Indigenous church funding panel awaits new chair

Commission probed past, future funding of Indigenous ministries

Church leaders are seeking a new chair for the Jubilee Commission, a group of Indigenous Anglicans tasked with examining possibilities for funding the Indigenous Anglican church. The commission’s previous chair, Judith Moses, stepped down in April. Speaking to the Journal in September, Moses cited her age, diminished energy levels and the difficulty of doing the commission’s work with limited resources.

Archdeacon Alan Perry, general secretary of General Synod, said it’s not yet clear how soon Archbishop Anne Germond, acting primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, will appoint a chair, as she is still new to the role of acting primate and getting up to speed on the information needed to pick a candidate. No one was happy, he said, with the length of time finding a successor has taken.

“It’s a simple matter of finding the right person who is both willing and able to take on the role. This is taking more time than anyone would like,” Perry said.

Perry said he saw the commission’s main task as putting together a plan for funding the Indigenous church. But Moses emphasized the need for it to first build a deeper understanding of history. Whether a new chair will transform the historical research the commission has already done into a funding proposal before 2025’s General Synod remains to be seen.

“We divided our work into yesterday, today and tomorrow when we started to look at financing,” Moses said of the commission’s work. “We decided to look at yesterday first as a basis for looking at the funding today and why there is such a paucity of funding for the Indigenous church.”

As that research has progressed, it has become clear there is a much larger project to be done in investigating the history of how the Anglican Church of Canada has raised money for Indigenous ministries in the past, what it has done with that money and what resources are lacking in those areas today, she added.

During her tenure, the commission also made some progress on the question of how to fund the Indigenous church today, most notably with the help of several dioceses that have opted to tithe a percentage of the proceeds from property sales to fund the Indigenous church. But for the most part, she said, it chose to put on hold the question of what the modern Indigenous church needs to thrive in order to first consider the origins of its current under-resourced state and where funding has gone in the past.

In the past, Moses said, the church saw the key to converting Canada’s Indigenous peoples to Christianity as lying in the building of churches and schools. But this money, she said, would have benefitted Indigenous people more by being spent more on mission.

“Even today there continues to be underinvestment in Indigenous ministry,” she said. “There are still many unpaid or underpaid Indigenous clergy. Many Indigenous people would say that the Creator is found on the land and in places in Creation other than only in church buildings,” she said.

When the Jubilee Commission launched its archival research project at Sacred Circle in 2021, Archbishop Linda Nicholls, then-primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, said it was important to form a shared understanding of the history of Indigenous ministries funding.“Sometimes the history that non-Indigenous people have remembered or been told is not the way it was experienced by Indigenous people,” she said. “We need to hear those histories and come to own them together.”

National Indigenous Archbishop Chris Harper declined comment on the commission until the final draft of its report to General Synod is complete. Perry, however, took some questions from the Journal about the commission and its work.

Perry said that as someone with a personal background in history, he agreed the past is always important. However, he added, the mandate of the Jubilee Commission as he understands it is primarily to look into finding sustainable funding for the future of Indigenous ministry.

According to the resolution establishing the Jubilee Commission, passed by Council of General Synod (CoGS) in June 2018, the group was to be formed to “propose a just, sustainable and equitable funding base for the self-determining Indigenous Anglican Church.” The resolution goes on to say, “The Commission would be charged with examining historic and current funds made available for Indigenous ministry at various levels of the Church’s structure, assessing current funds designated to Indigenous programming, and assessing broader property questions.”

Asked how he saw the element of history fitting into the commission’s work, Perry replied, “The question becomes, how do you define that and how do you contain the question?

“Speaking as a historian, there are a lot of different questions that can be answered about the past or can be asked about the past, which will lead in all sorts of directions. But the fundamental purpose of the commission is to look to finding sustainable funding for Indigenous ministry across the church going into the future … The past is always of interest, but in the end, the question is about the future.”

There is a March deadline for any report prepared by the committee to be submitted for consideration at GeneralSynod 2025.