The Council of General Synod (CoGS) has approved key elements of a strategy for streamlining and updating the church, including a task force dedicated to pursuing the six pathways for change recommended by a primatial commission along with other groups working on the national office’s property, programming and staffing.
In the same special online meeting Oct. 7, CoGS approved a motion to supplement the 2025 budget by drawing up to four per cent—a sum that could come to more than $1 million—from the unrestricted portion of the Consolidated Trust Fund (CTF) of the General Synod to resolve a cash flow shortfall caused by delayed diocesan payments.
In introductory remarks, Archbishop Shane Parker, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, said the church’s strategy for change would be made up of three pillars. The first would be the task force and six subordinate teams dedicated to pursuing the pathways.
The second would involve making decisions about the property owned and operated by General Synod, he said. This includes what Parker referred to as “the 300 Bloor situation, 80 Hayden situation.”
On June 24, General Synod learned that senior officers of the national church had hired an accounting firm to investigate the approval process for a lease on 300 Bloor St. West, Toronto, signed by former general secretary Archdeacon Alan Perry and chief financial officer Amal Attia without approval from CoGS. The lease was for space for the national office to move into in 2026 after a planned move from its current space on 80 Hayden St.
“The task force may shift its focus when we understand where we are going to be housed moving into the future,” Parker told CoGS. Senior church leaders have so far not responded to questions from the Journal on whether the move to 300 Bloor St. West will proceed as planned, or on whether senior national office leaders had yet received the report of the investigators.
A third pillar will be concerned with organizational, programming and staffing changes at the national office, Parker said. Only the first of these pillars currently has an official task force dedicated to it, with the latter two to be handled by officers of General Synod, legal counsel and staff leaders, he said.
Key people working on each of the three pillars would be members of a body he called the primate’s council, which will also include the officers of General Synod and the co-chairs of the planning and agenda team with other members to be added as work proceeds.
“The primate’s council, then, will be whoever we need to have at that level to understand either one or two or all three of the pillars and help manage them,” Parker said. “We will co-opt people as required.”
CoGS, the governing body of the Anglican Church of Canada when a full General Synod is not in session, will be frequently consulted throughout this process, he said.
“We have a task before us in this triennium and I believe that there’s been a unique alignment of persons and bodies and motions to enable this work to happen,” he said. “God has given us a moment in time to introduce important major change.”
CoGS approved terms of reference and a list of 18 members for the first group, called the Transformation Task Force, at the Oct. 7 meeting. That list names as co-chairs Andrew Stephens-Rennie, former member of CoGS for the ecclesiastical province of British Columbia and Yukon, and Canon (lay) Janet Marshall, director of congregational development for the Diocese of Toronto. It includes several members from the primate’s commission which drafted the six pathways for change as well as lay members, clergy and bishops with experience in theology, finance, adaptive leadership, Indigenous relations, marketing and more.
The other members are: lay members Janet Hope, Danika Meredith, Angela Morgan and Dorothy Patterson, clergy the Rev. Jasmine Chandra, Canon Patricia Dorland, Archdeacon Travis Enright, Canon Sarah Kathleen Johnson, the Rev. Clara King, the Rev. Douglas Michael, Canon Jenny Replogle, the Rev. Vincent Solomon, the Rev. Kyle Wagner, Archdeacon Rhonda Waters and Bishops Anna Greenwood-Lee and Rachael Parker. Archbishop Shane Parker, Andrea Mann (who was named general secretary of General Synod at the same meeting) and prolocutor Archdeacon Tanya Phibbs are listed as ex-officio members.
The list concludes with the note, “still to be recruited: youth/young adult, someone from Inuit community, person of colour.”
Parker said this task force would create an additional six teams, each devoted to achieving results on one of the six pathways: organization and structure; management overview and restructuring; inclusion and diversity in decision making; communications; partnership with the Indigenous church; and ministry in the North. Any of the church’s committees or task forces already in existence which are relevant to the pathways will be consolidated into the work of the pathways teams, he said, to avoid having multiple groups working in parallel.
