Bishop Mark MacDonald, the Anglican Church of Canada's first National Indigenous Bishop, is on the job and full of energy. After much delay, including leg surgery and moving his family from Alaska to Toronto, the 53-year-old Bishop is finally at his desk at 80 Hayden Street, typing away on his laptop and planning out the fall.
"You know, we're just in the first portion in what will be a long and large arc," said Bishop MacDonald in a recent interview.
It's an arc that began in the 1960s when the Anglican Church of Canada started to analyse its relationship with aboriginals. Over the next few decades, aboriginal Anglican groups developed a vision for a National Indigenous Bishop, and in 2005 the Anglican Indigenous Sacred Circle decided to ask then-Primate Archbishop Andrew Hutchison to appoint someone to the position.
Last January, the Primate announced the appointment of Bishop MacDonald, who was then Bishop of Alaska and Navajoland with the US Episcopal Church.
In some ways, his job description is clear: the Bishop will represent Canadian aboriginals in the larger Church, and help interpret and navigate Church systems to and for them. Yet this job is an unprecedented historical step.
"I don't think that anybody really has a good handle on what it is exactly, in any kind of organisational way," said Bishop MacDonald. "But I think over the long term it's going to be extraordinary."
To discern his direction, Bishop MacDonald will spend time talking to aboriginal Anglicans over the next few months. "Simply imposing somebody's great idea will probably be destructive and oppressive," he said. "I'm sure that a combination of my ideas and a few thousand people I'll be talking to over the next few years will be where the ideas come from."
In July, Bishop MacDonald visited Kingfisher Lake First Nation, north of Kenora, Ontario, in the diocese of Keewatin, where he taught at a summer ministry school, performed his first confirmations as bishop, and played guitar at a gospel jamboree. Moosonee and Rupert's Land are the dioceses he will visit next, and a Council of the North meeting in Edmonton is up for the end of September.
