At St John’s Theology Hub:

  • We had 13 credit and 4 audit students in Tanis’ Indigenous Christian Spirituality class, an all-time enrollment record for our agreement with CMU.
  • Winter enrollment is looking good with 6 credit students already registered for my Theology of Place class and 3 students registered for both our Intro Bible and Preaching classes.
    • One last recruitment push will be going out in early December.
  • Working with Vince Solomon, we re-offered the Land Acknowledgment workshops in an online forum which were well attended, averaging about 20 people each time. It was especially encouraging to see clusters from specific parishes who are taking this work seriously.
  • Our Summit series continues, it is especially attractive to folks from Norther Ontario but struggles to draw local participation. In the New Year we will be using this forum to host discussions around all the various A-Motions we passed at Synod.
  • Diocesan Book Club continues with a dedicated group of about 6-9 people including occasional participants from other dioceses.
  • The new mobile Hybrid classroom is almost assembled. I have plans to do a 4-week learning journey on the Israel-Palestine conflict during Lent, using this classroom to pop up in various parishes who want to host a conversation around one of the issues involved.

National and other Collaborations

  • The Anglican-Mennonite ecumenical dialogue is continuing. We are having very fruitful discussions around ecumenical shared ministry (we looked at the Pinawa example) and Reconciliation work with Indigenous peoples. Given the number of participants on the dialogue from Manitoba, I think this will result in some real opportunities for shared work here.
  • The Heads of Anglican and Lutheran Colleges have been informed of a new round of collaborative funding from the Lily Foundation and are working on figuring out how we might work together as a sector to land this $10 million USD grant.
  • The Discipleship and Evangelism Task Force continues to meet monthly and is generating some great focus on how we can better support this work across the nation.
  • Living Waters, a collaborative network out of the Episcopal Church continues to be a generative space for folks from our diocese. Wayne McIntosh and I had a wonderful time at their conference this fall.

Church Visits

  • I continue to visit and preach at parishes. Since Synod I preached at St. Francis, St Mary la Prairie, and St Mary’s Sioux Lookout. I was also able to bring a workshop on the lectionary to the Sioux Lookout LCM team while I was out. I preach at St Paul’s on Advent 1.

Ordinands

  • The OMT met recently and we have 3 interview panels ready to go for the new year and a couple more applicants in the pipeline.