‘Intentionally provocative’ documents broach deep restructuring of church
Eliminating General Synod and the Anglican Journal are among a set of measures some members of the Anglican Church of Canada are being asked to ponder by a primatial commission tasked with finding solutions to the church’s structural challenges.
The commission, officially titled Reimagining the Church: Proclaiming the Gospel in the 21st Century, Structures & Resources, was proposed to the Council of General Synod (CoGS) in March 2023 and has been meeting since the fall of that year. This summer, chair Archdeacon Monique Stone shared with the Journal a document, written by the commission, with seven “hypotheses” outlining these measures.
Stone says the hypotheses are deliberately stark statements, aimed at provoking strong opinions—not necessarily an outline for the church’s final course of action. But they do represent vital issues the commission believes the church needs to begin talking about immediately in preparation for next year’s meeting of General Synod—the decision-making body of the national church—and the anticipated process of restructuring to follow. The commission, says Stone, is sharing the document with General Synod members from each of the four ecclesiastical provinces and Sacred Circle; the Council of the North; and the House of Bishops. It plans to share the substance of their responses with General Synod next June—but doesn’t expect everything to be resolved by then.
“This is the beginning of a journey that will extend past 2025,” she says. “Our commission does not have preconceived answers to how those conversations will unfold or what the answer to those conversations will ultimately be.”
The seven hypotheses are:
- It is time to dismantle the colonial foundations of the Council of the North to fully “embrace mutual interdependence with the Indigenous church.”
- It is time to dismantle the racism and colonialism that is built into our governance structures in order to diversify participation.
- It is time to eliminate one level of structure—either General Synod or the ecclesiastical provinces.
- It is time to examine returning to a model where the primate is also a diocesan bishop.
- It is time to (further) reduce travel and meeting costs, both financial and environmental.
- It is time to re-vision Church House.
- It is time to end independent editorial journalism funded by General Synod.
Several other churches, including the United Church of Canada, says Stone, have responded to declines in membership by removing levels of their governance. The Anglican Church of Canada may need to follow their example, she says.
“Maybe it’s not ‘eliminate,’ but maybe it’s ‘vastly restructure who does what,’” she adds, reiterating that she expects many in the church would rather take a middle path than forgo any national office outright. “I think we need to explore and learn from other churches in the communion and other ecumenical partners,” she says. “We are all grappling with huge structures that made sense at the height of Christendom, but are now vulnerable.”
When she first proposed the commission to CoGS, the national church’s smaller executive body, which meets twice a year, Archbishop Linda Nicholls, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, said she hoped it would find “creative, lifegiving solutions—even radical solutions” to help the church adapt to post-pandemic realities. Challenges included parishes struggling to afford their clergy, dioceses struggling to meet their local, regional and national financial responsibilities and the national church’s responsibility to support ministry in regions that are not financially self-sustaining. The church would also need to consider its approaches to cultural change and its redefined relationship with the Indigenous church, she said.
Devolving General Synod’s powers
The work of the commission was discussed by CoGS at its latest session, May 31-June 2. One of the council’s first agenda items was a meeting (held behind closed doors, on the grounds that allowing General Synod staff to attend might make it unsettling for them and difficult for CoGS to speak freely) to discuss the church’s problems in light of a document written by another member of the commission, retired dean Peter Elliott. In it, Elliott summarizes the history of General Synod to examine its original intended purposes. The document also considers how those might be served in a church which no longer enjoys the much larger number of members which made the size of its structure practical.
One possible solution, he suggests, is “devolving” some of the functions currently served by the office of General Synod in Toronto, also known as Church House, down to the level of church dioceses or provinces. One way devolving the powers of General Synod might work, Elliott said in an interview with the Anglican Journal, is for dioceses to specialize and collaborate on work they would then share with one another. For example, one diocese might take on the responsibilities of workshopping new liturgies, while another might specialize in creating resources for social justice work.
A key takeaway from the history of General Synod, according to Elliott, is that it was never intended to be a top-down structure which told the regions of the church what to do. Rather, he said, its history shows it was designed as a way for dioceses to combine their resources to strengthen their work on priorities they share. Historically, that has facilitated work like a united stand against apartheid and bringing the nation together to work on reconciliation with Indigenous people, he says.
This fits into General Synod’s three core functions, according to the hypotheses document: connecting networks of Anglicans across Canada to each other, Sacred Circle and the global church; convening meetings, collaboration and expertise to steer and refer work of concern to Anglicans nationwide toward the bodies best suited to handle that work; and communicating information about the church, its history and liturgical materials from one part of it to another and to secular society.
