On 2 February 1932, Alan Don, chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury Cosmo Gordan Lang, recorded in his diary the simple entry: ‘Church Assembly – not very invigorating’.1 This has been the tenor of the relationship between the English and the governing bodies of the church for centuries. This article seeks to describe the role of synodality at the regional level2 by reference to the General Synod of the Church of England, with a brief comparative study of the tikanga system in New Zealand, and asks the question whether the procedures meet the expectation of synodality.
