CONCILIARITY AND PRIMACY – Echoes from the Holy and Great Council [8 October 2026 Chantilly, France]

 

CONCILIARITY AND PRIMACY

Echoes from the Holy and Great Council

Fr. John Chryssavgis

Your All-Holiness,

Your Beatitude,

Venerable Hierarchs, distinguished clergy, and dear colleagues,

In offering an assessment and suggesting prospects of the Holy and Great Council, I would like to draw on my experience at the Council of Crete where (at the invitation of the Ecumenical Patriarch) I served as Press Officer of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, but also on my experience as facilitator of the Special Commission that (again at the invitation of the Ecumenical Patriarch) produced the social document For the Life of the World, as well as on my experience in the church (both in Australia and in the United States) over the last four decades.

In this regard, I would like to draw your attention to two sets of distinct concepts and realities: on the one hand, the relationship between the council itself ten years ago and the document produced five years ago; and on the other hand, on the relationship between the principles of conciliarity and primacy in the church.

1. I. The Council and the Document

By now, theologians and historians alike should have learned one thing about the conciliar life of the Orthodox Church: it is scarcely neat, rarely predictable, and hardly efficient. Perhaps that should not surprise us. Conciliarity depends upon consensus rather than imposition, upon persuasion rather than domination. And while such a process can be frustrating—both for those inside the Orthodox Church and for those observing us from outside—we have often taken pride in claiming that this is precisely what makes our way more ecclesiological, more patristic, even more apostolic. Sometimes, I fear, we make that claim with more triumphalism than realism.

The Holy and Great Council offers a revealing example. Throughout its long preparation, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew worked patiently and persistently with every Orthodox Autocephalous Church. He demonstrated extraordinary sensitivity and remarkable flexibility in seeking to accommodate the voices of individual hierarchs and local synods. Yet patience did not mean passivity. His All-Holiness also knew when to stand firm: to uphold what had been agreed, to guide the completion of the documents, and ultimately to ensure that the Council actually took place.

Well, the same pattern emerged with the document entirled For the Life of the World: Toward a Social Ethos of the Orthodox Church. Commissioned by His All-Holiness and endorsed by the Holy and Sacred Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, the document sought the widest possible participation from the Eparchies of the Throne. Honestly and transparently, these communities identified the major social challenges confronting the faithful in their particular regions. Once again, the Ecumenical Patriarch encouraged consultation while maintaining direction. He guided the authors—clergy and laity, men and women—and, when the work was completed, he championed the document throughout Orthodox and ecumenical circles.

The response has been nothing less than extraordinary. Over the last five years, For the Life of the World has generated translations in more than twenty languages, countless articles and presentations, special journal issues, scholarly monographs, and international conferences. Initially, much of this interest came from the ecumenical world; increasingly, however, it is coming from within the Orthodox world itself.

For example, next month, Metropolitan Philotheos of Thessaloniki will gather more than two-hundred-and-fifty religious educators to hear presentations on the document by professors from the Universities of Athens and Thessaloniki. And only days ago, at a colloquium organized by the Huffington Ecumenical Institute at Holy Cross School of Theology to mark the thirty-fifth anniversary since the election and enthronement of His All-Holiness, Dr. James Skedros, one of the members of our Special Commission, described For the Life of the World as one of the foremost initiatives of His All-Holiness—and perhaps one for which he has received the least credit.

Indeed, we have literally been unable to keep pace with the response. You all heard the favorable, even enthusiastic reaction to the text last night by Dr. Dietmar Schon and Dr. Stefanie Dietrich. Why has this text struck such a chord? I believe it is because For the Life of the World is not simply the product of a small or arbitrary group of international scholars. It represents something much larger. It is another historic achievement of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, to whom I wish once again—this time publicly—to express my profound gratitude for entrusting us with this unique responsibility.

If the Holy and Great Council represented the culmination of a long and momentous synodal process, then For the Life of the World represents something equally important: the translation of the synodal vision and its decisions into ecclesial principles and practice. The Council asked what the Orthodox Church needs to say. The document asked what those words mean for the life of the world. And that brings me to the deeper question underlying the patriarch’s two achievements: first, the council; and, second, the document.

