COMMENTARY By David W. Virtue, DD I www.virtueonline.org I August 28, 2026 It is now apparent to the world’s roughly 85 million Anglicans that the Anglican Communion is irretrievably broken, and that short of repentance it will never be repaired. There is no glossing over it, no parsing it, no pretending otherwise, no hope that if we talk long enough and lovingly enough about unity, we will somehow arrive at a different conclusion. We will not. The Fault Line and the Po

COMMENTARY By David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueonline.org | August 27, 2026 On multiple fronts, the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) finds itself embroiled in one ecclesiastical fight after another, with no apparent end in sight. Even as it heads toward the September 7 trial of its archbishop, Steve Wood, in Charleston — on charges of sexual harassment, bullying of staff, and plagiarism — another fire has broken out in the usually bucolic Low Country of South

COMMENTARY By David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueonline.org | August 25, 2026 They never met, and there was never any intention that they should. The country was Brazil. Spiritually and theologically, the two gatherings might as well have convened ten thousand miles apart. Two bodies of Anglican leaders — with different gods, different gospels, and different destinations — passed each other like ships in the night. Sunni and Shia without the bullets and the guns, a commun

Twenty-five years after the towers fell, the theologian who was there still cannot tell revenge from justice — or good from evil. By David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueonline.org I August 24, 2026 On the morning of September 11, 2001, Rowan Williams was a hundred yards from the World Trade Center, in a studio at Trinity Wall Street, preparing to record a program on the spiritual life. Then the towers came down and the dust rolled in under the doors. To his credit — and one s

Sentencing deferred to the College of Bishops until the appeal period closes; civil litigation continues. By David W. Virtue, DD I www.virtueonline.org I August 22, 2026 The Anglican Church in North America's Court for the Trial of a Bishop has unanimously found Bishop Derek Jones guilty on all four canonical charges brought against him, formally condemning the founder of a breakaway chaplaincy body while leaving his punishment for a later day. The court released its opinio

A South Carolina bishop shares a chancel with the church his diocese spent a decade — and half a billion dollars — to leave By David W. Virtue, DD www.virtueonline.org August 20, 2026 CHARLESTON, SC — On the grounds of Porter-Gaud School in Charleston, a new chapel bearing the old name of St. Timothy's was set apart last week by two bishops who, by their own churches' reckoning, are not supposed to be able to stand together at the same altar. The Rt. Rev. Ruth Woodliff-

By David W. Virtue, DD www.virtueonline.org August 19, 2026 Seven primates of the Anglican Communion met recently in São Paulo, Brazil, and pledged to labor together on the great global questions of the age. They issued a statement. They affirmed dignity. They deplored colonialism, secularism, polarization, migration, corruption, and climate change. What they did not do — what they dared not do — was look out the window at their own emptying pews. They were the Most Rev.

“All of us have inflated views of ourselves, especially in self-righteousness, until we have visited a place called Calvary. It is there, at the foot of the cross, that we shrink to our true size.” — John Stott “Either human intelligence ultimately owes its origin to mindless matter; or there is a Creator. It is strange that some people claim that it is their intelligence that leads them to prefer the first to the second.” — John C. Lennox “The Western Church possesses things

Ryan Burge has written the most honest ledger of American religious decline in a generation. His remedy is the disease that produced it. By David W. Virtue, DD I www.virtueonline.org I August 16, 2026 Nine people in a room. That is how Ryan Burge opens The Vanishing Church, and it is where any honest reckoning with the man must begin. He counted them himself, from the front of his own dying Baptist congregation in Mount Vernon, Illinois, at the close of 2023. Seventeen year

By David W. Virtue, DD www.virtueonline.org August 13, 2026 This month the Anglican Church in North America removed Archbishop Abraham Elavata an Indian Christian leader based in Patna, Bihar, from the program of its Matthew 25 conference, where he was to speak on the persecuted church in the East. His offense was not heresy, nor scandal, nor any failing of his own. He had attended a worship conference for Kenyan congregations in the Northwest — a gathering sponsored by Arc

