Archbishop Shane Parker, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, opened the Council of General Synod (CoGS) meeting June 12-14 in Mississauga, Ont. with a reflection on changes facing the Anglican Church of Canada.
“This is not a business-as-usual triennium,” Parker told CoGS members, recapping the process by which the last General Synod in June 2025 had been presented with and approved six pathways for transformational change recommended by a primatial commission and allocated $2 million to implement them. Since then, he said, church leadership and staff have been hard at work on the “unambiguous mandate” set by General Synod for a leaner, less expensive national structure.
Some of those changes have already begun or been completed since the council’s previous meeting in November, he said, including work on realignment and reduction of staffing at General Synod’s national office in Toronto, known as Church House. The staffing overhaul is the first of three “pillars” on which the church’s strategy for change rests, Parker reiterated, with the other two concerning the national office’s real estate property and the six pathways themselves.
Church House pillar
One goal of the staffing transformation at Church House, Parker said, was to bring the office more in line with the functions of provincial offices found in other regions of the international Anglican Communion. That means concluding some of the work it handles today, he said, and reimagining the way the office handles other components.
“There’s no longer a large staff to catch the work of General Synod … That means we can still do lots of the work that is commissioned [or] required by General Synod, but how we do that needs to change,” the primate said. For example, rather than fund a standing body to handle tasks, some work that General Synod assigns may require project proposals including plans for how it would be funded, staffed, evaluated and implemented, he said.
“If you look at other provinces in the Anglican Communion, [very] few [provincial offices] are large bureaucracies and function as mission agencies. They’re involved in the work of convening and connecting and communicating,” he said.
Later that morning, Andrea Mann, general secretary of General Synod, in her own address on the first pillar echoed Parker’s description of Church House becoming more like provincial offices elsewhere in the Communion.
“Leaving behind the national, colonial mission-agency model that has been our bureaucracy for decades … Church House is now smaller in size, becoming essentially canonical and constitutional in its core functions,” she said.
As of July, Mann said, Church House will comprise a staff of 31 full-time and part-time employees as well as two on casual contracts, down from 44 as of September 2025. The national office has also brought on two staff members to support the joint office of the primate and general secretary, she added. It has also agreed to create a shared office with the church’s agency for sustainable development and relief, Alongside Hope, and the Anglican Foundation of Canada to encourage and receive legacy donations—money left to the church in parishioners’ wills.
Property pillar
Other changes actively underway include the work of the property pillar, Parker said. The church has made further progress, he said, in negotiating the church’s exit from the lease at 300 Bloor Street West in Toronto, where the Anglican Church of Canada formerly planned to share office space with the United Church of Canada and the Presbyterian Church in Canada.
It is known that the Anglican Church of Canada has repudiated the lease and that has been accepted, Parker said. George Cadman, General Synod’s chancellor, explained further specifics on the lease in an in-camera session of CoGS later that day, but no more information was announced publicly.
Meanwhile, some changes pertaining to the property pillar remain matters of longer-term work, Parker said. These include a plan to lease commercially a significant amount of unused space at 80 Hayden Street in Toronto, Church House’s current location, which Parker said could provide revenue that would help the national office sustain its operations while asking less of dioceses in terms of proportional giving.
Pathways pillar
Other work that remains ongoing includes the six pathways, Parker said. These involve changes to the church’s organizational structure, management overview and restructuring, inclusion and diversity in decision-making, the church’s communications function, the church’s relationship with the self-determining Indigenous church and ministry in remote and northern communities.
In particular, the primate highlighted the communications pathway and a proposal he said he supported to create a new mandate for the church’s communications department, including the Anglican Journal.
He also pointed to continuing growth of the Indigenous church and said that the former Indigenous Ministries department will become the Office of Sacred Circle. The change represents a shift toward “Indigenous ministry conducted by Indigenous Anglicans,” he said, and the Office of Sacred Circle is independent and self-determining insofar as is possible under the financial and legal umbrella of General Synod.
Some of the pathways’ ongoing work would be done in discussions and decisions made by members of CoGS both later that day and throughout the three-day meeting, he added.
Primate encourages changes in thinking and acting
As the church enters the second year of the triennium between General Synod meetings in 2025 and 2028, Parker said, it will become clearer how the priorities mandated by synod will be implemented. In some cases, it will also become clear which of those priorities will be completed by the end of the triennium and which will need to be carried over to the next. Parker hoped the model of setting the church to work on projects that can be tangibly accomplished in the course of one triennium and carried forward where necessary will become the new standard model, he said.
Ultimately, Parker said, the transformation process requires cultural change in the Anglican Church of Canada. “It’s deep change and difficult change,” he said, adding that all other changes to operations and strategy must be predicated on cultural change—which means thinking and acting differently.
As primate, Parker said, he has visited a majority of dioceses across the country and plans to visit those remaining by fall of next year. In those travels, he said, he has learned two major things: “People want to love their church, and people want to have hope.”
Those themes spoke to the heart of the transformation the church is undertaking, he said, especially the communications proposal. The church needs to tell its story in a way that serves those purposes to its members across Canada, he said, “as we engage in guiding our [national church] toward a new expression of itself in our time.”
