A thankless and necessary job: proposing change in the church
On the Reimagining Church Taskforce
Here is a thankless job: propose change in the church. Like many other institutions, the church can all too easily fall into the mindset of, “We’ve always done it that way” or “No, that definitely won’t work.” Change can too easily get pushed to the side.
Here is a necessary job: propose change in the church. It’s clear that the structures that have sustained Christian witness in Canada for some generations are in need of renewal and refreshment. We shouldn’t find this surprising. Across the scope of Christian history, how Christians have organized themselves, what they’ve considered important, and how they’ve shared their message with the world have shifted and altered many times.
So we should all give thanks for the work of the Reimagining Church: Proclaiming the Gospel in the 21stCentury taskforce in the Anglican Church of Canada. For the last year, they have been meeting to discuss where the Anglican Church finds itself now and this summer and fall have been soliciting feedback on the initial draft of their work, which amounts to seven hypotheses about potential changes.
If you study the recent history of the church, I think it is clear that taskforces of this nature don’t tend to effect immediate change (and I don’t think any member of this taskforce thinks they will). More than a decade ago, the Episcopal Church formed, with great fanfare, a Taskforce to Reimagine the Episcopal Church (TREC). When it reported, its recommendations were…mostly ignored. I remember talking to the leader of an ecumenical seminary a few years ago who was reflecting on his institution’s history and how, many years ago, it brought together several denominational seminaries into an existing institution. “In order to make change,” he said, “we needed to have wise leadership, good relations among our partners—and a burning platform.” In other words, there had to be an urgency about the need for change. Perhaps the problem with TREC was that no one sensed the platform was truly burning and they liked things just the way they were.
But what these taskforces can do is bring to the surface, in a thoughtful, reasoned, and substantiated way, some of the undercurrents that aren’t far below the surface and get the church talking about them. My own experience of structural change in the church has been integrating the work of two theological colleges. In our case, we had an initial task force that did an immense amount of work—and was met with, well, not quite the same enthusiasm from the people who needed to make decisions. But not long afterwards the work of that taskforce made the eventual work of integration so much easier.
(And since one member of the TREC taskforce is now the Presiding Bishop and another is the President of the House of Deputies, perhaps one lesson to draw from all of this is that taskforces like these just need to wait until their members come to occupy positions of influence, as I am sure many members of Reimagining the Church will one day—if they’re not so turned off by their current experience! You can read the full TREC final report here, by the way.)
So all of this is by way of background to reading the hypotheses of the Reimagining Church group. They has been soliciting feedback from the church and I understand that their survey is now closed. I filled out the survey and I hope you did too. (I’ve deliberately held off on sharing any views in a forum like this so as not to shade those survey results.) But I think it’s important for the church to reflect on this document and posts like these have been helpful in contributing to that reflection in the past so here goes. In the remainder of this post, I’d like to say a few things about the taskforce as a whole. In a subsequent post, I’ll write about the hypotheses directly.
I am struck by the (somewhat cumbersome) name of this group: Reimagining Church: Proclaiming the Gospel in the 21st Century. Based on the sub-title , it seems to be a group dedicated to thinking about the place of the Christian gospel in our society. Huzzah! I am all for a conversation like that. But the title makes clear that its focus is on the church and, as the hypotheses make clear, the focus is on church institutions. Church and gospel proclamation are related, but I think you can talk about gospel proclamation without talking about church structures and (alas) vice versa.
In fact, I sometimes wonder why as a church we collectively shy away from this conversation about just what the good news of Jesus is for the context(s) in which we find ourselves. I don’t think we can all just assume that we agree on the question of what is good and what is new about what Christians have to say to the world today. Perhaps church structures and institutions are easier to talk about because—I don’t know—they’re safer? They’re less theological and we don’t feel equipped to speak and talk theologically anymore? I’ve written elsewhere about this so I’m not going to belabour the point here but there seems to be a tension between the rather august title of this group and the focus of the hypotheses.
Even if the focus is just on the church, there is still a potentially quite large scope. Indeed, when the then-primate Linda Nicholls proposed this group she was reported as describing the challenges in this way:
Nicholls said a new strategy would be needed for the church to go forward into the post-pandemic world. It will need to respond to challenges including financial pressure “as parishes struggle to sustain full-time or part-time stipendiary ministry and dioceses struggle to meet multiple responsibilities at local, regional and national levels.” The national church, on the other hand, is facing the challenge of supporting ministry in regions where donations do not cover expenses, she said. Meanwhile, statistics show the church’s membership is aging and declining. Cultural shifts in Canadian society and a newly redefined relationship with the Indigenous church, she said, also demand new ideas.
That is an ambitious (and necessary) agenda. The commission seems to have decided to narrow its focus to the General Synod, perhaps on the quite reasonable belief that they should only be considering things over which the body to which they report has authority.
But as we approach this group’s report, we should keep in mind that the conversation that needs to happen as a church is significantly broader than what these hypotheses cover. We are potentially in danger of spending significant energy on responding to a report that is actually fairly narrow in its scope. So I think my first caution is that we not lose sight of that larger scope, whether that be the place of the church (in all its levels) in Canadian society or the fundamental message of good news that Christians have to share.
That’s enough for one post. I’ll turn to the hypotheses themselves in a future post. You can get that post directly to your inbox by subscribing for free.
The Rev. Canon Jesse Zink is principal of Montreal Dio, a theological college affiliated with McGill University, and canon theologian in the Diocese of Montreal.
Thanks for this reflection, Jesse.
One of the challenges I see in this moment is that the work of the Commission has in some ways overshadowed, perhaps supplanted, the Transformational Commitments that General Synod adopted in 2023. While much can be said about whether those were the right Commitments, etc., etc., they were adopted by Synod (and have disappeared from view).
One of the key tests going forward is how the group tasked with implementing the Transformational Commitments and the Primate's Commission engage with one another so that structural changes aren't made separate from, but informed by these commitments, core to which is a commitment to Inviting and Deepening Life in Christ.