Loose Canons: Unsure Foundations
This analysis is the second in a series that examines the Diocese of the Upper Midwest’s Constitution and Canons during their ongoing revision process.
Two years ago, an ACNA priest noted that the governing documents of the Diocese of the Upper Midwest (UMD) – the Constitution and Canons – did not equip the diocese to function within the nominal bounds of Anglican polity, let alone navigate a crisis involving the bishop’s leadership.
In the summer of 2021, following public allegations of abuse mishandling, UMD Bishop Stewart Ruch was placed on leave and the ACNA Province announced that a review of the UMD’s Constitution and Canons was underway. (Missing from this announcement was an explanation for how the radically deficient Constitution & Canons were approved by the ACNA Governance Task Force in the first place.)
In November 2022, Bp. Ruch declared that his leave of absence was over and resumed his governance of the diocese. On December 1, 2022, he shared that the task force reviewing the UMD’s Constitution and Canons had completed its work and a new constitutional structure was going before the Diocesan Assembly for a provisional vote. The UMD Diocesan Assembly issued a first ratification of its revised Constitution by a two-thirds majority vote on December 19, 2022. To be permanently adopted, the Constitution must be ratified a second time, at this year’s Diocesan Assembly meeting on December 16, 2023.
That December meeting is scheduled to be busy: the diocese plans to ratify the new Constitution, adopt a whole new accompanying body of canon law, and vote for members of a new diocesan group called the Standing Committee, all at the same session. Then it will be a new day for the UMD – poor governing structures will be replaced with better ones, backed by the accumulated wisdom of the Anglican legal tradition and strengthened by the desire to govern justly and keep at bay bad actors from within and without. Right?
As ACNAtoo has pointed out over the past two years, the UMD has shown little interest in learning from their mistakes and has instead doubled down on the denial of any institutional wrongdoing – including around mandatory reporting failures. Leaders whose mishandling of abuse has been thoroughly documented, including Chancellor Charlie Philbrick, have returned to leadership positions, without any apparent corrective measures or constraints on their authority.
This defiant lack of transparency and accountability is further reflected in the timeline for updating the Constitution and Canons – a process that is as hurried as it is opaque. UMD members who plan to attend the Revive conference on October 27 have very little time to learn what a diocese’s constitution should do – and how the UMD’s revised Constitution continues to fall short. Even more importantly, UMD members must understand how to evaluate the Canons in order to weigh in on them during the narrow two-week window allotted for feedback. Far from engaging lay people with the Anglican civic context they need to make informed decisions, the UMD has not yet even released the text of the revised Constitution or Canons to its members.
Constitutions, Canons, and Civic Duty
Keeping an eye on the laws of our state or country is part of our civic duty. Letting our representatives pass bad laws or exploit loopholes leads to corruption, tyranny, and harm to our neighbors. In the same way, keeping an eye on the laws of our church is part of our duty to the most vulnerable in our midst. While some may consider church laws to be red tape, they serve a valuable safeguarding function. It is never enough to rely on church leaders’ good intentions or verbal assurances regarding the church’s procedures. It’s not just for canon lawyers – church governance concerns everyone.
With that in mind, it’s both important and easy to understand the basic structures of Anglican dioceses. The chief document that governs a diocese is called its constitution. A Constitution lays out the bodies of the diocesan government, their purposes, and their relationship to one another – much like how the US Constitution lays out the structure of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of the federal government, including their checks and balances on each other.
Accompanying a diocesan constitution are its canons. Canon is simply a church term for law. Canons contain implementation details for the procedures generally described by the constitution, and other laws which don’t contradict the constitution. Continuing the US government analogy, canons are like a body of federal law, fleshing out what the governed people wish to do with their legal authority within the parameters of the constitution.
A diocesan constitution is its highest law, the skeleton around which any subsequent canon law is built. It’s a critical document that defines the legal direction of what comes next – but, even though the new UMD Constitution has already been ratified once by the current Diocesan Assembly, its text has not been made public.
