Departing Nicholls reflects on trials and joys of primacy

Mississauga

This article was updated August 29 to include material from the Anglican Journal’s September print edition.

“The closer it gets, the better I’m feeling about it,” Archbishop Linda Nicholls, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, told the Council of General Synod (CoGS) on the prospect of her retirement this September.

Nicholls will retire in September, leaving Archbishop Anne Germond, metropolitan of the ecclesiastical province of Ontario, as acting primate until the church elects a permanent successor at General Synod 2025.

Nicholls announced in May she would retire on Sept. 15 and said she looked forward to standing alongside her fellow Anglicans not as a leader, but as a friend, teacher and mentor.

Nicholls, the church’s first female primate, was elected in 2019, just as the church reached a controversial settlement on the same-sex marriage debate which had rocked it for many years.

She began her term by announcing a planned review of church mission and ministry aimed at adapting to challenging times, and signaled her intention to improve the church’s inclusivity and work on systemic racism.

Nicholls was primate during an often turbulent and challenging time for the church. Months after her election, a church statistics report warned the church might be out of members by 2040 if the current rate of decline continued. In early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, drastically altering church life.

She also found herself steering the church through controversies, first over Church House’s handling of a draft article for the Anglican Journal’s then sister magazine Epiphanies in 2021, followed by the resignation of then-national Indigenous archbishop Mark MacDonald after an allegation of sexual misconduct. Her tenure was also marked by accomplishments including aiding in the continuing emergence of the Indigenous Anglican church; speaking out with other Canadian church leaders for peace and compassion in Israel/Palestine; and leading the church on improving inclusiveness, reducing internal racism and reducing its carbon footprint. Perhaps most significantly, she established a commission to look at radical solutions to the church’s financial and structural problems.

Nicholls has served as chair of the Anglican Roman Catholic Dialogue in Canada is a member of the third Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC). She is also regional representative for the Americas on the Anglican Communion’s Primates’ Standing Committee.

‘Deeply hurt by the church’

In a wide-ranging question-and-answer session on the evening of May 31, Nicholls shared what she saw as some of the highlights of her time as primate, her accomplishments and also the work she wished she had been able to see to its conclusion. She also shared her feelings on two incidents she said had caused her immense personal pain while in office.

In response to a question from the floor asking what aspect of her had most profoundly changed during her time in the primacy, Nicholls told CoGS, “It’s a difficult question to answer because the thing that’s most profoundly changed is having been so deeply hurt by the church. #ACCtoo was horrific, absolutely horrific … General Synod [2023] was hard. And I think what it flipped in me was maybe that I had been too naïve … So what’s changed for me is a wound that’s very painful.” Her voice stayed steady, though thick with emotion.

The first incident she referred to was the social media backlash after news came out about the 2021 sharing of the Epiphanies draft article, sent by Church House leadership to four Anglican institutions. The draft article cited three people who had made allegations of sexual misconduct at those institutions in the past and who had agreed to speak to Epiphanies on condition of anonymity. #ACCtoo was the hashtag and name of an online group that contended the draft contained personal information potentially identifying these complainants and demanded a set of responses by church leaders for the harm it said the sharing of the article had caused.

Nicholls said she was “completely gobsmacked by social media” during the backlash to church leadership’s handling of the incident. “I regret that we’ve not been able to come to any kind of reconciliation or resolution on that,” she added. “There are many truths in that whole story and some of them can never be told publicly, ever.”

The second painful incident she referred to was the failure of a resolution, at the 2023 General Synod, to amend the canon governing a primate’s retirement. Currently, primates are required to retire upon reaching age 70, like other bishops in the church.. The amendment would have allowed a primate to continue in the role until the next General Synod if their birthday fell within a year of the upcoming gathering. In two separate votes, enough members of the Order of Bishops voted “no” on the resolution to prevent it from reaching the required threshold of a two-thirds majority in each house (bishops, clergy and laity). At the time, then-chancellor of General Synod, Canon (Lay) David Jones stipulated that the motion was not aimed at the current primate, but was designed to create a procedure for any time a primate would age out of office with less than a year left in their term. But the immediate result of the votes was to require Nicholls to retire earlier than she would have wished.

“Something was profoundly broken in my relationship with the whole church at General Synod last year. Not my faith. Not my relationship with God. But maybe a naïve trust [in] the church that I’d given my life to and thought I understood. And I clearly didn’t,” she said.

‘I hope it will become a grace’

Still, Nicholls added, she was still looking forward to supporting the leaders who came after her, as well as to spending time in the church without the burden of responsibility that comes with being a leader. Of the wound she said she received in the office, she said, “I hope it will become a grace at some point.”

