The Council of General Synod (CoGS) has directed General Secretary Andrea Mann to form a task force and create terms of reference for a national youth council for the Anglican Church of Canada. CoGS, which is meeting Nov. 27-30 in Mississauga, Ont., unanimously approved the motion in response to a directive from June’s General Synod. Mann promised the task force drafting the terms of reference would include youth and young adult members of General Synod and from elsewhere in the church, beginning with the youth members present at CoGS. Later in the meeting, CoGS voted to appoint Paige Keller, youth member from the ecclesiastical province of Ontario, as the chair of the task force.
Zach Groves, a lay member of CoGS from the ecclesiastical province of British Columbia and Yukon and one of the youth members of June’s General Synod, said he saw the council as a way to promote youth involvement in a church where it had diminished. Much of the church’s existing youth programming happens at the diocesan level, he told CoGS, and is dependent on resources that vary from one diocese to another. This leaves youth in isolated congregations without an easy way to connect to others of their faith, he said. He hoped the creation of a national council would connect youth across the country and create resources dioceses could pick up and use to supplement their own youth programming.
The goal, he said, was to create a body that was aimed not only at reaching youth, but also at facilitating their participation in the decision-making and work of the Anglican Church of Canada as a whole.
Noah Skinner, lay member for the ecclesiastical province of Ontario, and mover of the original General Synod motion endorsing a youth council, added that everything from school terms to parenting responsibilities could limit the ability of younger Anglicans to participate in gatherings like CoGS. A similar council now being formed by his ecclesiastical province offered a way to participate anyway, he said.
“That’s why [it’s] such a wonderful thing,” he said. “It’s an advisory body to the provincial synod council and it gives the opportunity for a plethora of youth who wouldn’t otherwise have come to provincial synod to [participate] in the life of the church. Now I think we have the opportunity to do something amazing here as well.”
Sally Smith, a youth member from the ecclesiastical province of Canada, told CoGS that she was one of very few youth in her home parish, Bay Roberts-Coley’s Point, Nfld., where many of the others her age had fallen away from youth programming as the demands of school increased and they moved away to university. She told CoGS about the power of finding a community of other youth members. “Going to General Synod, it was amazing. It showed me that yes, people my age are also really involved. [I] made life-long friends” she said.
Numerous members of CoGS added their support to the motion. Several said their own involvement with the church had been kicked off by early involvement in an Anglican youth organization such as the now-defunct Anglican Young People’s Association.
Canon Murray Still, co-chair of the Anglican Council of Indigenous Peoples, added that a national council would create an excellent opportunity for collaboration and sharing of ideas and experiences between youth of different regions and cultures.
Once the motion had passed, Archbishop Shane Parker, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, said that as president of CoGS he could not participate during the debate, but could now say he strongly supported the youth council.
“I’ll do everything I can to support its existence … This has the potential to be something that’s offered in every part of our church,” he said. He encouraged other ecclesiastical provinces to create youth councils similar to that of the ecclesiastical province of Ontario, with the goal of creating “networks within networks,” working together.
