I offer these comments as a member of the Inter-Anglican Standing Commission on Unity, Faith and Order (IASCUFO), a long-standing lay member of the Brazilian province, a former member of the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC) and its Standing Committee, and a social scientist of religion. I write in defense of the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals (NCPs) as presented in their first formulation and later Supplement, but I do not claim to speak officially for IASCUFO, my province, or the ACC. My purpose is more limited: to add, from my experience as a Christian and scholar of religion, an argument about the historical and institutional conditions under which the Church discerns disputed questions. I offer this in support of the theological rationale of the Proposals, not as an alternative to it.

The background of the NCPs is the recognition of deep divisions and broken relations among provinces and churches of the Anglican Communion, largely centered, however reluctantly we may say so, on questions of human sexuality. We cannot downplay this circumstance. It has already driven the Communion toward de facto division, visible in violations of provincial territorial boundaries through ordinations and “mission,” non-attendance at official gatherings of the Instruments of Communion, alternative coalitions, Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches (GSFA) covenantal intensification, and GAFCON’s contestation of the Communion’s spiritual and symbolic center. It is from within these realities—not through appeals to tradition abstracted from reception, unilateral definitions of truth exempted from Communion-wide testing, or an idealized account of full communion—that we should seek to rebuild relations, mutual recognition, and common mission.

ACC-18’s request to IASCUFO is fully aware of the divisive trends within the Communion, reflected in years of disengagement by entire provinces from attendance or their response to the ACC meetings and implementation of resolutions or specific calls. Affirmations of principle on questions of ecclesiology continue to be relevant but have not been able to avoid or amend the institutionalization of a contesting view and structure of the Communion. Such affirmations alone do not grasp or engage with the provisional and penultimate ecclesiology of impaired but real communion the Proposals put forward, which can be inferred from the articulation (that is, the joining of distinct parts or features) of its theological and institutional components.

The NCPs should not be read as an administrative detour around doctrine. Their institutional recommendations rest on a deliberately ecclesiological grammar: the Church is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic, even when Anglican churches experience that communion as wounded, incomplete, and unevenly receivable. The Proposals ask how a Communion that cannot presently assume full mutual recognition may nevertheless refuse the false clarity of either centralized coercion or polite separation.

The mistake to be avoided, I claim, is the supposition that the Church first discerns doctrine in some pure, placeless realm and only afterward arranges institutions to administer the result. In fact, the institutional form of ecclesial life (“church structures”) helps determine who may speak, who must wait, whose suffering is heard, whose judgment is tested, how disagreement is classified, and whether estranged churches remain answerable to one another. History and institution are not external circumstances surrounding discernment; they are among the conditions under which discernment becomes ecclesial rather than merely partisan.

Any consideration of how doctrinal disagreements have been argued, defined, received, resisted, or institutionalized in the universal Church—including its Roman, Eastern, and Reformed configurations, and the modern ecumenical movement—shows that univocal claims to truth, discipleship, fidelity to the biblical text and the affirmation of full communion have never been the only forces at work. The point is not that these things matter less than institutional process. It is rather that ecclesial decisions have often been shaped by power, cultural parochialism, and failures of mutual recognition; and, more positively, that Anglican and ecumenical discernment are historically situated exercises of Scripture read through tradition, reason, worship, and synodical reception. The NCPs do not replace truth with procedure. They refuse the fiction that truth is served by procedural finality alone, while taking seriously the concrete conditions in which disagreement and discernment actually take place.

We should acknowledge by now, over 20 years since the debate on homosexuality openly took the spotlight, that there are elements of time, culture, theology, and church politics that are integral to how discernment and restoration of broken or impaired communion have evolved. They are not accidents external to the “heart of the matter.”

The Church is always in history and, in seeking to follow Jesus faithfully, she must grapple with the ambiguity of her historical forms. In this light, such big themes as Jesus’ divine and human nature, the procession of the Holy Spirit, the authority of Rome vis-à-vis national churches, modern slavery, women’s ministry, and human sexuality have both aroused fierce debate and taken time and forbearance to be faithfully treated. These historical moments of tension and division in the universal Church highlight that spaces are needed for deeply held views to work out their differences while frankly admitting to them and regarding others as worthy of love and respect in Christ. As ever, in such situations, we are called “not to think of [ourselves] more highly than [we] ought to think but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. For as in one body we have many members and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another” (Rom. 12:3–5). Closing ranks on doctrinal formulae, treating one province’s settled judgment as if it must, by itself, do the same for the Communion’s discernment, and imposing views on others by rallying large numbers will only consolidate fractures and hide contradictory practices and internal divergences.

