‘We need consensus; but we also need courage,’ says Fr. John Chryssavgis on the 10th anniversary of the Holy and Great Council of Crete

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Fr. John Chryssavgis, Archdeacon of the Ecumenical Throne and Executive Director of the Huffington Ecumenical Institute at HCHC, participated in an international conference organized by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Chantilly, France, from October 5–8, 2026, commemorating the 10th anniversary of the Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox Church, held in Crete in June 2016.

The conference brought together scholars and representatives from Orthodox Autocephalous Churches to reflect on the Council’s decisions, documents, reception, and continuing significance for the life of the Orthodox Church.

Fr. John chaired a special panel devoted to the reception of the Council of Crete and the development of the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s social document, For the Life of the World: Toward a Social Ethos of the Orthodox Church, published in 2020. The panel featured presentations by Rev. Dr. Nicolas Kazarian (Commission member for the document), Rev. Dr. Dietmar Schon (author of two books on the document) and Rev. Dr. Stephanie Dietrich (Faith and Order moderator of the WCC).

Fr. John also participated in the conference’s concluding session, which offered an assessment of the Holy and Great Council and considered its prospects for the future. 

Drawing on his experience as Press Officer of the Ecumenical Patriarchate at the Council of Crete and as facilitator of the Special Commission that produced the document, he addressed the relationship between the two, and between the principles of conciliarity and primacy in the Church.

Fr. John said the conciliar life of the Orthodox Church is “scarcely neat, rarely predictable, and hardly efficient,” because conciliarity “depends upon consensus rather than imposition, upon persuasion rather than domination.”

The Council of Crete, he said, offers a revealing example of this.

“Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew worked patiently and persistently with every Orthodox Autocephalous Church,” Fr. John said. “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.”

“The same pattern emerged with the document entitled For the Life of the World: Toward a Social Ethos of the Orthodox Church,” Fr. John continued. “Once again, the Ecumenical Patriarch encouraged consultation while maintaining direction.”

Now, For the Life of the World has generated translations in more than twenty languages, as well as articles, special journal issues, scholarly monographs, and international conferences. Interest that initially came largely from the ecumenical world, Fr. John said, is increasingly coming from within the Orthodox world. 

Describing how the two relate, Fr. John said the Council “asked what the Orthodox Church needs to say,” while the document “asked what those words mean for the life of the world.”

Fr. John then moved into a discussion of conciliarity and the Church’s future.

Recovering a genuine culture of conciliarity, he said, will require “patiently listening, humbly trusting, generously sacrificing, and sometimes boldly relinquishing inherited assumptions and entrenched habits.”

He urged the audience that we must acknowledge “we have largely lost the lived experience of conciliarity.”

“Synodality is not an event,” Fr. John said. “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.”

Fr. John also said Orthodox Christians should not fear the concept of primacy. 

“Synodality does not mean the absence of leadership,” he said. “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 need the many; but we also need the one, the first. We need consultation; but we also need command,” Fr. John said. “We need consensus; but we also need courage.”

He concluded that the future of Orthodoxy does not lie in choosing between synodality and primacy, but in “recovering the proper relationship” between the two.

“The Orthodox Church will not become more conciliar by diminishing leadership; nor will leadership become more authentic by diminishing conciliarity,” Fr. John said. “Each requires the other. Each corrects the other. Each complements the other. And, at their best, each serves the communion of the Church.”

Fr. John closed by posing the question of “whether we can learn again how to walk together in the time and place we have been placed and entrusted by God.”

This, he suggested, is what conciliarity has meant all along.

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