A great sigh of relief: General Synod Diary, Day 5
Posts and diary entries from the Anglican Church of Canada’s 2023 General Synod, meeting for part of that time conjointly with the Evanglical Lutheran Church in Canada. Earlier posts in this series are here.
Bible verse for today: “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.” (Ecclesiastes 3:1) The chancellor, David Jones, invoked this in his farewell remarks when it was announced at the end of the day that he will be retiring in the next year. The season of General Synod is coming to an end — and an exhausted group of people gives thanks.
Highlight of the day: The Primate, Linda Nicholls, preached at the closing worship service, and I found it just magnificent. Here was a woman who was clearly exhausted, who had been on the run from thing to another all week, and was suddenly and unexpectedly being forced to re-evaluate the future of her ministry delivering a quite compelling Biblical exegesis to the church with very few notes. It felt so deeply episcopal and primatial. I wish we had been able to see more of her in this role this week.
Today’s personal goal: Glue myself to my seat and not speak to a single motion, though I was (unsurprisingly) full of opinions about many of them. Every moment of floor time that went to a motion earlier on the agenda was a moment that couldn’t go to a motion later on the agenda and I wanted the resolution on MAID that I sponsored to make it to the floor.
In one of those wonderful serendipities of agenda scheduling, we passed a motion related to various matters of the ecumenical relationship with the United Church of Canada and then turned directly to A055, a profoundly anti-ecumenical motion that would undercut much of what the previous motion sought to do. (The resolutions page seems wonky and not all resolutions are currently posted so I’m not able to link to everything.)
I have already written about A055 and had heard plenty of opposition expressed to it throughout the week. It was being informally called the “anti-ANiC” [that’s the Anglican Network in Canada] motion, i.e. that it would prevent dioceses from licensing clergy ordained in this breakaway church. In recent years, I’ve worked closely in Montreal to help bring an ANiC priest into the diocese and it’s been a success so that was even more reason to oppose the motion. Among the many issues brought out on the floor was this connection to ANiC and whether this was an attempt to prevent that. The answer from the chancellor was not entirely clear and so not terribly reassuring.
There was an immediate line at the microphone to speak to A055 and every speaker was in opposition. I found this quite heartening and it made it easy to sit on my hands, though I was longing to bring out something about this being the Anglican equivalent of Apostolicae Curae, the 1896 papal bull that declares Anglican orders “absolutely null and utterly void.” The glue worked and held me to my seat.
After some discussion, A055 was amended to remove the middle two paragraphs that were the most awful. Somehow, the glue holding me to my seat then failed and I got up to speak against even the amended motion. I just do not think we need to turn everything into a canon in the church and, in fact, making everything a canonical issue can serve us poorly. The amended motion passed, but only very narrowly.
One essay question I often set for my students goes something like this, “Why does the Anglican Church have bishops and what are they good for?” I wish my students had been able to hear debate on the floor today as we considered a motion (A031) changing super-majority requirements for some voting procedures. The range of views expressed about bishops was quite wide. I had come into this Synod leaning towards supporting this motion but had over the course of the week found myself leaning towards opposing it. But then I found myself getting annoyed by the rather uncritically high view of episcopacy that some speakers were expressing and so was leaning back towards supporting it.
But then a surprising thing happened, and I was saved from having to vote. The new prolocuter and deputy prolocuter made a motion to postpone consideration to the next Synod and it passed by a relatively narrow margin. We then turned to the other potentially controversial governance resolution about eliminating the need for some motions to be passed by two consecutive synods. The chancellor had effectively undercut the argument for its passage during the debate over A055 when he kept saying that if we passed A055 now, then it could be given further consideration before final approval. He seemed to recognize this and suggested this motion be deferred as well, which we duly did.
Over the last couple of days, I’ve been a part of several quite direct side conversations with various church leaders and others about my concerns about the communications policy of the church that I sought to raise on the first day of synod. I’m not going to share what were private conversations but they led to a C resolution about communications that I authored. Much of what I had hoped to have in that resolution was ruled out of order and it was never going to make it to the floor anyway. But my concerns have made it into the resolution explanation (scroll to the bottom of this page). At this point I will take a teeny measure of satisfaction at getting these concerns onto the record in this fashion so that everyone can read them, even if they couldn’t hear them on the floor of synod.
One of the things I learned from these side conversations is that people have been speculating about my motives about all of this. Speculation includes that I am an agent of the #ACCToo movement (I didn’t sign the letter) or that I want to make some kind of scene about William Cliff, the bishop who is chair of the Communications Coordinating Committee and who is presently inhibited pending an investigation into misconduct allegations. Nope, not that either. I was once a news reporter and I genuinely care about the communications work of the church.
By my count, we have been addressed by delegates in seven different languages (English, French, and five indigenous languages) during floor debate. It is a great regret, therefore, that the entirety of our worship has been in English. I have struggled at times with the worship, including again today the use of a statement of faith that, to my knowledge, has never been authorized by the church. In a debate about some liturgical-related resolution today, an indigenous delegate raised the question of translation. The mover replied, “I regret that it’s not translated. Maybe some day, I hope.” We need to stop acting like an unilingual anglophone church and start coming up with strategies to translate our material. There are ample ecumenical resources we can draw on here.
One of our videos today about the work of the General Synod Office featured the General Secretary. It featured video clips of him speaking on the floor at previous General Synods and it was possible to witness his progressive greying. Someone at my table said, “Is that what going to General Synod does to you?”
Several people who have been to previous Synods have said that there has been a noteworthy increase in indigenous delegates speaking on the floor of Synod. We’ve heard a really wide range of perspectives from right across the country. If this is what it might be like when the entire Synod is conducted in English and according to western-style parliamentary procedure, imagine what it would be like if we could move beyond that.
Speaking of which, at the end of the day we did pass two interesting and important resolutions about exploring models of consensus decision-making (C009) and looking at the role of bishops in Synod (C008). These debates revealed yet more difference in understanding about the role of bishops in the church as well as dissatisfaction with the way things are done now.
In her closing remarks to Synod, Linda Nicholls told us, “I am of course disappointed that I will not have the opportunity to see through the work of this synod to 2025. Synod has spoken — or at least the Order of Bishops has spoken.” Not surprisingly, she was very emotional in these moments and added, “the personal cost of this leadership has been very high.”
Something I am proud about this week: every day I managed to get out for a walk of a fairly decent length. It was the only way I could stay sane.
Thanks for the feedback and for reading along these past several days. I’m going to offer a couple of wrap-up posts in the next couple of days before drawing this General Synod material to a close.
