The Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada and the Anglican Church of Canada will meet together for a second time in a Joint Assembly in 2019. The churches’ two governing bodies, the Council of General Synod (Anglican) and the National Church Council (Lutheran) have each passed a resolution in support of this joint assembly as each of their national gatherings meets in Vancouver, probably in July of 2019.
The two national gatherings (the Anglican General Synod and the Lutheran National Convention) will be hosted by their local churches, the British Columbia Synod of the ELCIC and the Anglican Diocese of New Westminster, supported by the Ecclesiastical Province of British Columbia and Yukon. The nature and agenda of the shared meeting is yet to be decided, as each church needs to decide how it will address its denominational agenda in its national gathering, as well as entering into time together to explore and grow into the common life of our Full Communion relationship.
The 2013 Joint Assembly, “Together for the Love of the World,” took place in Ottawa, and broke important new ground in the growing global pattern of relationship between Lutheran and Anglican churches. The 2019 gathering will build on the work that God did among us in that first Joint Assembly, and help our two churches continue to respond together to the new thing that God is doing by drawing our two churches more and more closely together, in God’s mission, “for the love of the world.”