Mississauga, Ont.
The national office has a balanced budget ready for 2025, Amal Attia, treasurer of General Synod, told members of the Council of General Synod (CoGS) Nov. 8. However, she said, the projected surplus of $26,953 is thanks partly to a plan to supplement 2025’s budget with reserve funds to buy time to make difficult decisions about the church’s future, and the outlook for 2026 through 2029 will be much gloomier unless those changes are made.
The budget Attia presented pegs revenue for 2025 at $9.4 million and expenses (which include $923,000 for next summer’s meeting of General Synod in London, Ont.) at $10.7 million. It plans for $883,865 to be transferred from internally designated assets, the type of transfer normal for years when General Synod meets. But it also includes using $350,000 from the church’s investment income to help bring the church’s budget into the black.
Attia spoke to CoGS on the first day of its fall meeting, which runs Nov. 8-Nov. 10. Much of the day’s conversation was about money, as well as the shape the church’s future governance structures will take as it finds itself, as Archbishop Anne Germond, acting primate of the Anglican Church of Canada said in her opening remarks, “at a crossroads.”
It is difficult to make projections about what future years will look like based on existing trends, Attia told CoGS, as those decisions will depend on uncertain factors like investment income and parish donations from which dioceses draw their contributions to General Synod as well as uncertain outcomes of decisions already made, such as the plan to share office space with the United and Presbyterian churches. But the general trend in revenue is negative, she said. The church’s average annual revenue from diocesan proportional giving shrank by about $2 million dollars between 2018 and 2024 according to numbers she presented, while inflation has raised costs across the board.
Revenue, she said, is declining $200,000 to $250,000 per year, and if she were to provide forecasts based on this and estimated expenses for 2026 through 2029, she would be “painting a gloomy, gloomy picture.
“I [would be] basically telling you guys we would not be here in 2029,” she said.
Still, Canon Patricia Dorland, chair of General Synod’s financial management committee (FMC), which oversees financial decisions made at the national church level, told CoGS members she believes the church’s governing body must find some way to make long-term financial plans.
“In the years ahead, there will be new challenges and new opportunities as we discern what it means to be the Anglican Church of Canada, and sorting out the financial implications is one important piece of that sorting,” she said. As General Synod outlines priorities for the general secretary, FMC and CoGS to allocate money to, she said, they have to have some sense of what will be available to spend on that work. “We can’t go year by year right now … We can see that we’re not going to be the same kind of church today as we will be three years from now and we have to be prepared.”
In the following session, Canon (lay) Ian Alexander, prolocutor of General Synod and chair of the financial planning working group (FPWG), said the group was working out how the church could go about that kind of multi-year financial planning. To begin the process, he said, the FPWG had brought a list of questions for CoGS to discuss, including how the annual budget could best be communicated to CoGS; whether there were opportunities for General Synod to work with other bodies in the church, such as the Primate’s World Relief and Development Fund (PWRDF), on mutual fundraising initiatives; how much the church should be drawing on its investment income to fill gaps in future budgets; whether it should make changes to the proportional giving formula that guides diocesan contributions; and how CoGS would organize the decisions about how to adapt to the gloomy financial outlook Attia described.
“We may have to start looking some of that gloom squarely in the face,” he said.
CoGS members split into table groups, each discussing one of the questions Alexander assigned and presenting their feedback for further work to the FPWG.
In summarizing her table’s feedback, Archdeacon Tanya Phibbs, deputy prolocutor of General Synod, told Alexander and CoGS, “We need to face the darkness, the gloom. And then we need to find hope. Because that’s what we are. We are a people of hope.”