Nicholls was also asked about the highlights from her time in office and some of her key achievements. One, she said, was the gratitude she had received from Anglicans for the sense of connection and hope they said they got from her online work during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly the hymn sings—live streaming sessions in which she played piano and sang worship songs for audiences at home, she said, “which I just thought were my chance to do what I love to do, which is to sing and play.”

Likewise, she said she was pleased with the work she had done with the Strategic Planning Working Group, which responded to the pandemic by pivoting from coming up with a fixed strategy to a process of listening to Anglicans across the country about their hopes for the future of the church. That work formed a basis for the five transformational commitments which now inform much of the national church’s work, outreach and worship. And she said she was deeply affected by the power of the office of the primate to represent the whole church wherever she went visiting. “When the primate turns up somewhere, people feel like they’ve been visited by the rest of the church,” she said. “I’ve always found that both a joy, and a delight and surprise—when I show up and people are so grateful that the rest of the church cares.”

One regret, she said, about her early retirement was that she would not be present to see through the process of listening and drafting a primatial apology to the victims of Ralph Rowe. Rowe was an Anglican priest and scout leader in northern Manitoba and Ontario who sexually abused hundreds of young boys during his travels across the province in the 1970s and 80s. The apology is part of the settlement of a class-action suit reached in fall 2023. “I’m sorry because I would have liked to see that through to its completion,” she said.

As the first woman to be primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, Nicholls was also the first woman primate in the world to celebrate the Eucharist before assembled global bishops at the Lambeth Conference. The former has felt simple and natural, Nicholls said, not least because she has been working alongside the women who currently lead some of the other mainline Protestant denominations in Canada, especially the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada’s national bishop, Bishop Susan Johnson. But the latter was a profound experience, she said. “I remember standing there behind the altar in Canterbury Cathedral, with Canterbury Choir singing behind me and looking out on the length of the cathedral and just being awed at being there in that moment,” she said.

Asked what priorities she would stress if she were writing a letter to her successor as primate, Nicholls named the transformational commitments, and the work of the primate’s commission on finding a sustainable new structure for the national church. And with respect to the needed changes, she added, “We’ve certainly heard lots of comments about things people don’t like. And I have to say we’re really good at complaining. We’re not so good at proactively offering a way forward … So I think the next primate needs to be someone who is skilled at making change and working with change, able to give voice to both fears and hopes and dreams and hold the anxieties. And hold it all without exploding.”

“Certainly the next primate will have my prayers every single day,” she said. “It’s a lonely, lonely, lonely job.”

In an opening address to CoGS earlier that day, Nicholls reflected upon more recent work in her role, including a visit to Rome as part of an event held byARCIC the Anglican and Roman Catholic denominations’ ecumenical dialogue. During this gathering she and other primates from the Anglican Communion had an extended audience with Pope Francis, who, she said, answered questions off-the-cuff from the assembled primates in an unusual show of openness. She described her work on a statement from ARCIC on moral discernment and teaching in the global Anglican and Roman Catholic churches, which Nicholls said she would continue to work on for another year after retiring, and her recent work for international Anglican bodies.

Everywhere she went in her travels across the Anglican Church of Canada’s dioceses, Nicholls told CoGS in the spring meeting’s opening remarks, she saw local communities working on the church’s central transformational commitment: inviting and deepening life in Christ. “Every diocese is working on it slightly differently,” she said, some through existing programs like Alpha, others by developing their own methods of spiritual formation. “But everybody’s working on deepening formation for our own people and inviting others to come in,” she said.

On the evening of June 1, CoGS held a banquet and hymn sing in the primate’s honour, at which Opus 8, a Toronto-based eight-part vocal group, performed. CoGS members, General Synod staff and guests, including several members of Nicholls’ family, sang a selection of Nicholls’ favourite hymns and heard performances—from Opus 8 plus Dean Peter Wall, now-retired dean of Niagara and veteran of both CoGS and The Three Cantors singing ensemble, who sang a modified version of Cole Porter’s The Top, with lyrics joking about the primacy.

Church leaders including the Rev. Cynthia Haines-Turner, representative to CoGS for the Primate’s World Relief and Development Fund: Bishop of the diocese of Caledonia David Lehmann; Canon (lay) Ian Alexander, prolocutor of CogS; and General Secretary of General Synod Archdeacon Alan Perry gave speeches in Nicholls’ honour and presented her with a customized canoe paddle bearing the crest of the Anglican Church of Canada.

“You have taken us through, practically to hell and back, and you have brought us out,” said Perry, expressing his gratitude for Nicholls’ leadership, listening and grace. “No one can take that away from you.”

“It’s been an incredible journey,” said Nicholls in her closing remarks. “It’s going to take me some time to unpack what it has meant.”

A reference to mandatory retirement ages of bishops that appeared in an earlier version of this article has been deleted.

Correction: The Order of Bishops voted “no” on the resolution to extend the retirement date of primates.