Sacred Circle, the main governing body of the Indigenous Anglican church, will continue to give shape to the emerging self-governing institution when it meets this August 5-10 in Calgary, Alta.
National Indigenous Archbishop Chris Harper says key topics will include working out the procedural structures needed to put its founding documents, Our Way of Life and the Covenant, into practice; discussing an equitable method of picking representatives to Sacred Circle from across Canada; analyzing the funding available to the Indigenous church; and potentially even choosing a new national Indigenous archbishop.
“Putting the boards and the nails together” to build a framework of the emerging church, he says, will mean working out how duties are divided between Sacred Circle and the Anglican Council of Indigenous Peoples (ACIP). The former, like General Synod, meets every three years with a large body of representatives from across the church; ACIP, like the Council of General Synod (CoGS), is smaller and meets more frequently to carry out business between the larger gatherings. The coming meeting of Sacred Circle will offer members a chance to lay out the procedures each body will use to handle discussion and decision-making, as well as which one will be responsible for what work, says Harper.
Indigenous church leaders are preparing to welcome the new primate of the Anglican Church of Canada to Sacred Circle after the primatial election at June’s meeting of General Synod. Harper has spoken at previous CoGS meetings about his belief that the church should be treated as a family and has mentioned his standing invitation for non-Indigenous Anglicans to join and participate in Sacred Circle. The primate is naturally a vital part of that, he says. However, since he himself is one of the candidates for primate, he jokes, “If the Lord’s sense of humour is right on that day, [if] I am made primate, then all the work that we’re doing right now is to welcome myself back into Sacred Circle.”
In that case, Sacred Circle would have to select a new national Indigenous archbishop to continue the work of solidifying the Indigenous church’s structures.
Another aspect of that, he says, is how the membership of each body is selected. Up until now, he says, the Indigenous church has been mostly following the internal boundaries of the Anglican Church of Canada, parcelling out its representatives based on what diocese and ecclesiastical province they come from. It has also relied on existing members recommending new ones they personally know.
Now that work is ramping up, it needs a wider-reaching way to ensure people from coast to coast and in the North have a voice in that governance, he says. But the Indigenous people the church serves are grouped geographically, culturally and politically in ways that don’t match the provincial and diocesan system used to select delegates to General Synod. For that reason, he says, leaders have been considering using a system based on language groups. These groups would include, for example, the western, central and eastern Inuit in the North, coastal peoples in Western Canada, the Blackfoot in Central Canada, the Algonquin and Mohawk heading eastward and the Mi’kmaq and other peoples of the Atlantic coast.
The specifics of eligibility and selection of representatives are still in development and will be discussed further at Sacred Circle, he says. The goal, he says, is to ensure people from any Indigenous community can have their voices heard and people from every language region are included.
Meanwhile, Harper says, ACIP has assigned a financial group to work with the office of General Synod to examine what money in which accounts has already been set aside for Indigenous ministries and what procedures are needed to access it. At the time of his late April interview with the Journal, that work was just beginning, he said, but the group’s goal was to bring a report on what had been learned so far to Sacred Circle, then to assign a new group to carry the work forward.
