THE Anglican Church of Canada has voted overwhelmingly for the allocation of $2 million in unrestricted funds to bring about significant changes in church life. The resolution was carried by 199 votes to 14 by the Canadian General Synod’s seven-day meeting in London, Ontario, last week.

The recommendations are the outcome of a national consultation process by the Primate’s Commission on how the Church should go forward in the 21st-century climate of diminished attendance and harsh financial realities. The Church’s governance structures have long been acknowledged to be top-heavy, and one of the stated goals is to reduce their size and the cost of maintaining them.

The Church also elected the Rt Revd Shane Parker, Bishop of Ottaway since 2020, as its new Primate.

The resolution was moved by the Acting Primate, Archbishop Anne Germond. Decline in active participation in parishes and congregations is described as precipitous. Confusion about what the Synod is seeking to achieve is reported to be combined with dissatisfaction with the legislative processes and concern about underrepresented and marginalised communities.

The resolution sets out six “pathways”, which include working in partnership between the indigenous Church and the historic-settler Church. Archbishop Germond urged the Church to give up its internal divisions. “We cannot be a Church divided into east and west, north and south, indigenous and non-indigenous, gay or straight, progressive or conservative, rural or urban, well-resourced or poorly resourced,” she said.

“If we are to succeed at all, we can only be a Church walking together into the future with bold prophetic hope, extending the hand of grace to one another at every opportunity.” She referred to such co-operation as “holy and sacred risk-taking.”

Bishop Parker urged members to approve the resolution. “The Synod has called me to serve as your Primate. I have relinquished and will continue to relinquish a lot. To do that, please equip me to do what you’ve called me to do — to not be stranded with no resources,” he said.

Bishop Parker, who is 67 and of Irish heritage, had been neither on the list of Primatial candidates nor the first or second ballots of the day. The Order of Bishops added his name to the list of candidates, on the third ballot, in response to a motion from the laity asking for more candidates. He was elected on the fifth ballot.

He told the Synod that the next few years would be a time for removing the barriers between the Church and the outside world, and between people within the Church. “We need to feel the cold and the heat and the wind and the fire. We need to understand our context without the insulation that has built up over so many years . . . so we can feel the Holy Spirit, so we can feel and hear one another, and so we can have the courage to be the Church we must be at this point in time.”

Archbishop Parker worked as a labourer for several years before graduating and becoming a professional sociologist. He studied theology at Saint Paul University, was ordained in 1987, and was elected Bishop of Ottawa in 2020.

Resolutions of the Synod included support for the country’s 845,000 migrant farm workers. “The Good Samaritan didn’t ask for papers,” the director of the Huron Migrant Farmworkers Ministry, the Revd Enrique Martinez, told the Synod. “He didn’t check if each man was one of his people. He didn’t ask if he was from the same faith, the same country or the same language. He just loved.”

The Synod also passed a resolution related to disability theology. Jodie Porter, from the diocese of Niagara, who co-chairs the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada’s task force on ability and inclusion, said that many disabled Canadians did not feel part of Christian communities in Canada or internationally.

In her presentation, “The Leper’s Window”, she pointed out that the 11th-century Church in medieval Europe cared deeply about its leper community and allowed its members access, albeit at a distance, to the mass.

The task force believed, she said, that “as Christian communities, we are still at the leper’s window. We are good. We care about disabled people. We give them access. We want to share with them. But access is not inclusion, and that is the huge issue. The barrier isn’t accessibility. The barrier is our theology and the way we teach it.”