The second pillar, on property, is currently being managed by the officers of General Synod, along with the church’s legal counsel and with advice from David Caulfeild, an architect, engineer and former chief architect of Public Works Canada. “David Caulfeild is the chair of a notional “task force” which will, in time, be formally set in place by COGS,” Parker wrote in an email to the Journal.
Work concerning church house programming and staffing is currently under Parker’s own leadership, along with that of General Secretary Andrea Mann and other senior staff members of the national office, he added. The team on the second pathway, management overview and restructuring, will also take a share of this work when it is formed, Parker wrote.
“The senior staff team is able to change the name of departments, is able to rejig staffing positions to make decisions that help us become what we need to be, which is a tightly run central office that unambiguously serves the interests of our national church,” he said in his address to CoGS.
Budget supplement
CoGS also voted to supplement the 2025 budget with additional funds from the church’s investments. Prolocutor Archdeacon Tanya Phibbs told CoGS this was necessary due to a cash flow problem resulting from a delay in regular payments from dioceses as well as remittances for General Synod, held in June, and Sacred Circle, which followed in August.
“Unfortunately, in August and early September the General Synod was facing a cash flow crunch in part due to lagging proportional gifts payments by the dioceses,” she said. “And the other piece of that is of course the General Synod paid out to cover all the costs of the General Synod and of the Sacred Circle, some of which will be remitted back to it by the dioceses, but that hasn’t happened yet and that’s a substantial amount of money as well.” As a result, she said, Attia recommended CoGS approve the withdrawal of up to four per cent from the CTF—instead of the $350,000 the church had already planned to withdraw this year to cover the current shortfall until the dioceses can catch up.
In March, CoGS approved a motion to make a four-per-cent withdrawal from the fund each year beginning in 2026 to support the operational budget amid falling revenue. Yesterday’s CoGS vote effectively begins making that annual withdrawal a year early.
The unrestricted portion of the CTF is valued at $26.56 million, four per cent of which comes to about $1.06 million, according to the background note on the resolution. In response to a question from Bishop Susan Bell of the diocese of Niagara, Attia told CoGS the CTF makes an average of 7.5 per cent per year in investment returns, with last year’s return coming in at more than 12 per cent.
Interchurch business
Later in the meeting, CoGS voted to spend $500,000 toward constructing a new building to house the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR). The Anglican Church of Canada is one of three denominations the NCTR development team approached to ask for funding in 2024, along with the United Church of Canada and the Presbyterian Church in Canada, said Mann. The three churches agreed to make a joint contribution, without disclosing denominational amounts, she said. She and Attia had recently confirmed the other two partners, the United and Presbyterian churches of Canada, had each committed $500,000, she added.
The NCTR archives and communicates the history of residential schools in Canada, which the Anglican, Presbyterian and United churches helped to run. Its website describes the new building as “an international attraction for its cutting-edge work where history and Indigenous cultures come to life” for survivors, family members and other visitors.
The Anglican church’s contribution will be paid in three installments during the second phase of the NCTR’s construction in Winnipeg, said Mann.
That money will be allocated from the four per cent withdrawn from the CTF to supplement the church’s operational budget over the course of the next five years, said Attia.
Finally, CoGS voted to appoint two Anglicans—the Rev. Diane Lee, priest in charge of the parish of St. Matthew, Oshawa, Ont., and Mann in her capacity as general secretary—to the governing board of the Canadian Council of Churches. There are currently no Anglicans serving on the board, per the background note on the resolution, but as a founding member of the council, the Anglican Church of Canada has the option to appoint up to 3 of its members to serve on it. The resolution says the two current appointees will serve a three-year turn, with a third member to be appointed “in due course.”
Corrections:
Janet Hope’s name was misspelled in an earlier version of this story.
“300 Bloor St. East” has been corrected to “300 Bloor St. West.”
