Get to know the primatial candidates
Sean Frankling
May 27, 2025
The nominees for primate share their assessments of the present—and their hopes for the future
The nominees for primate share their assessments of the present—and their hopes for the future
Sacred Circle, the main governing body of the Indigenous Anglican church, will continue to give shape to the emerging self-governing institution when it meets this August 5-10 in Calgary, Alta.
National Indigenous Archbishop Chris Harper says key topics will include working out the procedural structures needed to put its founding documents, Our Way of Life and the Covenant, into practice; discussing an equitable method of picking representatives to Sacred Circle from across Canada; analyzing the funding available to the Indigenous church; and potentially even choosing a new national Indigenous archbishop.
The diocese of the Arctic has elected and consecrated three new bishops at its diocesan synod, running May 8 to 15 in Edmonton. Former Executive Archdeacon Alexander Pryor has been consecrated as the new diocesan bishop. Assisting him as suffragans will be bishops Anne Martha Keenainak and Jared Osborn. The three will succeed former Diocesan Bishop David Parsons and suffragan bishops Joey Royal and Lucy Nester, all of whom retired in 2024.
The church is approaching a time of important decisions—one which Anglicans can and should embrace with hope, Archbishop Anne Germond, acting primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, told Council of General Synod (CoGS) in her opening remarks March 7.
Friends and colleagues remember Bishop Robert Bennett, formerly of the diocese of Huron, as a caring, hilarious and deeply pastoral bishop who invariably put his relationships with parishioners first. Bennett died April 14 after a life touched by the love of his wife, Kathleen, their daughters Meghan and Jessica and countless Anglicans, an amazing number of whom Bennett always remembered by name, say his friends.
An Israel Defence Forces (IDF) air strike on Palm Sunday destroyed and damaged several buildings at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza. The hospital, which has at some points been the only one functioning in Gaza amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas war, is funded and operated by the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem.
The Rev. James Spencer has been building with Lego since he was eight years old. Today, that lifelong hobby is getting his parish, St. Mary’s Anglican Church with buildings in Clarenville and Burgoyne’s Cove, Nfld. noticed online—and forming the heart of a new ministry to local children.
Over the last year, Spencer has been building a pair of Lego models of the Clarenville and Burgoyne’s cove church buildings—built at the scale of one Lego “stud” (the basic unit of Lego blocks, demarcated by one of the nubs that let the bricks interlock) to one foot.
Now, the diocese of Ottawa has become the latest in a recent wave of regions across the Anglican Church of Canada to begin work on a program of parish development. Like the diocese of Niagara and the ecclesiastical province of British Columbia and Yukon, which have similar programs, Ottawa is aiming to provide parishes, their clergy and their lay leaders with the education and resources to streamline their decision-making, focus their vision and purposefully reach out to their communities.
The newly reinstated diocese of Moosonee has elected the Rev. Rod BrantFrancis, a Mi’kmaq priest currently ministering to a Mohawk parish in Ontario, as its first bishop in a decade.
Many parishes in the Anglican Church of Canada are finding themselves torn between their own desire to survive and their obligation to support the higher structures of the church, says Ed Willms, a parishioner at All Saints Anglican Church in Huntsville, Ont.
Bishop Leslie Wheeler-Dame of the diocese of Yukon will retire Oct. 24 this year, she announced in a letter to the diocese dated Feb. 26. On Oct. 24 she will reach 70, the mandatory retirement age for bishops in the Anglican Church of Canada. In an interview with the Anglican Journal, Wheeler-Dame said she felt reluctant to leave the position amid a period when the diocese is showing promising signs of renewal. Still, she added, she will not be leaving its service, instead planning to serve in Ministry of Presence, a program in which retired Anglicans volunteer to serve as non-stipendiary congregational leaders to supplement the diocese’s limited number of stipendiary clergy.
The Council of General Synod (CoGS) has voted to continue the print publication and journalistic mandate of the Anglican Journal for another three years at least, putting to rest at least temporarily the possibility of shutting it down, making it online-only or converting it to a corporate communications organ.
When he initially got the call to let his name stand for bishop of Saskatoon, the Rev. Chad McCharles, a Manitoba priest and part-time school bus driver, said his first impulse was “a hard no.”
The Anglican Church of Canada’s national office would have ended up with a $237,000 deficit—despite $600,000 in pared-back spending and an unusually high contribution from one diocese—if not for the unusually strong performance of its investment fund, which lifted it to a $3.19 million excess of revenues over expenses in 2024. But this investment performance consisted of “unrealized” or on-paper-only gain, and concerns about the office of General Synod’s financial sustainability persist.
The Anglican Church of Canada should consider making major cuts to the size of its governance gatherings and committees, says the report of a commission tasked with reimagining its future.
The church is approaching a time of important decisions—one which Anglicans can and should embrace with hope, Archbishop Anne Germond, acting primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, told Council of General Synod (CoGS) in her opening remarks March 7.
Amid the rising international tensions and overwhelming flood of executive orders under the new Trump administration, it is the duty of Anglicans in Canada to speak up for the marginalized and vulnerable, says Canon Maggie Helwig, rector of St. Stephen-in-the-Fields Church in Toronto.
Not only multidenominational church researchers, but also parish and diocesan strategists and even interested lay people attended December’s second annual gathering of the Canadian Institute for Empirical Church Research (CIECR), a research institute at Wycliffe College at the University of Toronto. It’s a sign that in an increasingly uncertain faith landscape, people are looking for clarity and data to guide their decision-making, ministry and outreach, Canon Neil Elliot, the Anglican Church of Canada’s statistics and research officer, told the Anglican Journal at the event.
Archbishop John Stephens, newly elected metropolitan of the ecclesiastical province of British Columbia and Yukon, says he plans to continue predecessor Archbishop Lynne McNaughton’s work of increasing collaboration between dioceses within the province.
Mother’s Union has elected its first worldwide president from Canada: Kathleen Snow, a board member at the international Anglican charity and parish nurse at Christ Church Cathedral in Fredericton, N.B. She is the second president of the charity to come from outside the U.K., following her predecessor, Sheran Harper from Guyana, who has been president for the past six years, Snow told the Anglican Journal.