When a church stops asking hard questions

Does the Anglican Church of Canada deserve good journalism? Do they need it?

I’m a former editor of the Anglican Journal, one with a fraught and very public history with the church and some of its former leadership. I left the church after my own ordeal and no longer read the Journal.

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When I learned that the church voted last month to eliminate the Journal’s journalistic mandate and transform it into a public relations instrument, I felt little surprise. Church leadership had long struggled to manage a department dedicated to consistent and structured truth-telling. Sometimes it made the church look good, but sometimes it made the church look very bad indeed. I knew the church was ready to let journalism go.

And so my answer to the first question is no, Anglicans do not deserve good journalism. In fact, they decided as much on June 12 through their own democratic structures.

But deserving isn’t the same as needing, and ending your pursuit of truth doesn’t negate your obligation to it. These ideas raise different questions, ones that I believe every Christian should consider.

The Anglican Journal has produced award-winning and meaningful journalism, but it has come at a cost. When I took over the publication in 2019, something like 12 editors had served the Journal over the previous 20 years. My immediate predecessor lasted a month. In my experience, this is extremely unusual in ecclesial journalism; I’ve known editors who served the same publication for 30 years.

As I fell deeper into the role, I came to understand that the church had backed itself into a corner: the Journal had to be journalistic in order to access hundreds of thousands of dollars from the federal government. The Aid to Publishers grant, from the Department of Canadian Heritage, is designed to support production and distribution costs so Canadian journalism can still reach relevant audiences. You cannot produce a public relations rag and receive taxpayer money.

When I arrived, the grant money subsidized the costs of the Journal’s printing and distribution, allowing for other materials to be wrapped within its pages and mailed without additional postage costs. Diocesan publications and appeals for donations were stuffed inside, saving thousands on direct mailings that would otherwise be unaffordable to the church. So, the church had to commit to journalism to keep this delivery vehicle alive.

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Church leadership, however, could hardly serve as publishers of a journalistic venture. Journalism is, after all, difficult. It’s full of “legal, reputational and relational risks” to borrow from the Council of General Synod’s own language. As the church has shrunk over the past six decades, so has the capacity, the patience and the will to keep such an effort afloat. When you’re bleeding, you search for a bandage, not for salt. And many church leaders perceived the Journal editors as always standing by, ready to tear at any wound that they’d sooner see ignored. I can empathize with any church leader who has experienced the Journal editor as a professional pain in the ass: an unwanted gadfly and dedicated party pooper who, unfortunately, must remain to enable subsidized direct mailing.

For Journal editors and writers, this has always been a stressful arrangement, occasionally boiling over into living nightmares. The Journal’s publisher didn’t want the journalism it produced — sometimes it really didn’t want it — but it needed the grant money. When I was there, I felt trapped. I believe church leaders also felt trapped. Everybody was trapped.

Nobody deserves this kind of misery. But that suffering wasn’t without purpose.

Do Anglicans need good journalism? This is a different sort of question.

The General Synod, the Anglican Church of Canada’s highest leadership body, largely includes people who are elected, and is, therefore, a democratic body.

The people vote for leaders; the leaders are empowered to make changes. But without access to reliable and truthful information, how do the people know what changes are needed, what values are at stake, and which leaders will lead effectively? Who holds the leaders accountable? How will institutional shortcomings or failures be brought to light?

In democratic societies, this is where journalism comes in. In the Anglican Church, this task fell on the shoulders of Journal editors. I’m neither the first nor the only person to make this observation.

So what happens now that the Anglican Church has abandoned journalism? Its corporate communications department will surely promote the denomination’s successes, but who will shed light on its missteps?

The church is arcane, and as its numbers decline, so does its relevance. Secular journalists can serve neither as the church’s compass nor its conscience. They almost certainly won’t cover the less sensational but still important questions about budgets, due process and use or abuse of power that can best inform democratic processes.

The Anglican Church of Canada may not want journalism, but it needs it. Anglicans are facing all sorts of crises: long-term demographic decline, abuse scandals and a collaborative role in colonial genocide. Even long-stable partnerships seem more complicated these days; consider the church’s decision to exit a joint Toronto office lease with The United Church of Canada before anyone could even move in. How will the church navigate these predicaments without hard questions being asked and answered? Will it rely on earnest presentations by subcommittee chairs and nodding affirmations of senior clergy?

This brings me to my final point. People across Canada have survived — and not survived — abuse at the hands of Anglicans. Some lie in fields outside of residential schools, their descendants still struggling with the trauma. Others, those who survive, live with the terrible sting of spiritual, physical and emotional betrayal. What do they deserve? What do they need? Who will hear their cries?

As someone who advocated to church leadership the necessity of bringing the stories of both residential school and #ACCtoo survivors to the pages of the Journal, I absolutely affirm that the church’s victims deserve good journalism, and more of it.

This is the crisis that finally led to my resignation as Journal editor. In 2021, amid the #MeToo movement, survivors of sexual abuse and misconduct in the church contacted the Journal to share their stories. As editor, I offered them confidentiality and anonymity, a practice journalists use judiciously, and usually only when tangible harm could come to a source sharing their perspective. I went on parental leave for two months, and when I returned, I discovered the survivors’ stories, with identifying details still intact, had been shared by the church’s general secretary with the bishops in charge of the very institutions that had harmed them. My calls for accountability for this breach of trust went unheeded.

The following spring, the Council of the General Synod discussed the incident. According to their meeting summary, church leaders were struggling between “the Gospel imperative to care for the powerless and victimized” and “their covenanted responsibility to the institution.”

That struck me as blasphemous, and I left Anglicanism behind.

Anglicans should find pause in the suggestion that their church leaders are struggling to balance survivors’ needs and institutional loyalty. They should be troubled by their leaders’ belief that the risks of truth-telling outweigh the benefits.

I appreciate that the church is in a tough spot — maybe as well as anyone could. But my sympathy does not make the prioritization of institution over truth-telling and human suffering understandable to me.

If you’re an Anglican, I hope you fail to understand, too. For Jesus said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

He made no mention of the truth’s legal, reputational and relational risks.

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Matthew Townsend was the editor of the Anglican Journal from 2019 to 2021. He is the editor of The South Dartmouth Post in Dartmouth, N.S., and worships at St. Vladimir Orthodox Church (Orthodox Church in America) in Halifax.