On the 'Reimagining the Church' Commission
Or, on the necessity and limits of polity fixes
Last summer, I wrote a piece about the Anglican Church of Canada’s 2023 General Synod, arguing that the church in which I serve was failing to reckon with the key question before it: how to best facilitate the proclamation of the Gospel in the context of a rapidly secularizing country and shrinking church. I recall having a good and rather spirited conversation about it. (I made much the same argument about the Episcopal Church’s last General Convention here).
Fortunately, while I stand by my comments about General Synod, outside of Synod there was a realization that more thinking on exactly this question of how our structures can facilitate Gospel proclamation was needed. Thus, in fall 2023, a new commission began meeting, named Reimagining the Church: Proclaiming the Gospel in the 21st Century, Structures & Recourses.1 It is charged with making recommendations for the next General Synod in 2025 for how the governance and operations of the church - and specifically the churchwide level - might better fulfill its mission.
Earlier this month, the Commission released the first updates on its work (read them here): an introduction to its work, a history of the General Synod, and seven hypotheses — suggestions, “deliberately provocative,” for transforming the structures and functions of the Anglican Church of Canada offered for discussion. The Anglican Journal recently reported on the Commission and its work; the article can be read here.
I have a few thoughts about this process that I want to share.
I am very glad that the ACC is taking seriously the question of how our structures can better serve Gospel proclamation. I’m really just thrilled! In that piece last summer, I wrote that Reformation efforts at church-building give us a helpful criterion for assessing church governance: “good church governance is ordered clearly and explicitly towards the Gospel; poor church governance is not.” It is very heartening indeed to read the Commission clearly state that “the primary purpose of the Anglican Church of Canada is to communicate the good news of God in Christ,” and that the goal of the Commission’s work is to discern “how structures can best enable the proclamation of the Gospel.” I wrote last year that this is precisely the question that the Anglican Church of Canada ought to take up, and I am glad to see that this is also the view of this Commission.
And what are the hypotheses the Commission provides? As the instructions for the Commission demand, they are a set of proposals about how our church functions at the churchwide level. Recall that they are not final proposals and indeed are deliberately provocative; the final recommendations might be different. They are as follows:
To reimagine the Council of the North (the churchwide structure that supports ministry in the Canadian north) with an eye towards achieving mutual independence with the Indigenous Church.
To diversify participation in churchwide governance.
To eliminate one level of the ACC’s polity, either General Synod or ecclesiastical provinces (the judicatory between the diocese and General Synod).
To consider having our Primate be a diocesan bishop rather than a stand-alone position.
To reduce travel and meeting costs, likely by limiting in-person churchwide meetings.
To re-envision the work done by the national church headquarters and ask whether maintaining a physical national headquarters is necessary.
To end the church funding of the Anglican Journal.
Now, I’m not going to comment on each of these individually. But I think that they are very much the questions that need to be asked right now about the polity of the ACC, and will soon (assuming current trends continue) need to be asked in the Episcopal Church too. Let me underline this: if our church is going to carry out its mission of Gospel proclamation, it cannot be crushed by the weight of sclerotic institutions that no longer function well; the Commission seems to get this.
Indeed, I’m glad that the Commission is willing to propose significant changes to how our church functions. I think that the strategy of making the upper levels of our polity much leaner in order to free up resources for Gospel proclamation is probably the right one. This is not least the case because the national church’s power at other levels of our polity is actually not very considerable, especially in a polity like that of the ACC that devolves a lot of power to dioceses. I am excited about the work of this Commission, and will be praying for its success and participating when it asks for public comment.
But thinking about the Commission and its work also led me to think about some other issues that — while beyond the ambit of the Commission itself — may impede its success.
First of all and most obviously, there is the risk that whatever proposals this commission comes up with will be voted down at the 2025 General Synod. This, rather embarrassingly, is what happened with the Task Force to Re-Imagine the Episcopal Church (TREC) in 2015. A lot of time, energy, money, and expertise were poured into this task force. It produced what I think were a quite interesting and compelling set of recommendations. But then these recommendations were largely ignored at General Convention, perhaps not least because they required General Convention voting to slim itself down. This obviously isn’t the fault of TREC, any more than something similar happening would be the fault of the members of the ACC commission, but it is worth remembering that church bodies are much better at talking about issues than actually solving them.
Secondly, I noticed that, despite the Commission’s statement that the goal of each of their hypotheses was to better enable the ACC’s proclamation of the Gospel, the actual explanatory text for each of these hypotheses did not always successfully link the two. I don’t mean to be too hard on them for this; there are only so many ways one can say “this will free up time and resources at the diocesan and parish level,” after all.
However, I worry that this also reflects a broader issue for our church: we are not actually of one mind about what the Gospel, “the good news of God in Christ” is. It is a disagreement that, as I have suggested, is particularly reflected in our debates over MAiD, but it is not restricted to questions of euthanasia. No: I have heard it preached from prominent ACC pulpits that the point of Christianity is to establish social democracy and support cultural progressivism or that Jesus did not come to found a religion at all but a movement for justice. That such old-fashioned doctrines as Jesus’ resurrection or divinity may be allowable if they provide motivation for that goal but are fundamentally just nice stories. And then of course there are those who (without denying the significance of social justice for Christian ethics) see the Gospel as more fundamentally about how the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of the God-man Jesus opens up to us the forgiveness of sins and new life now and eternal life forever in Jesus Christ, who will return to judge the living and the dead. These two accounts of the Gospel are, at the end of the day, incompatible.
Now, let me be very clear: this question of the nature of the Gospel is not within the Commission’s ambit to discuss. Its remit is not to define what the ACC means by the Gospel,2 but rather to discuss fixes to our ecclesiastical structures. And so it can hardly be justly called a failure or shortcoming of the Commission that it doesn’t face this head-on. However, I worry that, beyond some obvious good-governance fixes or institutional streamlining, this basic disagreement will make it harder for us to decide on the changes we need to better equip the church for Gospel proclamation. That is, if we don’t agree about what the proclamation of the Gospel actually is, how will we be able to agree about what church structures best enable that proclamation?
To be sure, extreme theological diversity seems to be going nowhere fast in the ACC. Perhaps there is really nothing more that we can do now at the church-wide level then find the sort of polity fixes that don’t depend on privileging one account of the Gospel over the other. But — the Commission’s laudable goal of structures optimized for Gospel proclamation notwithstanding — I don’t know that we can actually claim to have a polity driven by the Gospel if we don’t have a shared understanding of what that Gospel is.
Thus, as I said, I am praying and will be working in whatever small ways I can for the success of this Commission. It seems to be doing good work, and I pray it will continue. This really is good news for the church, and I was excited to see it. And also, I will be praying and working in whatever small ways I can for renewal in this church, that we may boldly confess the doctrine that we are already de jure committed to — that the Gospel of forgiveness, new life, and death’s defeat by Jesus may indeed be the Gospel that our church full-throatedly proclaims.
Per the reporting in the Anglican Journal, the proposal for this commission was in fact made before General Synod, which makes the lack of discussion of it at Synod itself somewhat perplexing.
I would argue that this is, in fact, clearly defined in the Solemn Declaration, but it is often ignored in our church today, alas!