On Sunday 9 August 2026 the General Synod of the Anglican Church of Australia will assemble in Melbourne. I will be at the opening service in the dual guise of second bass (cantoris, please) and lay member representing the Anglican Diocese of Melbourne. This will be my third General Synod; I previously attended sessions in 2014 (Adelaide) and 2022 (Gold Coast).

I have to admit that the General Synod doesn’t have a great track record in spreading the good news of Jesus. But in fairness, it was never designed to be a means of propagating the Christian faith. Instead it was intended, in the kind of establishment imagination only Anglicans can produce, to be a national Anglican Parliament. Under our national church Constitution, the General Synod has the power to:

Make canons, rules and resolutions relating to the order and good government of our Church, including canons in respect of ritual, ceremonial and discipline;

Make statements as to the faith of our Church;

Declare its view on any matter affecting the Church;

Declare its view on any matter affecting spiritual, moral or social welfare; and

Take such steps as may be necessary or expedient in furtherance of union with other Christian communities.

The first General Synod met in 1872, though it was an unincorporated body made of voluntary participants from around what were then the Australian colonies. At that first meeting it focussed on creating local mechanisms for appealing the decisions of a colonial bishop or diocese without having to post the appeal to the Privy Council in England. Those mechanisms were soon put to the test by the infamous case of a bigamous priest in Adelaide … but that’s another story.

Attempts to create a body with statutory authority to shape a truly Australian Anglican church – one that might, for example, authorise its own liturgical texts – almost succeeded in the 1920s but failed under the weight of Australia’s rampant diocesan independence. It was not until 1961 that the constitution of the Church of England in Australia and Tasmania (don’t ask) was finally adopted after a tortuous process involving 25 diocesan synods and several secular parliaments. And it was only in 1981 we got our name changed to the slightly less colonial Anglican Church of Australia (but the 2026 Census still only allows us to identify as “Anglican (Church of England)”). The 1961 constitution is deliberately weak: nothing the General Synod decides has any effect unless a local diocese adopts it. This isn’t the Church of England.

Notwithstanding its weakness, the General Synod made significant progress over its first thirty years. Read it all at profsherlock