The practical shape of Moravian government follows from the vacancy. Authority rests with synods and with the boards those synods elect, not with a primate, and the church is organized into provinces that govern themselves and meet in a worldwide Unity Synod. The episcopate survives, in a succession the church traces through the old Bohemian Brethren, but a Moravian bishop is a pastor and an ordainer without administrative jurisdiction, which is a rarer arrangement than it sounds and one that has helped the church in ecumenical conversations with both episcopal and non-episcopal bodies. The eighteenth century congregations pressed the underlying conviction further than their descendants do, deciding contested questions, including at times marriages, by drawing the lot, on the reasoning that if Christ governs the church directly then the church should ask him rather than vote.
The lot was gradually restricted and then abandoned as binding during the nineteenth century, but the conviction it expressed remained in a milder institutional form. The same instinct shows in the Moravian reluctance to make a confession of its own the test of membership: the church's doctrinal statement, the Ground of the Unity, describes the essentials it holds and deliberately declines to legislate beyond them, on the ground that Christ, not the Unity, decides what the church must believe. A church with a vacant highest office is unusually careful about how much authority it gives the offices below.