21/12/2023
GHANA TO HOST MEETING OF THE ANGLICAN CONSULTATIVE COUNCIL ON FEBRUARY 11TH..
The 18th plenary meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council will take place in Accra, Ghana, from Feb. 11 to 20, 2023. During the meeting, members of the ACC will visit Cape Coast Castle, the largest of around 40 “slave castles” built on Africa’s Gold Coast to temporarily house enslaved Africans before their forced passage across the Atlantic. While there, members will be invited to engage in a symbolic act of prayer and repentance.
Plenary sessions of the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC) takes place every two or three years. Representatives from each of the 42 provinces (member churches) of the Anglican Communion are invited to gather together for prayer, worship, Bible study, and discussion on matters of common concern, to promote the unity and purposes of the Churches of the Anglican Communion in mission, evangelism, ecumenical relations, communication, administration and finance.
The ACC Standing Committee is due to meet online later this month and is expected to confirm the theme for ACC-18. The 2023 meeting is the last in the 10-year Season of Intentional Discipleship, agreed at ACC-16.
The Anglican Consultative Council is not an international synod. It has no legal power over member churches of the Anglican Communion, which are autonomous and independent-yet-interdependent. The ACC is a consultative body, and one of four Instruments of Communion, or Instruments of Unity, in the Anglican Communion, alongside the Lambeth Conference, the Primates’ Meeting and the Archbishop of Canterbury.
The meeting’s agenda will be focused around the Anglican Communion’s five Marks of Mission, as we approach the 40th anniversary of their first adoption (as four Marks of Mission) by the 6th plenary meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC-6)), held in Badagry, Nigeria, in July 1984.