What the church’s national body has not historically succeeded at, according to Elliott, is consistently implementing the strategic plans it has drawn up, such as the Five Transformational Commitments and, before that, Vision 2019. This includes attempts by the national church to reverse or mitigate the decline in attendance numbers that has continued since the 1960s.
“Every strategic plan has included steps intended to arrest this decline. None has had any demonstrable impact,” his document states.
Like the committee’s seven hypotheses, Elliott says, these statements from his Evolution of General Synod are “intentionally provocative.” They highlight the limitations of national church structure and are intended, he says, to state the need for change as bluntly as possible in order to provide a starting point for conversations about what the national church has, what it needs and how those needs will change as societal change accelerates.
“How can there be some forecasts that will help the church navigate through these incredibly changing times?” he says. “I think the only way to do that is to have some broad-based conversations so people can hear each other. For me, I would rather the changes are made by choice than by the attrition of financial resources.”
Solving the church’s financial problems is not part of the commission’s formal mandate, and, in another email to the Journal, Stone wrote that the commission won’t be tackling the church’s financial challenges at this stage. Nevertheless, she added, financial challenges are among the impetuses behind the formation of the commission, and any action taken in response to the hypotheses will be in response to current financial realities.
Financial woes at national office
In a May 31 presentation on the national office’s 2023 financial statements, General Synod’s chief financial officer, Amal Attia, told CoGS that dioceses continued to have increasing trouble making their annual contributions to the national office as donations at the parish level continued to fall. General Synod, she said, ended 2023 with revenue of $9.4 million and expenses of $10.6 million, before transfers. It had a surplus for the year of $391,000, she said—but only thanks to an injection of $1.617 million from reserves, investment and depreciation.
Diocesan contributions are by far General Synod’s largest source of revenue, but Attia said these have been trending downward for more than two decades, and she expected them to shrink by about $200,000 a year across the whole country in the next couple of years.
Nicholls told CoGS it would no longer be practical to make incremental cuts to programming. Rather, she said, it is time to make proactive decisions about what work the church wants to hold on to going forward. The church will need to investigate either dropping entire sections of programming at the General Synod level, significantly restructuring church governance or possibly seeking new sources of revenue, she said. She asked CoGS to discuss what information it would need in order to bring recommendations to General Synod when it next meets, in June 2025—the soonest the church as a whole will be able to vote on any such decisions. CoGS responded by voting to form a working group to create a multi-year financial plan for the national office, taking into account its options for stemming financial decline, increasing its revenue and proceeding if neither of those proves possible.
To fund the national office while the working group prepares long-term scenarios, CoGS approved a resolution to supplement the 2025 budget with the office’s financial reserves to buy time while the decisions are made.
Full independence from church one possibility for Journal, chair says
The commission also suggests the church consider eliminating the Anglican Journal, or perhaps cutting it loose from General Synod’s purse strings, as suggested by the seventh hypothesis.
“That is not to say that we would stop communications and we would stop journalism,” says Stone. But the commission does question whether true independence is possible for a publication both covering and funded by General Synod.
In one possible scenario, she says, “maybe the Anglican Journal is its own independent publication and continues. If there’s a market for that news story and those news stories, then does that have to be handled in the General Synod office? Are there other publications and media organisations that would have interest in providing the platform?”
In reply to a followup email about the possibility of another scenario—that General Synod might keep the Journalbut make it a vehicle for communications, rather than journalism, Stone responded, “The commission feels that communications is one of the key roles of General Synod for the church across Canada. With that in mind I suspect that any outcomes of future implementation work will seek to continue to support and grow the General Synod’s role in that area.
“What that looks like is unknown. However, I suspect some form of national communications vehicle(s) will be needed and what the hypothesis is asking [Canadian Anglicans] for is an exploration into what those vehicles would look like.”
Another commission member, the Rev. Cole Hartin, currently serves as associate rector at Christ Church Episcopal in Tyler, Texas and was previously the rector of St. Luke’s Anglican Church in Saint John, N.B. Hartin says he believes each of the hypotheses is worth considering as a course of action for the church—and in the core idea that the church must grapple with reforming a national structure built for a much larger organization. He’s just not sure that any effort or campaign from the national level will address the underlying problem of falling attendance. He says he doesn’t know exactly what structure would be best to manage that.
“Frankly, I don’t think it matters that much,” he says. “For most Christians it’s not a material question for their day-to-day life of faith.” The thing that can make a difference in the struggles of Canadians with finances, social change, grief and ambient low-grade depression, he says, is contact with Jesus Christ. That’s something the church can best help with at the parish level through meaningful teaching, listening and pastoral care, he says.
“To me that puts all of the national structures into perspective—that they’re dispensable in an ultimate sense—but we need some kind of structure to get things done.”
