Walking Together 3: Bishops in Synod
Naming the Institutions of the Church and How They Might Be Renewed
For earlier instalments of this 4-part series, visit here and here.
In the first post of this series, I suggested the Church makes far more sense when we see it not as a corporate organisation but as a commonwealth — a living tapestry of relationships among people, communities and institutions. The second post turned to the Synod on Synodality and asked what it means to be a Church that truly listens in ways shaped by synodality, subsidiarity and solidarity. We saw that good structures can help that vision flourish or quietly stifle it.
So what exactly do we mean by church institutions? Before we can talk about whether they’re healthy or hollow, we need to see what they actually and why they matter. Let’s take the Church in Wales as a case in point. If we think of it as a living commonwealth then its institutions aren’t just boxes on an organisational chart. They’re the bones and sinews that hold the body together.:
Constitutional Core: The Governing Body, Bench of Bishops and Representative Body — together holding provincial oversight, governance and stewardship.
Dioceses: Bishops’ offices, diocesan teams, Boards of Finance and Diocesan Conferences — linking local church life with the wider vision.
Ministry Areas: Local congregations and collaborative ministries — where most people actually encounter the Church, week in and week out.
Formation and Education: St Padarn’s Institute, church schools, discipleship groups and youth work — nurturing faith, imagination and everyday discipleship.
Finance and Property: Budgets, land and buildings — expressing a theology of trust, generosity and mission.
Mission and Outreach: Evangelism teams, chaplaincies and justice initiatives — turning the Church outward in service and witness.
Ecumenical and Interfaith Relations: Partnerships across traditions — bearing common witness in an increasingly plural society.
Spiritual and Cultural Life: Cathedrals, retreat houses, pilgrimage ministries, religious communities — offering depth, beauty and spaces of renewal.
These shouldn’t be mistaken for cogs in a single bureaucracy. Each has its own integrity and fragile ecology. Together, they pass on faith, hold wisdom in trust, protect the vulnerable, and remind the Church that its purpose is not to hoard power but to share it. When healthy, they make real discernment and real communion possible.
If we want true renewal, therefore. the question isn’t whether our institutions are efficient but whether they help us live as a community. Do they help us listen well, walk together, and carry one another’s burdens? Do they strengthen our common life or hollow it out?
Structures aren’t the Church. But they can help the Church become what it claims to be: a people bound by God’s grace and trust, called to announce his Kingdom, and committed to a shared promise to keep walking together — especially when the road is hard.
A Crisis of Trust
One of the more unsettling features of modern life is how thoroughly trust has drained out of our public institutions. Across Western societies, confidence in government, education, media, finance — and the Church — has evaporated with surprising speed. These once stood as pillars of stability and respect; now they often seem like opaque bureaucracies more concerned with power or survival than the common good.
We live in an age when information — and misinformation — spreads at the speed of a swipe. Every failing is exposed instantly, amplified endlessly, and used to feed a deep suspicion of authority. Distrust of institutions has become our cultural default.
The Church hasn’t escaped this collapse of trust. Stories of exclusion, abuse, cover-ups, or cold bureaucracy have left a bitter taste. Too often, Church institutions feel less like channels of grace and more like tired structures of control. The word institution itself calls up images of clericalism, managerial drift, or even harm. Few people use “the institutional Church” as a compliment.
These perceptions didn’t appear out of thin air. They were earned, sometimes painfully. When accountability fails and reform is resisted, damage runs deep. Structures that protect themselves instead of people corrode the communion they claim to guard. And once trust breaks, it’s hard to rebuild.
Yet scrapping institutions isn’t the answer. The Church isn’t just a loose crowd of private spiritual consumers. It’s a living community built on the claim that grace takes shape and love becomes flesh. If that’s true, our relationships need visible form: habits, structures, communities that hold us together.
How we shape and renew those structures says something profound about the Christ we follow — the Word made flesh who still dwells among us. Institutions must change when they fail that calling. But without them, grace risks becoming wishful thinking and trust has nowhere to grow.
