Mississauga, Ont.
The church should stop to consider how the work done by General Synod or the ecclesiastical provinces would be replaced before it responds to a suggestion by a primatial commission to eliminate one of those levels of governance, Archbishop Anne Germond, acting primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, told members of Council of General Synod (CoGS) Nov. 9. The suggestion is one of a set of seven intentionally provocative statements or “hypotheses” from the commission, the formal name of which is Reimagining the Church: a Primate’s Commission on Proclaiming the Gospel in the 21st Century.
Germond, who is also the metropolitan of the ecclesiastical province of Ontario, described intensive work the province has done in recent years on theological education as an example of a provincial contribution to the church.
Without the provinces, “who will do that work at the intensive level that we have been able to do it in Ontario?” she asked. While she wasn’t ruling out the possibility that other church bodies could collaborate to do similar work, she added, “To make a sweeping statement without knowing truly what is happening at the ecclesiastical provincial level—I would be really afraid of that. At the same time, until we truly understand the work of General Synod, I would be terrified just saying, ‘Let’s eliminate it.’”
Retired dean Peter Elliott and the Rev. Kyle Wagner, members of the primate’s commission, informed CoGS in a Nov. 8 report they had finished collecting feedback on the seven hypotheses from across the church in consultations with provincial synods, the House of Bishops, General Synod staff and more. The commission will spend the next several months analyzing and collating the data collected on how many people agreed with each hypothesis and how urgently needed they thought the suggested changes were in each case. It will also be examining respondents’ written statements.
As part of the process of preparing for that report, CoGS held a discussion Nov. 9 for members to raise their own thoughts and questions on the hypotheses. Other members of CoGS echoed the acting primate’s concerns about eliminating a level of governance, especially at the provincial level. One of those to speak was Bishop John Watton of the diocese of Central Newfoundland, who said his own ecclesiastical province, Canada, had not gathered for a meeting since the pandemic. But the conversation had galvanized him to call for a fresh effort at reconvening its clergy, bishops and laity, he said. “We need to fix this. We need to come up with a new model for being a province because it’s too precious to lose.”
Hannah Wygiera, of the diocese of Calgary, spoke fondly of her time serving at her provincial synod and at this, her first meeting of CoGS. “There’s so much hope about the future of the church,” she said. “I don’t think this is a question about, ‘Should we eliminate one of these?’ … I think this is more of a question of, ‘How do we foster those same servant relationships across the country?’”
Canon Stephen Fields, of the diocese of Toronto, agreed, adding “It’s too big of a country, a church, to say one or the other [synod or provinces] … There has to be a way to make this church work as it is.”
In that session, CoGS also discussed a hypothesis on improving accessibility and inclusion on the church’s governing assemblies. Some members, including Archdeacon Alan Perry, general secretary of General Synod, pointed out that there are few ways for General Synod to mandate dioceses to send more diverse candidates to General Synod gatherings by policy. Others, including deputy prolocutor Archdeacon Tanya Phibbs, said other factors General Synod could control, such as where the church chooses to hold its meetings and how it convenes them, could affect who has the opportunity to come, echoing another hypothesis which suggests the church further cut down on travel.
One group not specifically named in the hypothesis on inclusion, said Wygiera, was youth. Wygiera herself was a youth delegate at General Synod 2023, where she says she was excited to represent young people in the church and discuss issues of concern to them. What she found, she said, was that the youth were not given enough orientation to fully participate in Synod.
“It was nice talking about our favourite ice cream flavours, but I wanted to talk about why we don’t have a lot of youth in the church,” she said. Youth delegates did not feel they had opportunities to speak up in proportion to the responsibility the church laid at their feet to come up with solutions for representing youth. “You get blasted at Synod [by people] saying, ‘You’re the youth delegate—we need to do more for the youth, what can we do?’ And then we’re not included in the discussions,” she said.
On the hypothesis suggesting the church should require primates to serve concurrently in the role of diocesan bishop, the council asked for an opinion from Germond, who currently occupies the positions of acting primate, provincial metropolitan and diocesan bishop of Algoma. She said she would want to know how much input staff, clergy and Anglicans in a bishop’s home diocese would have in whether they had to share their diocesan bishop with the rest of the national church. It was also a challenge for a bishop to split their mindset between the kind of wide-viewed decision-making required to work on matters of national and international policy and the more focused—though also important—issues they worked on in one diocese, she added.
Any changes made to the canons defining the primacy would require extensive work, said chancellor of General Synod Canon (lay) Clare Burns. As such, she said, she and the governance working group, a committee currently looking into reforming the church’s governance, estimated making the change named in the hypothesis would require adjustments to at least seven other points in the canon. Redrafting those documents would take too much time and work to be finished in time to begin voting on any such changes at General Synod 2025, she said.
Commenting on the hypotheses as a whole, Archdeacon Jonathan Hoskin, of the diocese of Brandon, said he was unsure how they fit with the church’s five transformational commitments. Since the church had adopted these priorities at General Synod 2025, he said, CoGS should consider them their chief mission statement and judge any work they did by how well they served the core commitment of inviting and deepening life in Christ. That was ostensibly reflected in the commission’s theme of proclaiming the gospel in the 21st century, he said. But he questioned what some of the hypotheses did to advance that goal.
“Is our good news for the world that we don’t have a General Synod or ecclesiastical provinces anymore? Is that how we’re proclaiming the gospel, by eliminating one of those levels of governance in our church?” he asked. “So I just am not sure what we’re doing.”
In his presentation November 8, Elliott shared a preliminary look at the data collected from individual Anglicans, clergy, staff and church governing bodies across the country on their responses to the hypotheses. A simple look at the simple agreement and urgency ratings they gave showed that each of the hypotheses had some merit in the eyes of respondents on average, he said. A large proportion of respondents had rated themselves at high agreement with each of the hypotheses in the online survey. According to a chart the commission members showed CoGS, the most popular suggestions were reducing travel at the General Synod level and improving diversity of participation in governance. 64 per cent of respondents rated themselves as agreeing or strongly agreeing with the former with 9 per cent disagreeing and 61 per cent reported high agreement with the latter with 18 per cent registering moderate or strong disagreement. The least popular of the hypotheses was one on discontinuing independent journalism funded by General Synod, with 38 per cent of respondents agreeing and 31 per cent against.
But the more instructive and more difficult analysis will consist in the qualitative feedback they received, where respondents expressed their specific thoughts and feedback, they said. This will help the commission determine which aspects of each hypothesis spoke to respondents, which aspects they have concerns about and what they said about how the church should act on them, said Elliot.
Once the commission had thoroughly examined that data and extracted the common themes of the responses, he said, they would return to the spring gathering of CoGS with a complete report and recommendations for what to do with the hypotheses based on the feedback they had received. It would be up to CoGS, he said, to make final decisions about whether there were motions to bring to General Synod based on the data the commission provided.
