“Do we still want a publication that holds up a mirror to the church?” the Rev. Cynthia Haines Turner, chair of General Synod’s communications committee, asked Council of General Synod (CoGS) in a Nov. 9 session on a primatial committee’s suggestion that the church stop funding the Anglican Journal. “Sometimes the picture we will see may not be flattering and sometimes it will be. But is that still a value for the church?”
The suggestion of ending “independent journalism funded by General Synod” is the last of seven intentionally provocative statements or “hypotheses” on the future of the church released by the primate’s commission, the official name of which is Reimagining the Church: Proclaiming the Gospel in the 21st Century. A document released by the commission outlining the hypotheses identifies the core functions of General Synod as a national church structure, which it calls the three Cs: connecting, convening and communicating. They say the national structure connects Anglicans across the country with each other, and the settler church with Sacred Circle; it convenes Anglicans for shared work across the dioceses and ecclesiastical provinces; and it communicates information about the church’s work, mission statements, history and liturgical resources.
A commission document explaining the hypotheses also describes the Anglican Journal as General Synod’s third-largest expenditure at about $940,000 of the 2022 budget. However, Haines Turner corrected this in her introductory address to the discussion session. The document mentions but does not enumerate the Anglican Journal’s revenue streams beyond its annual appeal; these include advertising and a government grant dependent on operating it as a newspaper. As a result, she said, its net cost to the church was about $200,000. The Journal also publishes fundraising appeals for the Anglican Foundation of Canada, Alongside Hope and several other programs and initiatives of the national church.
Haines Turner said there was no doubt the church would continue its function of communication. The question, she said, was what it would communicate and how it would do it. She also invited CoGS to ponder what the advantages and drawbacks would be to moving to a model of in-house communications only and, if not the Anglican Journal, in what other formats they might want the church to communicate.
“There are people in this country—and we’ve seen it already in the letters to the editor—who are deeply attached to the Journal,” she said.
Haines Turner also discussed the possibility of taking the Journal to an online-only publication model. She said this would save on rising printing and mailing costs but would also make it impossible for the diocesan newspapers, which get bundled with the Journal on the way to readers, to continue. The cost of content creation would also remain the same, she added.
In the discussion that followed, Hannah Wygiera, of the diocese of Calgary spoke on behalf of her table of CoGS members. “We like the editorial aspect of the Journal,” she said, referring to its mandate of journalistic integrity. “But we talked about remodelling it to focus on building up the church, not necessarily investigating us,” she said.
Wygiera said her table had endorsed the idea of making the Journal a digital-only publication, but other members, including Ruth Travis of Western Newfoundland, expressed hesitation. Many of the Anglicans in her home diocese were seniors with limited or no computer proficiency or availability, said Travis, and would be uncomfortable or unable to access the Journal’s content online.
“The time will come when it can be digitized completely,” she said. “Not yet.”
CoGS members also asked whether the Journal might move to a less frequent publication schedule with longer, more in-depth articles in a format more like a magazine than a newspaper. Others suggested one way to find savings might be to approach the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada (ELCIC) or the United Church of Canada about combining their communications efforts into a shared publication. However, Canon Murray Still, of the Anglican Council of Indigenous Peoples, noted the ELCIC’s current publication, Canadian Lutheran, currently serves a role more akin to public relations than to journalism in his view.
As a former journalist himself, Still said he knows first-hand that journalists are trained to carefully and accurately represent all perspectives on a story. In some cases, he said, that means the church might hear perspectives that aren’t flattering. “So when the journalists bring up a window to the church to say who we are, the natural reaction is ‘Oh gosh, that’s awful, we did something bad.’ On the other hand, the truth can set us free” by helping us understand what went wrong, he said. “If there are more sides of the story that need to be shared, in my opinion [the church] needs to let the journalists do that.”
The alternative, he said, was for the national church to communicate only with a view to public relations. Both in-house communications and journalism have advantages they can contribute, he said, but neither can replace the other. “If you want a mirror to tell you who you really are and reflect back, journalism is a key piece of that work,” he said. “I like journalism because I like that window that gives me the truth.”
In a report on the primate’s commission’s work collecting feedback on its hypotheses, commission member and retired dean Peter Elliott told CoGS Anglicans had expressed a desire for the national church to facilitate not just top-down communication from the national church to the local, but lateral communication from one part of the church to another across the Canadian church’s massive coverage area.
