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THE OBJECTIVE of our Diocesan Plan is for each one of us to embrace the moment that we have been given and to believe and trust that the One who has promised is faithful. It is not about institutional survival, for it is not we who are called to save the Church. Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labour in vain (Ps 127:1); we already have a Saviour.
A second objective for us, collectively, is to get the will to do the things that we know that we need to do in order to be responsible stewards not only of those who came before us but also and perhaps more importantly for those who will come after us. Amongst the hard questions that must be asked is how our resources are allocated—existing, future, and potential. And so the Plan tries to be direct and honest in its assessment of where we are and where we can be—always, endeavouring, as St Paul reminds us, to speak[…] the truth in love, so that we, in the Diocese of Huron, may …. grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ (Ephesians 4:15).
The Diocesan Plan is rooted in formal and informal conversations that began in 2020, which were themselves informed by the October 2019 episcopal election. They have continued since then at Diocesan Synods, Diocesan Council Meetings, and other gatherings at the Deanery and Parish levels. The overall direction was set by the Bishop’s Charge at the 180th Synod of the Diocese of Huron (“Living Hope: Our Identity and Mission in Christ,” 2020), confirmed by the Vision Task Force that was established immediately afterwards, and reiterated at subsequent Synods. The vision is informed as well by the Five Marks of Mission and the Lambeth Calls, which came from the 2022 Lambeth Conference gathering of Bishops from across the entire Anglican Communion.
Bishop's Charges from 2020 onward have outlined the challenges by reminding us of how the Diocese and the entire Church has changed over recent decades. There is no need to rehearse the story here; we need only to look around us, in our parishes, amongst our friends and relatives, and in the media. We have all seen the demographic studies that predict the end of the Anglican Church of Canada in our lifetimes—but we ought not to believe that this will be the case. And even if it were, we are called only to be faithful participants in God’s mission in the world and here in the vineyard that is the Diocese of Huron. What is certain, however, is that Christianity can no longer be assumed to be at the centre of all things, forming and shaping the society and culture around us in its image.
The decline of religion in the West is a fact. It cannot be attributed simply to a failure of management, control, effort, or innovation. It is primarily due to forces far beyond our control, which in fact began centuries ago with the Enlightenment. But this decline and the rise of our very secular world is also an opportunity that, in some ways, resembles the small, counter-cultural assemblies of men, women, and children in the earliest centuries of the Church—a time of “patient ferment” (Alan Kreider, 2016). We need to remember that secularism is not the cause of this decline, only correlated with it.