The Church’s recognition of doctrine, error, adiaphora, discipline, and local adaptation has always required historically embodied Scripture is read in the Church; tradition is received, contested, and sometimes purified; reason attends to new situations and developments that earlier generations could not have imagined; and synodical life tests whether a judgment can be borne, recognized, and handed on. The classification of a disagreement is itself part of discernment, not a preliminary matter already settled before the conversation begins.

So, even when doctrine is genuinely at stake, the Church’s capacity to identify, test, receive, and settle doctrine is historically and institutionally mediated. And it takes time to reach that point of resolution. What we can avoid now is that the hardening and pain of schism and bitter rivalry should be once again the outcome. The Proposals are not a retreat from communion into federation; they are an attempt to describe communion truthfully when its fullness cannot honestly be presumed. The NCPs stress a particularly telling point: the phrase “highest degree of communion possible” emerged from Anglican handling of women’s ordination, where reception provided a way to live with impaired recognition. At a time in which the Archbishop of Canterbury is a woman, the ordination of women remains the precedent that gave Anglicans the vocabulary of degrees of communion. Sexuality and marriage are the unresolved test of whether that vocabulary can still bear ecclesial weight. Could this now be the opportunity to take it further with regard to our current intractable disagreements?

The NCPs do not authorize a dismissive relation to the See of Canterbury. They do acknowledge that many of the provinces are not willing to relativize their relation to Canterbury. They relocate communion with Canterbury from the defining frame of Anglican identity into one of several binding characteristics: shared inheritance, mutual service, common counsel, and historic connection with the See of Canterbury (the supplement is especially useful here: “historic” does not mean merely “historical”; it names a living connection). The issue is not less Canterbury, but Canterbury differently received: no longer the gate through which Anglican identity must pass, but a historic and pastoral sign within a polycentric Communion of sister churches.

For this reason, to defend the NCPs is not to commend a managerial settlement or a voluntary association of ecclesial “franchises.” Anglican structures matter because they are meant to serve communion: baptismal belonging, eucharistic recognition, common counsel, episcopal collegiality, lay participation, and the patient reception of contested judgment. If the Proposals are to be received faithfully, they must be read as an attempt to preserve answerability within the Body of Christ, not as a permission slip for disengagement or takeover.

The NCPs were never conceived or offered as the definitive means to address the issues at hand. They are an offer, a gift of reflection to the ACC itself and the wider Communion, in goodwill and faithfulness, by a group of Anglicans from various parts of the Communion who themselves represent a cross-section of the differences and disagreements held on compounded issues in and around sexuality—including, now, the legitimacy of a woman ordained to the episcopal ministry as primate of the very See of Canterbury. As a gift, the Proposals may be accepted, refused, or revised. As such, they are the occasion for another round of discernment that, this time, includes the claim that a decentered understanding of the Communion is long due, but requires a genuine commitment to stay and work to attain the highest possible degree of communion from the several contending parties.

Finally, the NCPs are also a bold invitation to go beyond a disciplinary definition of how theological disagreement (never clearly distinguishable from historical, cultural, ethical, and political dimensions) should be dealt with, through a revision of our own notion of belonging and our institutional protocols of representation and authority. Of course, the Proposals may seem like yet another attempt to square the circle. Of course, there are no guarantees they will work. But no change can provide those guarantees in advance. Of course, the Proposals may be improved, which is why they are being again submitted to appreciation and accountability before the ACC. But they should not be underestimated as an empty gesture or a diversion. They are not a generous compromise, but a truthful ecclesial response to a time when final discernment is not yet possible. Their strength is not that they lower the theological temperature, but that they make evasion harder. They require Anglicans to say, without theatrical innocence, that communion is wounded, real, differentiated, and still commanded of all of us.

