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

Why the Last Days Began at Pentecost — and Why God Is Not Consulting America’s Prophecy Charts By David W. Virtue, DD I www.virtueonline.org I July 28, 2026 It is time to end the nonsense peddled by the “end times” prophets who insist we are living in the last days. We are living in the last days. We have been for two thousand years, and we may go on living in them for decades or centuries more. That is precisely the point these hucksters miss. What they are selling — for

Why the GSFA Bishops’ Retreat in Uganda Signals Divergence, Not Merger By David W. Virtue, DD www.virtueonline.org July 25, 2026 LWEZA, UGANDA — When the bishops of the Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches gathered at the Lweza Training and Conference Centre this month, they came not to negotiate a treaty but to be formed. From July 14 to 20, under the theme “Rooted in Christ, Renewing the Church, Reaching the Nations,” bishops and their wives from Burundi, South Suda

The national numbers say he is describing the whole church By David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueonline.org | July 23, 2026 The Rt. Rev. Stephen T. Lane, Bishop Provisional of the Episcopal Diocese of Western New York, has done something bishops in his church rarely do. He has told his people the truth. In a pastoral letter to the diocese, Lane laid out, without spin or evasion, why there are no priests coming. Not why there might be a shortage. Why there are none. "The B

COMMENTARY By David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueonline.org | July 21, 2026 Episcopalians across the country have been invited to commemorate 50 years of pansexual inclusion in The Episcopal Church. It promises to be a memorable event affirming "that homosexual persons are children of God who have a full and equal claim with all other persons upon the love, acceptance, and pastoral concern and care of the Church." The Office of Public Affairs issued an invitation to ret

VirtueOnline — The Voice for Global Orthodox Anglicanism | July 17, 2026 We must allow the Word of God to confront us, to disturb our security, to undermine our complacency and to overthrow our patterns of thought and behavior. — John Stott From Gallup: The average American teenager gives TikTok about 90 minutes a day, and close to five hours once you add the other platforms. Ninety minutes a day comes to 540 hours a year on a single app; five hours a day comes to rough

By David W. Virtue, DD I www.virtueonline.org I July 17, 2026 When an institution dies, someone must render a verdict. Was it murder? Misadventure? Natural causes? I have watched the Church of England die by inches for more than forty years, and I can render only one verdict: suicide. No secular assassin crept into Lambeth Palace by night. No parliament outlawed the gospel. No persecutor burned the churches. The Church of England took the knife to her own throat, slowly, deli

By David W. Virtue, DD I www.virtueonline.org I July 15, 2026 Antisemitism has gone global. In one country after another, Jews are being excoriated over Israel’s conduct of the war in the Middle East. Israel stands accused of genocide, of baby-killing, of deliberately starving the citizens of Gaza. October 7, 2023 — the slaughter of some 1,200 Israelis and the dragging of roughly 250 hostages into the tunnels of Gaza — is now brazenly repositioned as payback for Israel’s

By David W. Virtue, DD I www.virtueonline.org I July 14, 2026 In the space of a single week, the man about to become Britain's prime minister and the Church of England's parliament both turned on the Jewish state. Andy Burnham, Labour's unopposed leader-in-waiting following Keir Starmer's resignation, apologized to the world for his party having stood too close to Israel and pledged to squeeze her harder. Days later, the General Synod, meeting in York, voted to "hear" a lib