A church cannot summon the world to Christ while it summons its own to court COMMENTARY By David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueonline.org | August 12, 2026 Attorneys for Archbishop Derek Jones and his Jurisdiction of the Armed Forces and Chaplaincy filed a motion on August 6 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama, Southern Division, to dismiss the defamation complaint brought against him by Bishop Julian Dobbs, the acting archbishop of the Anglican Chu

The Church of England will spend £100 million to atone for a sin its own ledgers may not record By David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueonline.org | August 12, 2026 Give the Church of England its due. When it resolved to repent, it did so with the full apparatus of the modern conscience — forensic accountants, an oversight group, an archbishop's tears, and a hundred million pounds laid on the altar of history. The instinct behind Project Spire is not, in itself, contemptible. A

Three independent reasons necessitate dismissal they argue Bishop Derek Jones Bishop Julian Dobbs David W. Virtue I www.virtueonline.org I August 10, 2026 BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – Attorneys for Archbishop Derek Jones and the Jurisdiction of the Armed Forces and Chaplaincy filed a motion Aug. 6 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama, Southern Division, to dismiss a defamation complaint by

"Let the Christians of Africa and their Crusader armies know that there is no security for you except by Islam or jizya." — Islamic State Central Africa Province, in a statement claiming the massacre of worshippers in Ituri, north-eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. COMMENTARY By David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueonline.org | August 7, 2026 More than 388 million Christians now live under high to extreme persecution for the name of Jesus Christ. That is one in every seven

By David W. Virtue, DD www.VirtueOnline.org August 7, 2026 CHARLESTON, SC — The ecclesiastical court that will try ACNA Archbishop Steve Wood next month has slammed the door on his attempt to obtain the confidential files of the Board of Inquiry that recommended charges against him, ruling that the Board's work is sealed — as to both its participants and its contents — and that the court “will not breach that confidentiality.” The order, denying Wood's Motion to Compel

The Church of England Joins the Chorus By David W. Virtue, DD I www.virtueonline.org I August 5, 2026 In July 2026 the General Synod of the Church of England voted to “hear” and engage with a document that accuses the State of Israel of genocide. Set that sentence beside another: this is the Church of Arthur Balfour, whose 1917 declaration gave the Jewish people the charter to a national home, and of Winston Churchill, who as Colonial Secretary became that promise’s unflinc

Across a dozen dioceses, The Episcopal Church has perfected the art of protecting its bishops and abandoning the abused. A single watchdog is doing the work the shepherds will not COMMENTARY By David W. Virtue, DD I www.virtueonline.org I August 4, 2026 The Episcopal Church likes to present itself to the world as the safest room in American Christianity — inclusive, enlightened, trauma-informed, ahead of every curve. For a season the boast had substance. A generation ago, its

COMMENTARY By David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueonline.org | August 3, 2026 If you want to know what schism actually costs — not in theory, not in press releases, but in souls — don't read a canon or a court ruling. Look at the Episcopal Diocese of San Joaquin. San Joaquin was the first full diocese to walk out of the Episcopal Church, and it did so in two deliberate steps. In December 2006, its convention voted to strike from the diocesan constitution the language by

By David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueonline.org | July 30, 2026 Some 20,000 volumes of Christian books and ministry resources — many of them written by the late Barnabas Aid International founder and director Dr. Patrick Sookhdeo — have been summarily destroyed under the charity's incoming chief executive, Colin Bloom. In a full interview with Dr. Chris Sugden, subsequently summarized on the Anglican Mainstream website, Bloom — the new Chief Executive of Barnabas Aid Inter

Eschatology without dogmatic uniformity By David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueonline.org | July 29, 2026 FULL DISCLOSURE. I did consult AI for much of the information in this piece. It is not all my own work. It is this writer's contention that the church's primary mission is to disciple the nations; to make Christ known, not to speculate on the End Times, about which we know very little. Reticence, Not a Timetable An Anglican view of the end times is not dispensationalism re