The NCPs do offer explicit ecclesiological—provisional as well as eschatologically hopeful—reasons, and they formulate two institutional implications of that theological understanding. The Supplement, reflecting a process of listening to provinces in the Communion and further reflection and refinement, envisages a collegial sharing of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s ministry with the regional primates and suggests that the office of President of the ACC has become unnecessary and could be excised, while the Archbishop remains ex officio with voice and vote. In any case, the NCPs must not become a defense of episcopal or primatial concentration. As a layperson, I strongly claim that the ACC’s lay and clerical character is central to any non-colonial Anglican future beyond the current crisis. Finally, in full respect of the integrity of existing provinces duly constituted and listed in the schedule of the ACC, the NCPs do not seek to normalize boundary-crossing or ecclesial supplanting.

The NCPs endorse the road of dialogue, provisional decision-making, and creation of formal spaces in which all voices committed to restoring and deepening our relationships and faithfulness to the Lord can be represented. At bottom, they take to heart that “now we see only a reflection, as in a mirror, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love remain, these three, and the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor. 13:12–13). The real alternative to the NCPs is not a serene continuity of Anglican order, but the unmanaged continuation of impaired communion under structures that no longer tell the truth about the Communion they claim to serve. How the ACC’s common counsel receives that offer, in all its open-endedness, is now the immediate test of whether our structures can still serve the communion they name.

TLC Coverage of the Nairobi-Cairo-Proposals

2026 Symposium: Should the ACC Endorse the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals?

Should the ACC Endorse the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals? Answer 1 of 3 by Glenn Davies (June 15, 2026)

Should the ACC Endorse the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals? Answer 2 of 3 by Paul Avis (June 16, 2026) 

Should the ACC Endorse the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals? Answer 3 of 3  by Graham Tomlin, Sarah Rowland Jones, and Andrew Khoo (June 17, 2026) 

 

The Abuja Affirmation and the Future: A Series Roundup: In April, Covenant hosted a series on the Abuja Affirmation and the varying options for the Anglican Communion’s future.

The Wisdom of the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals: A Response to Paul Avis  by Andrew Goddard (April 16, 2026): Paul Avis wrote a critique of the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals. Andrew Goddard here outlines what Avis seems to miss and the wisdom of the NCPs.

2025 Series Roundup: The Nairobi-Cairo Proposals & Canterbury Transition:  Covenant hosted a series of essays on the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals from the Inter-Anglican Standing Commission on Unity, Faith, and Order.

 

TLC News Coverage of the NCPs

Proposals Call for Decentering Canterbury’s Role in Anglican Communion by Mark Michael (December 6, 2024): IASCUFO’s Nairobi-Cairo Proposals suggest a “narrow revision” of the 1930 Lambeth Conference’s classic description of the Communion that decenters the phrase “in communion with the See of Canterbury,” as well as a term-limited, rotating presidency for the Anglican Consultative Council.

Poggo Responds to GAFCON Communion Launch  by Mark Michael (October 17, 2025): The Secretary General urged engagement with the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals and spoke kindly of GAFCON as a reform movement, while inviting its members to next summer’s ACC Meeting.

Brazil, Scotland Lukewarm on Nairobi-Cairo Proposals  by Mark Michael (December 16, 2025): The progressive churches praised the proposals’ vision of “plural catholicity,” but criticized plans to weaken full communion as the standard for unity.

‘Not a New Communion,’ Gafcon GS Says by Mark Michael (December 18, 2025)

GSFA Primates Reaffirm Anglican Communion Ties  by Mark Michael (January 26, 2026): “GSFA is staying within the Anglican Communion,” they said, in a communique that did not mention GAFCON’s Global Anglican Communion plans.

Updates to the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals Released  by Mark Michael (March 2, 2026): The Communion’s five regional primates will share the Archbishop of Canterbury’s ministry and the ACC would lose its president in revised proposals.

ACC Members Discuss Hopes for Meeting by Douglas LeBlanc (May 22, 2026): Anglican Communion News Service has gathered the expectations of five members of the Anglican Consultative Council, and none of the published remarks mention the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals.

 

Responses to The Nairobi-Cairo Proposals from across the Anglican Communion.

Joanildo Burity is a political scientist, a lay member of the Diocese of Recife of the Anglican Episcopal Church of Brazil (IEAB), and has been a member of IASCUFO since 2023.