Walking Together 2: How Synodality Could Renew the Church
Towards a Culture of Discernment and Co-Responsibility
In my previous post, I suggested that the Church might be better imagined as a kind of commonwealth than as a single institution. Instead of being like banking or the NHS, it’s a living tapestry of people, places, and institutions, united in the common vocation to proclaim the Gospel of Christ Jesus. Catholic Social Teaching offers a compelling grammar for this vision. Its emphasis on synodality (walking together), subsidiarity (trusting the local), and solidarity (bearing one another’s burdens) describe a posture of openness and meaningful communion.
But how does this vision move from ideal to reality?
That question is central to For a Synodal Church: Communion, Participation, Mission, the 2021 working document that guided the Roman Catholic Church’s recently concluded global Synod on Synodality. Drawing on testimony from across the world, it invites us to see the Church not as a system to manage, but as a pilgrim people on a shared journey. Indeed, the theme of this Jubilee Year for Roman Catholics is “Pilgrims of Hope.”
Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, with some alarm, likened the Synod to an “Anglican synodal meeting.” Taking is concern as an invitation rather than a warning, in this post I’ll explore what the Synod can teach us about becoming a more attentive, responsive Church.
A Church that Walks Together
If the Church is a commonwealth of grace—as I suggested in the last post—then its life rests not just on structure but on interdependence. That’s the vision at the heart of For a Synodal Church: Communion, Participation, Mission, which opens with a striking image:
The Church as a people walking together.
Drawn from the Greek syn-hodos (a shared path), this language recalls Jesus walking with his disciples, especially on the road to Emmaus. It shifts our view of the Church from an institution to manage to a pilgrim people, listening and discerning together. This isn’t just a metaphor: the Synod insists it’s a theological posture—the Church exists to walk in faith together, not just to sustain itself.
Upholding the Blessed Virgin as our model, it describes a Church “who listens, prays, meditates, dialogues, accompanies, discerns, decides and acts.” It listens mutually, prayerfully, and with openness to being changed. Synodality isn’t committee governance but a culture of spiritual attentiveness, rooted in the belief that no single voice can exhaust what the Spirit says to the Body of Christ.
At the heart of this is corporate discernment. Real listening doesn’t arise from management strategies but through conversation, vulnerability, and shared prayer. This listening is Christ-like: it echoes Jesus’ self-emptying love—his kenosis—by making space for others to be heard, welcomed, and transformed. As the document says, “Discernment draws on all the gifts of wisdom that the Lord bestows upon the Church and on the sensus fidei given to all the Baptised by the Spirit.” Such discernment must be nourished by Scripture, tradition, prayer, and community.
If true kenosis involves sacrifice—a love that yields to others (Phil. 2:5–11)—then it stands in stark contrast to an ecclesial culture that defaults to centralisation and control. Too often, the link between local congregations and decision-making bodies is weak. Consultations and listening exercises may be held, but these are frequently symbolic. What’s framed as dialogue functions instead to secure compliance rather than foster authentic discernment. As a result, synodical agendas often echo institutional priorities more than the concerns of ordinary worshippers.
Yet the Synod reminds us: “Our commitment, supported by the Spirit, is to ensure that the Church is perceived as a welcoming home, a sacrament of encounter and salvation, a school of communion for all the sons and daughters of God.” In order to become this “home”, the document advocates for a new, richer understanding of the “local” as “the real and actual setting in which we come to experience our humanity, without denying that there is a geographical and cultural dimension to this as well.” In a sense, the further we move away from the altar, the less real the Church is.
The tension described by For a Synodal Church is felt acutely in Wales. On paper, the structures for synodality exist—church councils, Ministry Area Councils, Diocesan Conferences, the Governing Body. But too often these feel procedural rather than participatory. Meetings drift into financial compliance and policy updates. Conferences become one-way briefings. The Governing Body risks becoming a stage for reports rather than a space for true discernment. The forms are there, but the spirit of walking together is too often missing.