It’s impossible for UMD members to act responsibly and perform their membership duty to the church and their neighbor without seeing and carefully considering the Constitution that will govern the UMD. While the UMD has not publicly shared its revised Constitution, ACNAtoo received photographs of it. You can read the full text of the proposed Constitution here.
In this post, we will take a look at two of the four governing bodies that the new Constitution creates. What leaders do with their power matters, and it is vital that we understand how their power is structured, and in this case, protected. No church governance is abuse-proof, but steadfast refusal of authentic checks and balances reveals a hubris that will only cause more harm. We hope the people of the UMD and the ACNA will take note and ask the necessary questions.
The Synod
The new UMD Constitution states:
ARTICLE VI: THE SYNOD
There shall be a Synod which shall be the primary legislative body of the Diocese, with such composition, membership selection, responsibilities, powers and authority as set forth in the Diocesan Canons.
The diocese has framed this article as merely a change in nomenclature, renaming the old Assembly to the new Synod. A Synod sounds great, and synods are the normative way to run Anglican provinces and dioceses alike. Anglican primates and their canon lawyers from eighteen churches worldwide made this implicit principle explicit when they said together: “Each church, province, and diocese has an assembly, namely a synod, council or other body, the function of which is to govern.” (1)
Why do Anglicans govern through synods? Because they give voice to every baptized Christian, representing groups with different perspectives and interests. No one group can railroad another if all are guaranteed representation. The primates and their lawyers say that “representative government is fundamental to church polity, and in matters which touch all, all should have a voice.” Flowing directly from this is the normative expectation that synods be composed of “representative bishops, clergy, and laity,” which “share authority in synodical government.”
But the UMD Constitution is short on specifics. Who will make up the Synod? Will there be an even balance of clergy and laity? Where will the Synod members come from – will they be elected as representatives of their respective groups, or appointed arbitrarily? The Constitution does not say, instead seeing these questions as implementation details to be answered by the as-yet-unseen Canons. Constitutions normally spell these important provisions out. Representation isn’t just a detail to be worked out later. It’s fundamental to how a synod functions.
The Dioceses of San Joaquin (2), Pittsburgh (3), Quincy (4), and Fort Worth (5) (four founding dioceses of the ACNA), as well as the REC Diocese of the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic (a founding jurisdiction of the REC, dating from 1873) (6) and the Dioceses of CANA East and West (7), among many others, find the provision that their synods are to be elected and representative bodies to be structurally important enough to include in their Constitution. The provincial constitutions of the Church of Nigeria (8) and the Church in the Province of the West Indies (9), too, envision the diocesan synod as a representative body with lay participation. All of these groups and more accord harmoniously with the Anglican primates and lawyers who say that “lay people are entitled to participate in the governance of a church,” but the UMD Constitution stands apart as radically deficient in assuring this basic representation.
And what does the Synod do exactly? In the wider Anglican world, synods legislate, much like congresses and parliaments of secular governments. They amend constitutions, create new canons, issue resolutions, discuss and debate thorny issues, elect various diocesan officials, form committees to advance specific policy aims, and more. The primates and their lawyers are quite clear in observing that throughout the Anglican churches, “the power to legislate is vested in the representative assemblies of a church,” including on the diocesan level, and that while bishops sometimes give consent to proposed legislation, they “may not legislate unilaterally.” That is the power and privilege of the synod.
By contrast, the UMD Constitution describes the Synod as only the “primary” legislative body of the diocese – implying that there are other legislative bodies. Housing any legislative power in a body other than the Synod undermines the authority of the Synod. It means that legislation can originate from a body that is not representative of the various groups and interests within the diocese. It’s a violation of the separation of powers necessary not just for secular governments, but for any organization that wishes to function with a minimum of corruption.
Where else does the UMD Constitution locate the power to legislate? Read on.
The Standing Committee
The second new body the UMD Constitution creates is the Standing Committee, which is to replace the current Bishop’s Council.