2. II. The Synod and the First

At the Fifth Synaxis of the Heads of Orthodox Churches at the Phanar, on October 8, 2008—eight years before the Council of Crete—His All-Holiness offered what I regard as one of the most candid and consequential assessments of contemporary world Orthodoxy: “We preserve the true faith [he observed] . . . We commune of the same sacraments. We basically keep the same liturgical typikon and are governed by the same sacred canons . . . Yet, we must admit in all honesty that sometimes we appear . . . as if we were not one Church, but rather a federation of Churches.”

Several decades earlier, Fr. Alexander Schmemann (1921–1983) lamented that Orthodoxy had created too many idols and become trapped within competing jurisdictions, each “brandishing various canons.” He warned against the arrogance and self-satisfaction that prevent us from confronting our weaknesses. And centuries before Bartholomew and Schmemann, St. Gregory the Theologian (329–390) expressed an even more exasperated judgment about episcopal gatherings, complaining that synods seemed to produce little beyond “arguments, ambitions, and antagonisms.”

So our difficulties are not entirely new. But neither does their longevity excuse us from confronting them. Recovering a genuine culture of conciliarity will require more than—conveniently and complacently—just invoking the word synodality. It will require retrieving and relearning the spiritual habits that make synodality possible: patiently listening, humbly trusting, generously sacrificing, and sometimes boldly relinquishing inherited assumptions and entrenched habits.

Archbishop Stylianos of Australia (1935–2019) expressed the matter starkly in 1965: “If at any time the Church were to reject from its life, even for a moment, the idea of the synodal system, it would automatically cease to be Church.” And St. John Chrysostom had already made essentially the same point in the fourth century: There can be, he proclaimed, no Church without synodality. Without synodality, an institution may continue to function. But ecclesial life will have been diminished.

We know this. We repeatedly tell it to ourselves. And we take great pride in championing it to others. But if we are brutally honest—with ourselves, with one another, and above all with God—we must acknowledge that we have largely lost the lived experience of conciliarity that characterized earlier periods of the Church. And it cannot be recovered by convening one council every century—or, worse, every millennium. Synodality is not an event. It is a culture. And culture, as Julien Green reminds us, “cannot be improvised.” It must be learned. It must be absorbed. It must be practiced.

Yet there is another truth that we Orthodox are sometimes even more reluctant to acknowledge. Although the very word may sound suspicious to Orthodox ears—perhaps even, heaven forbid, papal—we should not be afraid of the concept of primacy, of the responsibility of the first.

Synodality does not mean the absence of leadership. Consensus does not mean paralysis. And communion does not mean that no one bears the responsibility to convene and coordinate, to guide and encourage, even—when necessary—to lead and insist. We rightly aspire to the apostolic ideal expressed in the Acts of the Apostles: “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us.” But until we learn again (and it will take a long time!) how to live that conciliarity unequivocally, we should not be afraid to recognize the responsibility—and, yes, the power—of the one who is called to serve as first.

I remain convinced that without the extraordinary resolve and persistence of His All-Holiness, the decades-long preparation for the Holy and Great Council would never have reached its fruition in Crete. In the face of profound disagreement, resistance, and ultimately the absence of several Churches, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew remained determined that what had been agreed should finally be realized.

The same is true of For the Life of the World. Without the Ecumenical Patriarch’s determination and decisiveness, I do not believe that this document would ever have moved from commission, to composition, to publication, and finally to global dissemination. There was hesitation. There was reluctance. And there was resistance—beyond and within the patriarchal court. But there was also unwavering leadership and unflinching steadfastness on the part of the patriarch.

And perhaps that is the lesson—the assessment and the prospect—I would leave with you in this closing session. The future of Orthodoxy does not lie in choosing between synodality and primacy. It lies in recovering the proper relationship between synodality and primacy. To echo Metropolitan John of Pergamon (1931–2023), we need the many; but we also need the one, the first. We need consultation; but we also need command. We need consensus; but we also need courage. We need councils—but councils must become a culture rather than merely an institution or event.

The Orthodox Church will not become more conciliar by diminishing leadership; nor will leadership become more authentic by diminishing conciliarity. Each requires the other. Each corrects the other. Each complements the other. And, at their best, each serves the communion of the Church. If we can acknowledge and embrace this honestly, then our relationships as Orthodox Churches will become much less defensive and far less competitive. And at the same time, our witness in ecumenical circles will become considerably more credible, while our common voice before the world will become significantly more coherent.

Ultimately, the question is not just how the Orthodox Church governs itself. The deeper question is whether we can learn again how to walk together in the time and place we have been placed and entrusted by God. Perhaps that is what conciliarity has meant all along.