Synod

Synod is a procedural word and the only useful question about any particular one is what it is empowered to do. The answers range from making law to offering advice that may be disregarded.

At the strong end, the General Synod of the Church of England legislates. Its measures, once approved by both Houses of Parliament and given royal assent, are the law of England. No other church body in the country has that power, and it exists because the Church of England is established. The synod has three houses, bishops, clergy and laity, and contested measures require a majority in each, which is why the ordination of women to the episcopate failed in 2012 on the house of laity alone and passed in 2014.

Orthodox holy synods elect bishops, try them, and settle doctrinal and liturgical questions for their own autocephalous church. There is no higher body, since there is no centre, and the granting of autocephaly to a new church is itself a synodal act whose validity other churches may dispute, as happened over Ukraine in 2019.

Presbyterian polity uses synod as one rung of a graded court system, between presbytery and general assembly, with defined original and appellate jurisdiction. These are courts in a real sense, with procedure, evidence and appeal.

At the weak end sits the Synod of Bishops of the Catholic Church, established in 1965. It is consultative. It advises the pope, who then issues a document of his own; it cannot legislate, and its recommendations bind nobody. Recent assemblies have broadened who attends and who votes, including laypeople and women for the first time, which changed the composition without changing the constitutional position, and much reporting has treated the two as the same thing.

The Reformation-era synods produced confessional documents that still operate as legal standards in the churches descended from them, which is a reminder that the decisions of a synod can long outlive the assembly that made them.

The earliest synods were not standing institutions at all but one time gatherings called to settle a specific dispute, and the dispute that produced some of the first recorded examples was the dating of Easter. Toward the end of the second century, bishops in Palestine, Pontus, Gaul and Rome each convened local meetings, reported by the historian Eusebius, to argue that the wider church should follow their own region's custom rather than the Quartodeciman practice kept in Asia Minor. The pattern generalized: a synod met because a question had arisen that a single bishop could not settle alone, and the largest synods, drawing bishops from across the whole Christian world, became the ecumenical councils, the first at Nicaea in 325. What synods since then can actually decide has never been uniform.

The Church of England's General Synod, established in 1970 to replace an earlier Church Assembly, passes measures with the force of law once Parliament approves them. Roman Catholic synods of bishops, instituted after the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, exist to advise the pope rather than to legislate on their own authority. The same word, applied across traditions, can mean a legislature or a committee, and only the specific body's own constitution says which.