ARTICLE III: STANDING COMMITTEE
There shall be a Standing Committee of the Diocese to function as the Diocesan Board of Directors, presided over by the Bishop and serving as a legislative, consultative and oversight body, with such composition, membership selection, responsibilities, powers and authority as set forth in the Diocesan Canons.
Standing committees have a long history, particularly in the North American Anglican churches. Bp. Ruch is correct in claiming that Anglican standing committees capture “the essence of gospel partnership [between] clergy and the people of God” as a governance structure, but that’s not all standing committees are for. A primary purpose of the standing committee is to serve as a check on executive decisions the bishop may want to make.
In North America, standing committees even predate the existence of the proper episcopacy, since the colonies were first left without consistent bishops for over a century; when bishops were more properly established in 1789, the standing committees retained their authority in order to maintain a crucial check on the bishops’ power. (10) In other worldwide Anglican churches, similar structures go by related names (e.g. “bishops’ councils,” “diocesan boards,” etc.).
Well-equipped standing committees can wield a considerable check and balance on a bishop: in 2020 the standing committee of the Diocese of Pittsburgh pushed for, then received, the resignation of their bishop upon his mismanagement of an abuse crisis. To enable such stands to be taken as necessary, it is essential that the members of a standing committee be independent from the bishop (and ACNAtoo has already cataloged how the existing UMD Bishop’s Council falls woefully short of this ideal).
But the same problem that plagues the Synod in the new UMD Constitution also plagues the Standing Committee: it is left unspecified where its members come from, delegating that decision to the Canons. The UMD plans for its Synod to elect the new Standing Committee this December, and this time, nominations can come freely from parishioners with the current Bishop’s Council determining the final candidates.
In subsequent years, says the UMD, the Standing Committee will serve as the nominating committee for itself. That decision appears to be taken unilaterally, as it is provided for nowhere in the Constitution, and it is hard to see how a self-perpetuating body could truly provide the needed independence to both counsel and confront the bishop when necessary. A Standing Committee which nominates its own replacements is a Standing Committee that is unable to be changed, though its members may rotate, even when change may be direly needed. A survey of the dioceses we’ve previously mentioned will show that, instead, the most common and time-tested method of selecting members for the standing committee is for the diocesan synod to elect them, and that both clergy and laypeople shall be so elected. (11)(12)(13)(14)
Given that there is no guarantee in the UMD Constitution that the Standing Committee will be an elected or representative body, it is troublesome that one of its functions is described as “legislative.” That power, as we have seen, properly belongs to the duly elected Synod. Assigning the Standing Committee legislative powers gives it the right to chip away at the Synod’s ability to act as a check on both the Standing Committee’s and the bishop’s power.
While the UMD Constitution accords powers to the Standing Committee that standing committees do not usually have, it is short on detail regarding the powers or responsibilities it does have. It isn’t necessary to enumerate all of these in a constitution, and many dioceses describe their standing committees’ duties further in their canons. But the fact that neither the new Constitution nor the new proposed Canons are available to the public means that currently, people in the UMD are being encouraged to serve on the Standing Committee without any real idea of the responsibilities they will take on.
The only forthcoming information about the role of a member of the Standing Committee comes from Bp. Ruch, who enumerates only three duties: to serve a three-year term, to attend monthly Zoom meetings, and to attend four in-person meetings. There are no examples given of the canonical responsibilities the standing committee will have or what precise duties they will have to carry out. All of these are hidden behind the wall of the revised Canons, which are not yet released or approved by the Synod.
One critically important responsibility taken on by Standing Committee members, but left undetailed by Bp. Ruch, is legal liability. It is common for standing committees to be the legal board of the diocesan corporation. This is mentioned in the new Constitution – the Standing Committee “function[s] as the Diocesan Board of Directors” – but the Constitution remains unavailable to the public and thus to the nominees. We believe that the fact of taking on liability via serving on a corporate board should be communicated clearly to those who wish to volunteer themselves for that board. If litigation should come against the diocese, it may be possible for Standing Committee members, as members of the board of directors, to be named as defendants. Those who would like to serve the diocese in this way should go in with eyes open.
