by Tim Wyatt, The Critical Friend
It’s election season in the C of E! We are just a few days away from polls closing in the elections for a new term of the General Synod, the national governing assembly. Don’t be alarmed if this has somewhat passed you by, as it’s both fiendishly complicated and in reality hundreds of individual elections which often fly under the radar. But it does matter who gets on to the next synod as we’ll discuss at the end, so buckle up for a brief explainer of how it all works.
As I hope regular readers will have picked up, the synod is actually three distinct houses: bishops, clergy and laity. Bishops is the easiest: all 42 diocesan bishops sit in the House of Bishops automatically, plus the Bishop of Dover (who is the ABC’s deputy but in effect runs the Diocese of Canterbury as a diocesan bishop) and the Bishop to the Armed Forces. There are also nine suffragan (junior) bishops elected by their peers.
For the House of Clergy, there are 185 seats for vicars which are divided out among the different dioceses according to their size (the precise allocation is tweaked every election to account for changes in churchgoing population). The largest is London, which this year will choose 12 clergy, the smallest is Sodor and Man which gets just one (and even that is wildly unproportional as the Isle of Man shouldn’t really be its own diocese given its size). Any cleric in the diocese can stand for election if nominated by two other vicars in the same diocese. The electorate is all the other clergy only, and they vote using the STV system whereby you rank candidates in order of preference.
Then there are a smattering of special constituencies which choose a handful of their own clergy, like monks and nuns in religious communities, army and prison chaplains, cathedral deans and people working for universities and theological colleges.