Anglican Consultative Council refuses to give up Ecclesiastical power

Posted on July 7, 2026 
Filed under Anglican Communion, Opinion

“Why are we not surprised?

The 19th Anglican Consultative Council, meeting in Belfast, Northern Ireland, voted 72–8 on July 4 to leave the Archbishop of Canterbury’s role as the spiritual and ecclesiastical figurehead of the Anglican Communion untouched. Delegates declined to adopt the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals — the most serious attempt in a generation to reckon with post-colonial reality — and called instead for three more years of ‘discernment and conversation.’

Three more years! When the ecclesiastical establishment wants to kill something, it does not shoot it; it studies it to death. The Windsor Report, the Anglican Covenant, the ‘listening process,’ Indaba — the graveyard of Anglican reform is littered with commissions, consultations and continuing conversations, and now the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals join them in the long grass. The ACC will not even take the matter up again until its next meeting in 2029, hosted by the Church of North India. By then the question may well have answered itself. …

There were voices in Belfast who saw it clearly. The Rev. Berthier Lainirina of the Province of the Indian Ocean warned the council that without structural change, his province and other orthodox churches might conclude they no longer have any place in the Communion at all, lamenting that delegates preferred to pretend all was well when it manifestly is not. …”

– David Virtue comments on the not-surprising lack of action by the 19th meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council, part of the old Anglican Communion.

Photo: ACC Members, Commission and Network Representatives, Staff and ecumenical guests at ACC-19.

Credit, Neil Turner, Anglican Communion News Service.