ACNAtoo will continue to examine the UMD’s Constitution and Canons in the coming weeks. These details require close attention, but church governance matters. It matters because it is about power, in this case the refusal by Bp. Ruch, Canon Stephen Gauthier, and other leaders to properly distribute power between the Synod, the Standing Committee, UMD’s parishes, and the major officers of the diocese. It matters because institutional structures have a direct impact on how abuse comes to light (or doesn’t), how laity are empowered to respond (or not), and ultimately how the virtues of justice and truth-telling are practiced within the Christian community.
Take Action
There is no guarantee that the Synod will be an elected, representative body, including both clergy and lay people. Push for that to be specified in the Constitution.
There is no guarantee that the Standing Committee will be an independent body, and its members may assume legal responsibilities without their full knowledge. Push for that to be corrected in the Constitution and in diocesan communications.
Refuse to ratify the revised UMD Constitution as it stands. Demand a Constitution that offers governance modeled after dioceses that have held their bishops and other authorities accountable.
Endnotes
The Principles of Canon Law Common to the Churches of the Anglican Communion, (link). This global document on Anglican common law arose from the collaboration of Anglican primates and their legal advisors, representing Anglican churches in Wales, Australia, South Africa, Canada, England, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, the Indian Ocean, Nigeria, the United States, the Philippines, Sudan, Papua New Guinea, Myanmar, Tanzania, Ghana, and the West Indies.
Constitution of the Diocese of San Joaquin (link). Article V Sec. 5: “The Convention [Synod] shall be composed of qualified members of the Clerical order and elected members of the Lay order of this Diocese.”
Constitution & Canons of the Diocese of Pittsburgh (link). Article III Sec. 1: “The convention shall be composed of Clergy and Lay Deputies.” Sec. 3: “The Deputies shall consist of two Deputies from each Congregation in Union with the Convention, chosen from the Lay Communicants as the Convention may, from time to time, by Canon prescribe.” Canon III Sec. 2 15a: “Lay Deputies from a Congregation shall be elected by the Vestry of the Congregation or by a meeting of that Congregation, as provided in its by-laws.”
Constitution of the Diocese of Quincy (link). Article VI Sec. 4 B: “Parishes, Organized Missions, and Parochial Missions which have been admitted into union with the Synod of this Diocese shall be entitled to lay representation with seat, voice, and vote in this Synod…” C: “Lay Deputies shall be qualified electors, as defined by canon, of the congregations they represent and shall be elected as prescribed by canon.”
Constitution of the Diocese of Fort Worth (link). Article 2: “The Diocese of Fort Worth entrusts its legislation to a Convention to consist as follows: First, of the Bishop, when there be one; of the Bishop Coadjutor, when there be one; of the Suffragan Bishops, Assistant Bishops, if there be any; Second, of all priests canonically resident in the Diocese, and not under Ecclesiastical discipline, and who have not in contemplation of removal from this Diocese, applied for their Letters Dimissory; and Third, of Lay Delegates chosen by and representing their Congregations. Lay Delegates and their Alternates shall be elected by the Congregations of their respective Parishes and Missions at the Annual Parish Meeting and shall hold office until their successors are elected.”
Constitution & Canons of the Diocese of the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic (link). Article V Section 3: “All lay delegates elected in accordance with the provisions of Title II, Canon V, of the Canons of the Diocese are members of the Diocesan Council.”
Constitution & Canons of the Anglican Diocese of the West (CANA) (link). Article III Sec. 1 A: “The Synod shall be composed of the Clerical Order and the Lay Order.” B: “The Clerical Order shall be composed of Clergy Delegates comprised of the Bishop or Bishops and all of the Priests and Deacons under the authority and license of the Bishop.” C: “The Lay Order shall be composed of the Lay Delegates elected by the Congregations and Missions as defined by Canon.” The Anglican Diocese of the East (CANA) (link) shares this language.
