Resisting the ACC’s Growing Power

August 16, 2010
By Mark McCall

Last month the Anglican Consultative Council began operating under a new constitution. One of the four “instruments of Communion,” the ACC was created by the 1968 Lambeth Conference as an advisory council composed of lay, clerical and episcopal representatives of the churches of the Anglican Communion. The four instruments — the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lambeth Conference, the Primates’ Meeting, and the ACC — have distinct but complementary functions in the life of the Communion.

The ACC usually meets every three years and has consisted of approximately 70 members, almost all of whom are directly appointed by the Communion’s 38 member churches. The membership criteria favor lay participation, and at the last meeting of the ACC the laity formed the largest group. To assure wider representation there are “term limits” restricting members to three meetings. The ACC thus serves as a complement to, but not a replacement for, the other instruments that emphasize the central role of bishops in a Communion that recognizes the historic episcopate as an essential element.

In the 1970s the ACC authorized its standing committee to form a charitable trust in the United Kingdom to manage its U.K. assets “on behalf of” the ACC. The standing committee members became the trustees of this trust. After the Primates’ Meeting was created as the fourth instrument and established its own standing committee, it became the practice of the two standing committees to meet together to help coordinate the two instruments. These joint meetings gave rise to the name “Joint Standing Committee,” but in fact they remained two separate committees and the primates were not trustees for purposes of the U.K. trust. Those matters continued to be addressed by the ACC committee alone. As the Communion has struggled to cope with the crises of the last two decades, various Communion commissions have recommended reform of the ACC and its standing committee. In addition, changes in U.K. law have resulted in legal advice to revise the legal structure of the U.K. charity. The result of these considerations was the recent incorporation of the ACC itself as an English company with the Articles of Association of that company becoming the ACC’s new constitution. the rest