To spend $2-million or not to spend $2-million...
...that is the question
(This is a follow-up post to an earlier one previewing the 2025 General Synod of the Anglican Church of Canada. The earlier post look at pre-filed reports.)
Relatively speaking, there aren’t that many pre-filed resolutions at the upcoming General Synod. One senses that people are used to working on a three-year schedule and this accelerated two-year time horizon (with a primate retiring halfway through) was not conducive to getting resolutions prepared. I see two interesting areas that resolutions are touching on.
Pathways and Structural Change
Two resolutions come out of the work of the Primate’s Commission on Reimagining the Church, one (A180) to urge action on the six pathways for structural change their report sets out, and another (A020) authorizing the spending of up to $2-million of unrestricted funds in the church’s endowment to pursue these pathways. Though it’s not specified, I gather this money would be spent on things like consultants, outside staff, and the holding of the constitutional convention envisioned in the Primate’s Commission report.
These resolutions raise critical and important questions for the church and, to the best of my knowledge, break new ground in the way the presiding officers are proposing (in A020) to spend the historic capital of the church. I hope this debate will be engaged and full at Synod. On my read, here’s what strikes me.
Financial implications
How much is $2-million? That’s an important question for considering A020. According to the draft financial statements, in December 2024 the church had about $15-million in unrestricted funds. (See net assets on p. 3 of the report.) It had about $9.8-million in expenditures (p. 5). So $2-million (over three years) is about 13% of the church’s reported unrestricted funds and a 7% annual increase in church spending. Those are big percentages. It concretely represents money taken from future generations to fund expenses in the current generation.
But there’s a significant wrinkle—to use a polite phrase—in the financial statements. They include a “commitment” (p. 17) that notes the national church has a five-year lease on new offices on Bloor Street in Toronto that—over the five-year initial lease period—will cost $1.06-million in basic rent; an estimated $3.14-million in additional payments for property taxes, insurance, etc. (that’s the $628,000 figure times five); and $3.98-million for leasehold improvements. That totals more than $8-million committed to the new church offices over the next five years. Where is this money going to come from? The budget is already in deficit so it can’t come from regular income. If it comes from the unrestricted funds ($15-million), that will cut those funds more than in half and make the proposed $2-million spend a much greater percentage—close to 1/3—of the church’s remaining funds. (It could come from the sale of the current offices, though in the current Toronto real estate market how much will that get? And does it make sense to spend all the proceeds of that sale on a single five-year lease term? What happens after that?)
Spending historic assets
Regardless of how much money the national church does, or does not, have, the significant question is whether it makes sense for the church to spend its historic assets and spend it on structural reform and a constitutional convention. I don’t think it does. First, I intend to be in ministry for some decades yet. I’d like there to be some money left in the bank when I retire, not to mention hand on to my children. There’s a real question of inter-generational justice to address. I know that many church organizations have been spending historic assets to fund current operations for a long time. It doesn’t make it right or mean the national church has to join in.
Second, one of the great besetting sins of Anglicanism is our belief that we can make plans and see them to fruition. There are a number of historical examples of this to point to—Mutual Responsibility and Interdependence, Partners in Mission, etc. I don’t have space to make this argument as full as it needs to but suffice to say that one of the lessons of church history is that God works through us even when our plans don’t work out. I simply don’t have confidence that even if the church did terrific preparatory work with some great consultants in the next, say, two years, it would be in a place to make meaningful decisions at a constitutional convention which, due to finances, likely couldn’t be much longer than a current General Synod, which is already too short for deliberative work. The kind of work that the Primate’s Commission suggests needs to be done—consolidating dioceses, eliminating provinces or the national synod—is so immense that I don’t see how a consensus on this can be reached.
Other approaches
So what’s the alternative? Well, one would be restructuring by budget cut. We just let the machinery of the church crash into a brick wall. On some days, this seems tempting (if unfair to those who labour heroically within that machinery). The other would be to elect a primate and officers of synod—and I have no particular candidates in mind when I write this—who have a clear vision for what needs to happen and are willing to work to make it happen. The one (perhaps) effective restructuring of the national church that has taken place happened in the late 1960s when Howard Clark commissioned outside consultants (from PWC, if memory serves) to report on the structure of the national church and then implemented a huge amount of change on the basis of that report. But that was just in relation to one level of the church (the national office) and it was implemented by a primate who took the heat for the change.
Obviously, there’s a lot more to write about this and notwithstanding what I said just a minute ago about being skeptical of spending historic assets, I want to make one last point. Motion A020 raises a tantalizing question—if we are going to spend down our historic assets, what should we spend it on? Colour me skeptical that we should spend it on church governance. I’ve heard the argument that we need to address the governance questions so we can have the energy to get to the mission and ministry questions. I agree—to a point. The thing about governance is that it has a way of sucking up all your energy, leaving nothing left over for anything else. Part of the job of church leadership is knowing how to give appropriate, but not undue attention, to these governance questions.
A couple of years ago—maybe more than a decade, actually—there was a General Convention of The Episcopal Church that adopted a motion to spend historic assets on evangelism. A bishop said something like, “I’d rather be in a growing church with a shrinking endowment than a shrinking church with a growing endowment.” (I can’t find the exact quote regrettably or who the bishop was.) Meanwhile, the 2025 General Synod approaches and it won’t be seeing a report from a taskforce on mission and evangelism and (for the second straight synod) it won’t be discussing its own statistician’s latest report showing continued decline. But it will be considering an unprecedented spend from its historic assets on… governance revision. Forgive me if I’m missing something here, but this doesn’t seem quite right.
Primate’s Commission
On the broader work of the Primate’s Commission, I commend their final report to you. I have already written (at length—in three separate posts) about their interim report last fall and I won’t re-hash all of that here. In reading the report, however, I am left with the sense of a missed opportunity. When this commission was first publicly announced, the then-Primate, Linda Nichols, suggested it would have an expansive mandate as suggested by its sub-title “Proclaiming the Gospel in the 21st Century.” However, the actual mandate reported in the terms of reference is considerably narrower—focus on structure and governance at the national level. Given those terms of reference, the report is fine, clears some important ground, and lays out obvious areas of focus. But I think the church would be so much better served by a broad conversation about what the gospel message actually is in the 21st century and how we are called to proclaim and enact it. Perhaps General Synod isn’t the place for that conversation—but it’s the one that needs to happen.
On the Primacy
On an entirely different matter, there is an intriguing resolution (C001) that would set in motion a process to change the canon on the primacy to permit—but not require—the person elected primate to maintain their diocesan see upon their election rather than being forced to relinquish it. The topic is well addressed in an article from the Anglican Journal.
As I say, I find this intriguing and could probably find my way around to arguing both sides of this one. It has to do with what we are looking for not only in primates but also in bishops and where we think the “real action” (so to speak) of church life takes place. Given that this motion isn’t actually canonical change but directing canonical change to be prepared for a future vote and that the change envisioned is permissive—i.e. the primate could stay diocesan bishop but could also resign as diocesan—and doesn’t require anything, I would probably vote in favour of it with the idea that this is a time when the church needs to keep as many ideas in play as possible. I hope it is well discussed at synod.
And with that, my limited preview of General Synod comes to an end. Back to my regular habit of deeply irregular posting.
The Rev. Canon Jesse Zink is principal of Montreal Dio and canon theologian in the Diocese of Montreal.