The recent sudden retirement of the Archbishop of Wales, following revelations of serious issues at Bangor Cathedral, underlines the cost when trust breaks down and a culture of accountability falters. It’s a sobering reminder that when structures fail to foster genuine openness and shared responsibility, the very communion that synodality seeks to nurture can be compromised. If walking together is to be real, it must include honest self-examination, transparent structures, and the courage to hold leadership—and ourselves—accountable.
All of this points to a kind of inertia that settles into habits that shape how we listen, decide, and relate. The Synod reminds us that this inertia signals a Church that has forgotten how to listen, and so, too, how to walk. What we need isn’t more structure, but a different tone: a renewed posture that allows us to listen with care, walk with humility, and trust that Christ is already ahead of us. Synodality is about recovering our spiritual gait so that we walk together, alert to grace and open to the Spirit’s lead.
Structures that Serve or Silence
For a Synodal Church strongly implies that structures are never neutral. They either support the Church’s journey of walking together or hinder it. They can open space for the Holy Spirit, or shut it down with bureaucracy. They either serve communion or subtly undermine it.
Anglicans rightly take pride in synodical governance, but the Synod document challenges us to asi if our structures enable real participation, or merely perform it? Are they places of shared discernment and co-responsibility, or processes that mask centralised decisions behind reporting and cursory consultation? These are the questions we must ask if we hope to “promote the broadest participation possible in the discernment process, particularly involving those who are at the margins of the Christian community and society.”
This is especially relevant in the Church in Wales, where the Harries Report noted the lack of a “fully developed system of synodical government.” Despite inclusive frameworks on paper, our processes often feel top-down and distant. Clergy and laity alike describe decisions framed as financial necessity, with diocesan leadership experienced more as management than mutual discernment. Even active laity at the local level feel increasing pressure to comply with policies over which they have little say.
Yet one of the most powerful insights in For a Synodal Church is that participation is the very lifeblood of mission. On the road to Emmaus, the risen Christ draws near to disheartened disciples, opens the Scriptures, and rekindles their hope. He demonstrates his authority through presence and dialogue. In the same way, when the Church listens deeply, it proclaims the Gospel with integrity. When it decentralises authority and honours the charisms of local communities, it becomes more responsive to the Spirit. When it invites the whole Body into discernment, it begins to embody the Kingdom it announces—just as those disciples recognised Christ in the breaking of the bread.
This vision invites us to see authority as a shared task grounded in trust, mutual responsibility, and communion. Bishops still lead, but first as attentive listeners who encourage discernment and act as signs of unity, holding their churches together in Christ. Synods still gather, but with true discernment as their purpose and consensus as their fruit, not just reports and presentations. Diocesan and provincial staff still serve—but with deeper attentiveness to the wisdom already present in the communities they accompany.
Participation in this sense isn’t about flattening the Church, but about letting the Spirit-shaped, local life of the Church guide its choices. It reminds us that the Church isn’t a machine to be managed but a people walking together. A remote, managerial Church signals one kind of Gospel, but a Church shaped by genuine participation signals another: one of grace, humility, and communion. Here, the Church in Wales has real potential—small enough to adapt, stretched enough to seek renewal, and ready to show what happens when participation is embraced not as a hurdle but as the beating heart of the Church’s mission.
From Listening to Living
The global Synod on Synodality invites the Church to move from consultation to communion, from reporting structures to an ecclesial culture of co-responsibility and discernment. Listening, if it is real, must reshape how we live.
That means letting synodality, subsidiarity, and solidarity move from aspiration into structure—from paper into practice. If we truly believe the Spirit speaks through the whole Body, then our decisions, resources, and leadership must reflect that belief. Otherwise, even the best rhetoric rings hollow.
In the next post, I’ll begin to map the ecclesial landscape of the Church when seen as a commonwealth rather than simply as an institution. I’ll ask what kind of institutional life is needed to sustain a truly synodal Church that learns from its mistakes, rebuilds trust where it has been lost, and seeks to organise itself around the slow, relational work of grace.
We’ve explored the vision. Now we turn to the framework that carries it.