across the board with exceptions for parts of the national office which are involved in work on the six “pathways for transformational change.” Archdeacon Tanya Phibbs, chair of the church’s financial management committee (FMC), presented the budget Nov. 28 to the Council of General Synod (CoGS), meeting Nov. 27 to 30 in Mississauga, Ont. The annual grant to the Council of the North (CoN) will also remain steady for several years, reversing a 2023 decision to make progressive cuts to it.
The church’s investments posted a gain of about $2.5 million—the result of a market situation which Phibbs referred to as “frothy,” alluding to current suspicions stocks and other assets may be overvalued, possibly leading to the bursting of a market “bubble.” It is impossible to predict whether gains of this kind will be lost in future years, she said.
“A [diocesan] fund manager I was speaking to said [the market] is somewhat like the foam on a latte. So it’s there, but there’s not much substance and it could drop again, possibly in the next year and we have to be careful with that,” she later told the Journal.
Also, most of this income is in the church’s Consolidated Trust Fund—much of which, in turn, either has restrictions on its use or is money being managed by General Synod on behalf of dioceses and parishes. Typically General Synod re-invests revenue of this kind into the market, meaning it is not available as cash to cover expenses.
The budget, which CoGS approved, is $621,632 smaller than 2025’s budget. Phibbs said the budget’s cuts to programming and its investment in the pathways reflected a dual need: to reduce spending to cope with falling revenues, and to commit resources to transforming the church into a leaner organization for the long term. It forecasts the church’s revenue at about $10,186,212 and its total expenses at $10,184,940 million, for an excess of revenue over expenses of $1,272. Among the departments receiving the largest cuts are Global Relations, which was budgeted for $320,766 in 2025 and $67,500 in 2026; Indigenous Ministries, dropping from $1,224,495 in 2025 to $727,195 in 2026; and Faith, Worship and Ministry, falling from $428,524 in 2025 to 362,377 in 2026. The Anglican Journal is budgeted for a reduction from $1,046,740 to $1,015,100 (with the revenue it collects projected to make up more than half the latter amount).
The budget of the primate’s office is set to increase from 2025’s $476,826 to $533,544 and the general secretary’s office from $906,631 to $1,932,174. This money will be used in part for paying employees who operate under these people, said Phibbs, and the substantial increase for the office of the general secretary is due to the budgeting of the work of the pathways under that office, she said. There is also an increase in the House of Bishops’ budget from $107,000 to $151,500, which Phibbs said would pay for continuing education for some of the bishops.
Currently, about 66 per cent of the church’s revenue comes from proportional giving from the dioceses, a share which will not be sustainable in the long term, said Phibbs. The dioceses cannot maintain that rate of giving indefinitely as their own incoming donations shrink. Part of the pathways work would therefore include looking for new revenue streams—such as leveraging General Synod’s property at 80 Hayden Street, Toronto—to help the church fund itself, she said.
The grant to the CoN, which usually makes up the largest single item on the church’s budget, goes to support ministry in dioceses in northern Canada. The church will maintain the CoN’s grant at $1,950,000 through 2028, Phibbs told CoGS. The FMC made this decision partly at the request of the CoN, which asked for the grant to remain stable through the work on the pathways; this request also received support from the House of Bishops, said Phibbs.
“We shouldn’t be making huge decisions about the Council of the North’s funding while we are still working our way through the pathways document and the Council of the North needs to have that surety about what’s going on,” she said.
The move reverses a decision mentioned in a Nov. 2024 document submitted to CoGS, in which General Synod officers and managers agreed to reduce the CoN’s funding by $100,000 every year, beginning in 2024, until its annual apportionment was equal to 25 per cent of the donations the national church receives through diocesan proportional giving.
Phibbs told CoGS the CoN dioceses had promised to also each make the full agreed-upon amounts of their own proportional contributions to General Synod through 2028, said Phibbs. Bishop Clara Plamondon of the Territory of the People, one of the Council of the North dioceses, added that this was a normal condition for the Council of the North dioceses receiving the grant.
CoGS also passed a motion tasking Phibbs with writing a letter to all dioceses across Canada requesting they commit to maintaining their own proportional giving to General Synod at the same level as or higher than it was in 2025 for 2027 and 2028. This was because it is difficult to plan for future budgets without a clear picture of what revenue is likely to come in, CFO Amal Attia said. At this point in 2025, General Synod still has not received proportional gifts from several of its dioceses, Phibbs told CoGS. Partially as a result of this, contributions were more than $362,000 behind the forecast total for the year as of the end of September, she said. Attia said it was difficult to know whether the dioceses would yet send in their contributions, and difficult to make predictions about future year’s budgets for similar reasons.
The request to dioceses to commit to 2027 and 2028 contributions in advance was a suggestion of one of the bishops on the FMC, said Phibbs, in part to give the church a clearer idea of what money would be available during this transitional time. The goal was to draw dioceses together and rally them behind the work of the pathways, she said.
Bishop Susan Bell of the diocese of Niagara added that the church’s dioceses calculate and pay their contributions in different manners. “It’s a wonderful mystery of the church,” she joked. If the church was going to make this request, it would have to understand it would not necessarily be as simple to implement as it sounded, she said. So advised, CoGS passed the motion unanimously.
Archbishop Shane Parker, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, closed the budget session by encouraging CoGS to see the budget process as a way of mapping the church’s future.
“Budgets tell stories. And the story that we’re telling now is using language that relates to the way we’ve done business for some time,” he said. “We’re in a time of change, a time of transition. And various row names will change as we restructure. Amounts may change as we restructure.” The budget gives the church a roadmap for the coming year, he said, but that map may be subject to change as restructuring continues. If any significant changes were required, he said, CoGS would be the first to know and may meet again to weigh in.
