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.
Wheeler-Dame was involved with the Anglican Church from a young age, she says. Her mother was a priest in the diocese of Huron later in Wheeler-Dame’s life, but even before that, the gospel was a core element of her home life. “We were taught very early that we are blessed beyond measure,” she says. “And it wasn’t about having stuff, it was about God and what God has done for us.”
Growing up in Windsor and Essex, Ont., she taught Sunday school and was in the church choir, among other forms of involvement which she says built up a growing feeling of connection to the church.
“There’s just always been a connection somehow to serving in the church. And I love this church,” she says, her voice cracking with emotion.
That affinity got even stronger when she trained for lay ministry in the diocese of Edmonton in her 20s. While living in Barrhead, Alta., then-bishop of the diocese of Edmonton Ken Genge told her he thought she was called to leadership in the church. “I laughed. I thought he was crazy,” she says, “and then it just kind of kept developing in that way. And the community of faith affirmed my calling. Never did I think it would be to this role. Never.”
Of her time as bishop, which began in 2019, Wheeler-Dame says she sees the COVID-19 pandemic as a surprising highlight. In a diocese with limited resources and staffing and widely distributed parishes, she says, it had become easy to get bogged down in what the church could not do, and how the ways it had always done things were suffering under the pressure of changing circumstances. By interrupting those patterns, she says, the pandemic forced the church to come up with creative solutions, including online services, Zoom and telephone fellowship and checking on parishioners via Zoom and phone. The shift to these alternative methods of staying connected mirrored a change in the church’s previously rigid thinking about what worship and togetherness could look like, she says. If the church could survive the sudden, forced changes the pandemic required, she says, then the other kinds of change it had already been seeing might not be as much of a death sentence as people feared.
Today, she says, the diocese is seeing increased involvement from younger people and deepening relationships with community members, both those who do and those who don’t often come to church on Sundays. “And so we’re finally starting to get away from, ‘Oh, we have to get all the bums in the pews’ to being more mission-focussed and caring about community.”
Some have told Wheeler-Dame it is a shame she needs to retire as this change is beginning to gather momentum, she says. And while she sees the need to be careful that aging bishops are still able to maintain their roles, she also describes the 70-year age cap as a form of ageism. Still, she says, with the signs that the diocese is ready to grow into a new idea of what church ministry looks like, “[This] might be the perfect time for me to retire, now that people are saying that. It’s not me that made this happen. This is God’s church. So I think we are learning to get out of the way and ‘let God.’”
Her outgoing message to the diocese is “to remember, never forget, that we are blessed beyond measure and that love is limitless,” she says. “That this is God’s church. It does not belong to any one person.”
