THE leadership of the Anglican Communion “should look like the Communion”, according to a report, published on Friday, which proposes changes to the structure of the body.
The report, The Nairobi-Cairo Proposals: Renewing the Instruments of the Anglican Communion, has been produced by the Inter-Anglican Standing Commission on Unity, Faith and Order (IASCUFO), over the course of the past year and a half.
It outlines two proposals for further consideration at the next meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC) in 2026. In the first, the description of the Anglican Communion agreed at the 1930 Lambeth Conference would be revised.
The authors of that description “could not have anticipated the future equality, mutuality, and maturing of the 42 sister churches of the Communion”, and the proposed revision makes clear that they are “autonomous”.
The revision also removes the description of the churches being “in communion with the see of Canterbury”, substituting it with a reference to their “historic connection” with Canterbury.
By this connection, the revised description says, the churches of the Communion “seek independently to foster the highest degree of communion possible one with another”.
The introduction to the report says that such a change of wording would be “in service of a decentered, polycentric understanding of the mission of the Church”.
The second proposal is to introduce a rotating presidency of the ACC, and to give the Primates’ Standing Committee an “enhanced role” in convening the Primates’ Meetings and the Lambeth Conference. Both moves would, in effect, reduce the Archbishop of Canterbury’s procedural influence in the Communion.
“Ceding the expectation that the Archbishop of Canterbury convenes and presides at all meetings of the Communion will enable the personal and pastoral aspects of the archbishop’s ministry to be given and received, and fits with the identity and ideals of the Anglican Communion in a post-colonial era. The leadership of the Communion should look like the Communion,” the report says.
Last year, Archbishop Welby indicated his support for structural and cultural changes to the Communion, saying: “I will not cling to place or position” (News, 17 February 2023).
The Communion needed to find ways to express unity that did not result in “the imposition of one powerful group’s values coming from their culture nor from scripture on another position”, he said in a speech at the ACC in Ghana.
The introduction to the new report says that it should be read “not as an end but as the beginning of a new conversation”, and, in a foreword, the former Bishop of Kensington, Dr Graham Tomlin, who chairs IASCUFO, said that the proposals were “the product of deep listening and honesty across theological and cultural difference”.
IASCUFO comprises 18 members, drawn from six continents. About two-thirds of the members come from countries considered to be part of the global South.
The body was asked by the ACC in February last year to prepare a report on the structures of the Communion. An earlier version of the report was discussed at the Primates’ Meeting in April, and the final version will be considered at the next meeting of the tri-annual ACC, in Ireland, in 2026.
Dr Tomlin wrote in his foreword that IASCUFO was proposing “seemingly small but significant changes to the way we work and understand ourselves as a Communion. There is a real prospect of the fragmentation, or even dissolution, of the Communion over the coming years if we do not pay urgent attention to matters of ecclesiology.”
To read the full report see: www.anglicancommunion.org/renewing-the-instruments
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