The Anglican Church of Canada has convened a panel of clergy and bishops to study a pair of proposed reforms to the structure of the worldwide Anglican Communion, known as the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals.
Canon Scott Sharman, General Synod’s animator for ecumenical and interfaith relations, says the goal of the informal group—members of which were selected based on their experience in Communion affairs—is to ensure Canadian delegates to this summer’s Anglican Consultative Council (ACC) meeting in Belfast, Ireland are informed and ready to discuss the proposals with representatives from around the world.
The Inter-Anglican Standing Committee on Unity, Faith and Order (IASCUFO) created the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals in 2024 at the behest of the 2022 Lambeth Conference and the ACC. They articulated the proposals along with their reasoning in a 44-page document based on discussions at their 2023-2024 meetings in Nairobi, Kenya and Cairo, Egypt.
The ACC and the Lambeth Conference are two of the four Instruments of Communion—bodies and leaders which tie the Anglican Communion together. The ACC is made up of clergy, bishops and laity from across the Communion who consult on matters relevant to its work and unity. The Lambeth Conference is an international gathering of bishops that the Archbishop of Canterbury—whose office is a third Instrument of Communion—convenes and hosts at Lambeth Palace in London, England.
The first of the two proposals the ACC will consider this summer is a change to the description of the Communion adopted at the 1930 Lambeth Conference, which defines the Anglican Communion as made up of those provinces “in communion with the see of Canterbury.” That description, the new document says, implied full communion with the Church of England, which at the time was the focal point of the Anglican Communion.
As the Anglican Communion has since grown larger and less centred on England both in population and culture, the proposal says, it suggests alternate phrasing: defining the Communion as provinces “in conference and connection with the See of Canterbury, by which they seek interdependently to foster the highest degree of communion possible one with another.” While full communion with the See of Canterbury remains the goal, the document says, the changed wording reflects that full communion is not always possible as increasing diversity in the church has led to divergence and disagreements in doctrine.
The second proposal initially called for a rotating presidency of the ACC, a role formerly held by the Archbishop of Canterbury. IASCUFO proposed rotating the position among primates of five regions: Africa, Europe, the Americas, Oceania and East Asia, and the Middle East and South Asia.
However, a 2026 supplement to the proposals has instead recommended eliminating the role of ACC president altogether. In either case, Primates’ Standing Committee members would take it in turns to convene the Primates’ Meeting—the fourth Instrument of Communion—and the Lambeth Conference, also duties once exclusively performed by the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Bishop Todd Townshend of the diocese of Huron is a member of both the informal Canadian study group on the proposals and IASCUFO, which he joined after the proposals were drafted. He sees one purpose of these proposals as helping to dismantle a colonial view of the church, in which uneven power dynamics gave other provinces a subordinate role to the Church of England.
Due to an extensive history of colonialism and reconciliation work with Indigenous people in the Anglican Church of Canada, Townshend says, “Canada does know something—especially the Indigenous people of Turtle Island—about colonial legacy and how to deal with it and what healing and reconciliation is about.”
In a climate where many provinces of the Communion outside Europe and North America have felt they were on the margins of decision-making, he says, a move like this shows the Communion is serious about hearing those provinces’ voices. Recent years have seen controversy between liberal-leaning provinces in Europe and North America and more conservative provinces—many in the Global South—which make up a large percentage of the world’s Anglican population.
Disagreements over same-sex marriage and the appointment of a woman as the Archbishop of Canterbury make the news, Townshend says. But there are more complex differences of ecclesiology, wealth distribution and biblical interpretation which are important on their own and often affect debates on those flashpoint topics, he says. As emerging populations of Anglicans have grown and European and North American ones have shrunk, he adds, questions have arisen about how to balance their perspectives on Communion matters.
In October 2025, the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (Gafcon), a coalition of conservative provinces, declared they were recentring the Communion around themselves, in what Anglican scholars called an effective schism within the Anglican Communion. The move followed decades of controversy surrounding issues such as same-sex marriage and the roles of tradition and reason in interpreting Scripture.
While Gafcon is an example of a group that has grown frustrated with the slow process of conversation on these issues, Townshend says, the proposals’ “small but significant changes” have the potential to approach a new, lasting status quo for the “many, many people who are not” splitting away.
Delegates to the June 27-July 5 ACC meeting in Belfast will have the opportunity to discuss and vote on whether the ACC endorses the proposals or requests further changes.
The Anglican Church of Canada’s delegates are Bishop Riscylla Shaw, suffragan bishop of the diocese of Toronto; the Rev. Marnie Peterson, rector of St. Anne’s Steveston Anglican Church in Richmond, B.C.; and Canon Anita Gittens, a founding member of Black Anglicans of Canada.
Members of the group currently studying the proposals to inform delegates include Sharman; Canon Alyson Barnett-Cowan, former president of the Canadian Council of Churches; Archbishop Colin Johnson, currently assistant bishop in the diocese of Niagara; IASCUFO members Townshend and the Rev. Dane Neufeld, incumbent at St. James Anglican Church in Calgary; and General Secretary of General Synod Andrea Mann.