Why Church Institutions Still Matter
Renewal must, therefore, begin with the recognition that these institutions of the Church’s institutions, at their best, aren’t bureaucratic machinery. They’re the connective tissue of a shared spiritual life, the vessels that carry memory, sustain hope, and turn grace from a feeling into a way of being together.
Without them, faith drifts into individualism, discernment becomes personal preference, and the work of ministry falls to the overburdened few. Institutions, when rightly ordered, root us in something older and steadier than the mood of the moment. They remind us that holiness isn’t just whispered in private but lived out in community—through how we gather, how we argue, how we serve.
Within Anglicanism, the good shepherding and renewal of our common life is expressed in the principle of bishops in synod. Anglicanism insists that authority and relationship belong inextricably together. Bishops don’t exercise authority alone, or just with other senior officials, but “in synod”, alongside the clergy and laity they serve. Bishops in synod is a theological claim that the Spirit speaks through the whole people of God. Bishops are meant to preside, not manage: to hold space for the Church to listen, discern and follow Christ together.
When it works, this principle grounds the Church and its institution in synodality, subsidiarity, and solidarity. Decisions come through shared discernment. Authority lives in relationship, not isolation. Institutions support those they serve and rely on each other within the commonwealth. Bishops resist the drift toward management by embracing their deeper call to serve: “Whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant… just as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve” (Matt. 20:26–27).
Yet ideals drift. Synods can become places only for reports, not real listening. Bishops can grow distant. Institutions meant to nurture communion can slip into self-preservation or become encrusted bureaucracies. And when trust erodes, the whole witness of the Church suffers.
So the question isn’t whether we need institutions—we do. It’s whether we can rebuild them as schools of trust. Can they call us back to shared discernment, to accountability, to the radical idea that grace isn’t just for me but for us? The world is hungry for communities that don’t just preach love but embody it in how they organize their life. That’s why this matters now.
Why This Matters
In weary times, when decline and fatigue seem constant, many assume real renewal is out of reach, or that old structures are too rigid to change. But this is exactly the wrong moment to give up hope.
Precisely because so many churches now feel stretched and uncertain, we have a rare opportunity. When the old defaults no longer hold, we’re forced — and freed — to imagine better ways of being together. If necessity is the mother of invention, it can also be grace in disguise. We often grow not despite our limits, but because of them.
This strikes at the heart of why institutions matter. If grace really takes flesh — if love becomes visible in our shared life — then structures aren’t just paperwork and committees. They’re where our deepest beliefs are tested. That’s why the old Anglican vision of bishops in synod still matters so much. It’s the principle that allows a rich common life to grow. It’s where we learn how to bear responsibility together, listen well, and decide faithfully. Bishops in synod show that authority stays grounded and open to the wisdom of the whole people of God.
What we need now isn’t a shiny new blueprint imposed from above, but a renewed sense of our shared calling. We must become a people who want a Church that listens deeply, discerns honestly, and stands together in hope.
This kind of renewal doesn’t tear structures down but reorders them around trust and mutual responsibility. It asks whether our systems really build true belonging, make space for real listening, and honour the many gifts within the Body. It also means nurturing leaders — bishops, clergy, and laity — who don’t stand apart but walk as companions in shared work.
No one holds all authority alone. No one hears the Spirit’s whole word in isolation. The Church’s future depends on rebuilding trust, and trust is restored when institutions stop blocking grace and become living channels through which Christ’s life stays visible, shared, and real.
A way forward
In the final post in this series, I’ll turn to the Church in Wales to explore, in more concrete terms, how we might begin to live more fully as a commonwealth than as an institution. That post will return to the institutions named above to ask how each might embody the principles of synodality, subsidiarity, and solidarity. If we can learn to see that community with the eyes of grace—if we can recognise the Spirit still moving among and within it—then perhaps we can begin to imagine something new: not a Church that’s rescued from the top down, but one that’s reawakened from the ground up; not an institution clinging to survival, but a living commonwealth of grace.