Looking to General Synod 2025
Highlights and silences from pre-filed reports
A couple people have asked if I’m going to repeat my series of posts from two years ago reviewing the reports filed in advance of the upcoming General Synod of the Anglican Church of Canada. I’m not. Two years ago I was on sabbatical and had a lot more time for writing (of all kinds) than I do right now. I’m also not a delegate to General Synod and won’t be attending this year’s meeting. Nonetheless, as a conscientious Anglican, I’ve looked through the pre-filed material a bit and for those who’ve asked (always keep the readers happy!) here are a few things that jump out at me.
Statistician’s Report
The Anglican Church of Canada is well-served by its part-time statistician, Neil Elliot, who offers up reports to the church—that the church then tends to ignore. Back in 2019, Canon Elliot generated headlines with a projection that on current trends the church would cease to exist in 2040. Alas, his subsequent report in 2023 wasn’t even discussed at General Synod that year. This year’s report is worth reading—even though it’s nowhere on the agenda (that I can see—happy to be corrected). The picture is one of some bounceback from Covid but overall continued decline, with a few exceptions:
In the six years from 2017 to 2023 we lost 1/3rd of our average attendance, or over 6% per year. In other words, it appears people are coming back to festival services, but not to regular Sunday worship.
It seems to me almost certain that the impact of Covid would be to bring forward the 2040 “expiry date” of the church. But it doesn’t seem like we’ve been brave enough to do that projection. Perhaps if it was updated, we could manage to get the governing body of our national church to have a discussion about this. In the meanwhile, have a read of the whole thing.
(The United Church of Canada has launched a Toward 2035 initiative that is deeply data-informed. The projections aren’t good but the comprehensiveness of the report and the discussion it is generating make me wish Anglicans could do something similar. I haven’t seen the numbers posted online yet but many of us have seen the presentation. Here’s a letter with an overview.)
Communications Committee
This is an area in which I have great interest, both as an avid reader of (and occasional contributor to) the Anglican Journal as well as someone with a professional background in communications. I thought the report of this committee in 2023 was very sub-par and tried (unsuccessfully) to have a resolution adopted to address that. The report this year is much stronger and includes several interesting pieces, including numbers on which resources are actually being used: 30,000 church calendars are sold per year! It is somewhat depressing that after quite a lot of work from quite a lot of people the book of essays the church put together about Medical Assistance in Dying only sold 200 copies. Read it! Study it! There’s a lot of important material in there. If you can’t buy it, download it.
Probably the most significant piece of work is a new statement on journalistic policies and practices in relation to the Anglican Journal, a quasi-but-not-really-independent entity in appendix 1. I haven’t had time to fully digest this but it does seem to address some of the key complexities here.
The one disappointment about this report is that the committee seems to have kicked the can down the road—again—on the future of the Anglican Journal. The report notes that the savings of eliminating the print edition of the Journal are likely not high at all and the potential costs of doing so could be great. But instead of saying the church should keep a print publication, it calls for a comprehensive study, even though we just completed one of those in 2019 (not all that long ago) that reached many of the same conclusions.
Read the whole report yourself.
Ecclesial Apologies
Various ecumenical committees and dialogues have been at work and they report to the General Synod. For me, the most interesting of these was the report from the Anglican-Roman Catholic Commission in Canada on ecclesial apologies. Here’s a snippet of the introduction:
This document explores the idea of apology through the lenses of scripture, theology, and history. We hope that this study might help the members of our churches reflect on the meaning and importance – and limits – of making formal apologies to those whom we have wronged. It can also be a resource for church leaders who may be called upon to offer such an apology on behalf of the church to which they belong.
It offers accessible theological, Scriptural, and historical reflection, and then makes concrete suggestions for how it can be used in the church. This is precisely the kind of helpful and worthy document that the church generates that will, regrettably, I fear, fail to make an impact commensurate with its significance.
Speaking of apologies and residential schools, it’s always worth reading the archivist’s report, if for no other reason than that the work of archivists has been so vital to the church’s work towards reconciliation.
I should add that I served on the Financial Management Committee in this past biennium. The committee’s report has not yet been posted but the draft financial statements for the recent year have been.
Silences
There are a couple of topic areas that are notable by their absence in the pre-synod materials.
First, evangelism and discipleship. There was a motion about this at the last General Synod that was not considered. But the Council of General Synod then formed a taskforce on evangelism and discipleship. I know this because I was asked to meet with them at one point. Yet there is no report from them, though I know that one was written. Why isn’t it public? Surely—in light of the statistician’s report, if nothing else—this might be a topic for the General Synod to pay attention to.
Second, the Jubilee Commission. The 2023 General Synod extended the mandate of this commission that is “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.” The Anglican Journal reported recently that the commission had struggled to make progress in the past biennium. Nonetheless, it might be worth at least a short report to give General Synod a sense of the scope of the challenges. I don’t see any resolutions about this commission either. Will it just be allowed to wither away? That would be regrettable.
Third, governance resolutions. The last General Synod had a lot of discussion about proposals to change the super-majority requirements for certain resolutions and whether some topics had to be discussed at two consecutive synods. Ultimately, they got punted to the next General Synod. But I don’t see them in the pre-filed resolutions at all. Who made this decision and why? I’m not saying it’s the wrong decision but an explanation wouldn’t be out of order. (UPDATE: this is addressed in the report of the Governance Working Group, which decided the resolutions were unlikely to pass and so did not put them forward again. Apologies for the oversight.)
Finally, the transformational commitments. The 2023 General Synod adopted five transformational commitments to guide the work of the church. I found them less than compelling and voted against them. Nonetheless, they did pass and I respect that as a decision of the church. A couple of the reports make some reference to them. But I can see no indication of anything the church was doing that it stopped doing or anything it wasn’t doing that it started doing because of the transformational commitments. In other words—and not to be overly cynical about this—it appears to be existing activity fitted into new category headings. But the church is in a season of trade-offs—yes to this, no to that—and the transformational commitments don’t seem to be a helpful tool for making that a reality.
If I have time, I’ll have another post about some of the proposed resolutions. In the meantime, happy reading and safe travels to those of you on the way to London, Ontario for the meeting.
The Rev. Canon Jesse Zink is principal of Montreal Dio and canon theologian in the Diocese of Montreal.
The General Synod 2023 minutes including the interesting information of the recorded vote on the extension of the primatial term: how each member voted.