Constitution of the Church of Nigeria (link). Chapter IX Sec. 40: “Every fully organised Diocese shall have a Diocesan Synod consisting of the Diocesan Bishop, a House of Clergy and a House of Laity and a Constitution approved by the Diocesan Synod to govern its administration.” Chapter XVI Sec. 8: “‘Diocesan Synod’ is and shall mean an assembly consisting of the Diocesan Bishops, Suffragan Bishops, the House of Clergy and the House of Laity of a Diocese constituted according to such Regulations as have been or shall be made in such Diocese and approved by the General Synod.”
Constitution & Canons of the Church in the Province of the West Indies (link). Article 7: “‘Diocesan Synod’ means an assembly consisting of the Bishop or Bishops, Clergy and members of the Laity of a Diocese and constituted according to the Rules and Regulations of the said Diocese…”
Early Development of the Diocesan Standing Committee, Bob Pritchard (link).
Constitution & Canons of the Diocese of Pittsburgh (link). Article IX Sec. 1: “At each Annual Convention one member of the Clergy and one Lay person shall be elected for a period of four years. No member of the Standing Committee shall be eligible to succeed himself or herself until the next Convention following the expiration of term of office.” Sec. 2: “The Clerical members of the Standing Committee must be of those entitled to Seats in the Convention of the Diocese.” Sec. 3: “The Lay members of the Committee must be communicants in some Congregation of the Diocese in Union with the Convention.”
Constitution of the Diocese of Quincy (link). Article X Sec. 1: “There shall be a Standing Committee of the Diocese which shall be a council of advice to the bishop, and shall, along with the bishop, constitute the Board of Directors of the Diocesan Corporation. If there is no bishop canonically authorized to act, the Standing Committee shall be the ecclesiastical authority of the Diocese and it shall have such other rights and duties as provided by the Provincial and Diocesan Constitution and Canons. It shall consist of three priests and three laypersons to serve three-year terms; a priest and a layperson being elected annually.” Sec 2: “The members of the Standing Committee shall be elected from among the priests of the Diocese who are qualified members of the Synod, canonically resident within the Diocese, and from the laypersons who are qualified electors of a congregation in the Diocese, except those pursuing an application for postulancy or ordination. No person shall be elected to a second successive full term. No person serving on the Standing Committee shall serve concurrently on the Diocesan Council, Ecclesiastical Court or, or as Chancellor or Vice Chancellor.”
Constitution of the Diocese of Fort Worth (link). Article 10: “The Standing Committee shall consist of three (3) Priests entitled to seats in the Diocesan Convention and three (3) Lay Persons who shall be Confirmed Communicants in good standing in this Diocese at least eighteen (18) years of age and who shall possess such other qualifications as may be prescribed by Canon. When there is a Bishop in charge of the Diocese, The Standing Committee shall be his Council of Advice. If there be no Bishop canonically authorized to act, The Standing Committee shall be the Ecclesiastical Authority of the Diocese. The Members of The Standing Committee shall be elected by ballot by a concurrent majority of each order at an Annual Convention. Their terms of office shall be for three (3) years or until their successors are elected. At each Annual Convention one (1) Priest and one (1) Lay Member of The Standing Committee shall be elected. Vacancies occurring prior to the expiration of the term of any member of this Committee shall be filled by the vote of a majority of the remaining members of The Standing Committee. The person so elected shall fill out the unexpired term, constituting a first term of office if said unexpired term is for two or more years. No member of The Standing Committee may serve more than two (2) consecutive terms. The Standing Committee shall keep a record of all its official acts and shall report them to the Convention.”
Constitution & Canons of the Diocese of the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic (link). Article IX Sec. 1: “The following Committees and Boards shall be elected annually: (1). A Standing Committee, consisting of three Presbyters and three Laymen. Members are elected for three year terms, with one Presbyter and one Layman being elected annually. Members who have served for two consecutive terms may not be elected for a third consecutive term.”