Joint Assembly set for 2019

The Anglican Church of Canada and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada (ELCIC) will meet together for a second time in a joint assembly to be held in Vancouver in 2019.

The first joint meeting of the governing bodies of the two churches – which have been in full communion since 2001 – was held in Ottawa in 2013. The two churches met as one group except when required to meet and vote as separate legal entities.

The 2019 assembly, to be held “probably in July,” will be hosted by the Anglican diocese of New Westminster and the British Columbia Synod of the ELCIC, and supported by the Ecclesiastical Province of British Columbia and Yukon.

The 2019 gathering “will help build on the work that God did among us in that first Joint Assembly” and will also draw “our two churches more and more closely together, in God’s mission ‘for the love of the world,'” said a joint announcement issued by the two churches.

The announcement noted that the 2013 assembly, which adopted the theme, Together for the Love of the World, “broke important new ground in the growing global pattern of relationship between Lutheran and Anglican churches.”