General Synod starts cuts to Council of the North as ‘gloomy’ financial future foreseen

The Anglican Church of Canada’s national office has a balanced budget ready for 2025, Amal Attia, treasurer of General Synod, told the Council of General Synod (CoGS) at its latest meeting in November 2024. While a plan has been approved to draw on reserve money to keep the budget stable through the year, some cost-cutting measures have already begun—including a gradual plan to reduce funding to the Council of the North—and more cuts will be needed in the years to come, she said.

The national office is projected to run a surplus of $26,953 thanks partly to a plan to supplement 2025’s budget with the national office’s investment income. Doing so will buy the church time to make difficult decisions about its future, said Attia.

It is difficult to make projections about what future years will look like based on existing trends, Attia told CoGS, as those decisions will depend on uncertain factors like investment income and parish donations from which dioceses draw their contributions to General Synod—as well as uncertain outcomes of decisions already made, such as the plan to share office space with the United and Presbyterian churches. But the general trend in revenue is downward, she said. The church’s average annual revenue from diocesan proportional giving shrank by about $2 million between 2018 and 2024 according to numbers she presented, while inflation has raised costs across the board. 

Revenue, she said, is declining $200,000 to $250,000 per year, and if she were to provide forecasts based on this and estimated expenses for 2026 through 2029, she would be “painting a gloomy, gloomy picture. 

“I [would be] basically telling you guys we would not be here in 2029,” she said. 

Attia spoke to CoGS on the first day of its fall meeting, which ran Nov. 8-10. Much of that day’s conversation was about money, as well as the shape the church’s future governance structures will take as it finds itself, as Archbishop Anne Germond, acting primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, said in her opening remarks, “at a crossroads.

”The budget Attia presented pegs revenue for 2025 at $9.4 million and expenses (which include $923,000 for next summer’s meeting of General Synod in London, Ont.) at $10.7 million. It plans for $883,865 to be transferred from internally designated assets, the type of transfer normal for years when General Synod meets. But it also includes using up to four per cent per month of the 2024 return on the Consolidated Trust Fund, an investment trust held jointly by General Synod and several dioceses. That adds up to $650,000 across the year, though Attia said she expects the church to need just $350,000, depending on 2025’s diocesan contributions.

Council of the North funding reduced

One cost-cutting measure already implemented by church leadership is the reduction of funding to the Council of the North by $100,000 each year until its total funding is equal to 25 per cent of each year’s proportional giving by the dioceses.

The Council of the North is a group of northern dioceses that gets financial support from the national church and ministers to many remote and Indigenous communities. In 2007, the council agreed to an annual five per cent reduction in funding beginning in 2012 to help ease the burden on national finances that were beginning to strain under shrinking church attendance and donations, Attia told CoGS.

The church was able to keep the budget steady from 2014 to 2021, and decided not to make the cut in those years. However, General Synod managers and officers eventually settled on the idea of reducing Council of the North funding by $100,000 each year, starting in 2024, until it reaches one-quarter of proportional giving, according to a document explaining the decision and submitted to CoGS in advance of the November meeting. In 2024, the council received $2.05 million, down from the $2.15 million it had been receiving annually since 2013.

Between 2018 and 2023, the annual amount of diocesan proportional giving declined by about $2 million from about $8 million to about $6 million.

“Dioceses are increasingly informing the General Synod that they are unable to support General Synod at the same levels as previously,” the document reads. “Continuing to bear the reductions in revenue solely from General Synod operations while maintaining the Council of the North grant at the current level is increasingly unsustainable. We need to find a way in partnership, to bear the consequences of reduced revenue together.

”In September, the synods of two ecclesiastical provinces, Ontario and British Columbia and Yukon, passed resolutions calling General Synod to review the impacts of that funding cut “and find ways to continue to fund this ministry.

”Bishop David Lehmann of the province of Caledonia, chair of the Council of the North, said he understood the need for General Synod to cut spending amid the ongoing decline of resources. However, he said, even with cost-cutting measures in place in the North, rising costs from inflation have meant ministry in northern Canada is already stretched thinner than ever.

Beyond 2025

While acknowledging the unpredictability Attia cited in General Synod’s finances beyond 2025, Canon Patricia Dorland, chair of the financial management committee (FMC), which oversees financial decisions made at the national church level, told CoGS she believes the church’s governing body must find some way to make long-term financial plans. 

“In the years ahead, there will be new challenges and new opportunities as we discern what it means to be the Anglican Church of Canada, and sorting out the financial implications is one important piece of that sorting,” she said. As General Synod outlines priorities for the general secretary, FMC and CoGS to allocate money to, she said, they have to have some sense of what will be available to spend on that work. “We can’t go year by year right now … We can see that we’re not going to be the same kind of church three years from now as we are today and we have to be prepared.” 

In the following session, Canon (lay) Ian Alexander, chair of the financial planning working group (FPWG), tasked with creating a multi-year financial plan for the national church. said the group was working out how the church could go about that kind of multi-year financial planning. To begin the process, he said, the FPWG had brought a list of questions for CoGS to discuss, including how the annual budget could best be communicated to CoGS and how CoGS would organize the decisions about how to adapt to the gloomy financial outlook Attia described.

“We may have to start looking some of that gloom squarely in the face,” he said. 

CoGS to hear ideas on church restructuring in March

CoGS also heard from members of a primatial commission tasked with re-examining the structures of the church. Retired dean Peter Elliot and the Rev. Kyle Wagner, members of the commission—the formal name of which is Reimagining the Church: a Primate’s Commission on Proclaiming the Gospel in the 21st Century—presented some preliminary results of a survey of clergy, staff and other Anglicans as well as church governing bodies across the country. The survey asked respondents to rate their agreement with seven “hypotheses”—intentionally provocative proposals meant as conversation-starters—and how urgently they viewed the change called for in each one.

According to a chart Elliot showed CoGS, the most popular suggestions were reducing travel at the General Synod level and improving diversity of participation in governance. Least popular was a hypothesis proposing discontinuing the Anglican Journal as an independent journalistic entity funded by General Synod, with 38 per cent of respondents agreeing and 31 per cent against.

Other hypotheses call for the elimination of either General Synod or the ecclesiastical provinces; returning to a model in which the primate is also a diocesan bishop; and dismantling the “colonial foundations” of the Council of the North.

The commission will make recommendations to CoGS on what to do with the hypotheses based on the feedback it has received at the council’s next meeting in March, Elliott said. It will be up to CoGS, he said, to decide whether to bring resolutions to General Synod based on the data the commission provided.

Also at CoGS, Germond announced she had appointed two Indigenous clergy to join the commission. They are the Rev. Rod BrantFrancis, diocese of Ontario and the Rev. Vincent Solomon, diocese of Rupert’s Land. Some bishops of the Council of the North raised concerns earlier in the year that the commission had no Indigenous members.

Also new to the commission is Bishop Rachael Parker, of the diocese of Brandon.