A Crisis of Integrity and Broken Promises

JAFC Press Release

January 16, 2026

The author is a senior officer of the Jurisdiction of the Armed Forces and Chaplaincy who participated in the Executive Committee's deliberations regarding disaffiliation from the Anglican Church in North America. This article documents the JAFC's concerns and explains why the Executive Committee concluded that continuing to seek partnership with the ACNA was untenable.

The September 2025 decision by the Jurisdiction of the Armed Forces and Chaplaincy (JAFC) to disassociate with the Anglican Church in North America represents far more than institutional politics or the actions of a single bishop. It marks the culmination of years of theological discomfort, broken promises, inconsistent discipline, and a fundamental loss of confidence in the ACNA's commitment to maintaining orthodox Christianity.

While critics and the ACNA’s public relations firm have attempted to frame this decision as an effort by Bishop Derek Jones to evade accountability, the truth is precisely the opposite: the JAFC left because the ACNA itself has proven unwilling or unable to maintain the very standards it claims to uphold. What follows is an account of the issues that led to this decision.

The JAFC's concerns were not merely theoretical or based on distant observation. Because military chaplaincy requires ecclesiastical endorsement and ongoing assessment, the JAFC routinely reviewed clergy credentials from every ACNA diocese and evaluated applicants seeking to serve as chaplains. Our chaplains worshiped in ACNA parishes across the country during assignments and deployments. This positioned the JAFC to observe patterns invisible to diocesan leadership operating in institutional silos. We encountered applicants with poorly formed sacramental theology, clergy who listed preferred pronouns in official correspondence, priests with equivocal positions on same-sex marriage, and even one applicant who identified as non-binary. These were not isolated anomalies from one problematic diocese but a cross-provincial pattern indicating systemic catechetical failure and inconsistent doctrinal formation across the ACNA.

A Tenuous Relationship from the Beginning

The JAFC's relationship with the ACNA was never one of full integration. The structural incompatibility was baked in from the start:; Canon 11 of the ACNA's provincial canons, which establishes a "Special Jurisdiction of the Armed Forces and Chaplaincy," (a name co-opted from the diocese without permission) was drafted in a manner fundamentally incompatible with how the JAFC was structured for nearly 7seven years, prior to the ACNA canon being adopted.

This is why, until 2022, the JAFC provided ecclesiastical endorsement for ACNA chaplains while remaining canonically under the Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion). The JAFC could not fully integrate into the ACNA because Canon 11 precluded the jurisdiction from fulfilling the role outlined without substantial organizational change that would undermine the effectiveness of chaplaincy operations. The Church of Nigeria had made the JAFC a diocese three years earlier which the Canon could not accommodate. The province had created a canonical framework for chaplaincy without understanding how chaplaincy actually works, but with promises it would evolve the canon.

When the JAFC finally agreed to leave its canonical relationship with Nigeria in 2022, it did so only with explicit, solemn promises from ACNA leadership that Canon 11 would be revised to reflect the JAFC's actual structure and operational requirements. These commitments were made by Archbishop Foley Beach to both the Church of Nigeria and JAFC leadership, and were reaffirmed by Archbishop-elect Steve Wood.

The promise was clear and non-negotiable: the ACNA would fix the canonical incoherence that prevented the JAFC's reception and full integration. This was not about preference or convenience but about canonical necessity, making the ACNA's structure compatible with the realities of the JAFC’s ministry.

Yet However, this promise was systematically undermined and neglected. Rather than working toward the canonical revision that would enable the JAFC's full integration, the ACNA leadership under Archbishop Wood's tenure allowed the issue to languish while simultaneously tolerating, and in some cases enabling, theological drift on multiple fronts. The broken promise on Canon 11 revealed a disturbing pattern: the ACNA leadership speaks the language of commitment while lacking the institutional will to follow through.

The Dual Integrity Disgrace

Beyond the structural issues, the JAFC faced ongoing theological discomfort with the ACNA's incoherent position on women's ordination. The question exposes the ACNA's fundamental theological unseriousness. A church body cannot simultaneously affirm that Holy Orders are ontologically restricted to males in some dioceses while permitting the ordination of women in others without rendering the entire sacramental system incoherent. Either women can be validly ordained as presbyters or they cannot. Either there is an ontological reality to Holy Orders, or ordination is merely functional.

The ACNA's "dual integrity" compromise attempts to split the unsplittable. For orthodox Christians worldwide, particularly in the Global South provinces with which the ACNA claims partnership, this position is not nuanced theology but incoherent doublespeak. The Church of Nigeria, the Church of Uganda, and other GAFCON partners formerly maintain[SV1] ed male-only presbyterates not out of cultural conservatism but from theological conviction rooted in Scripture, Tradition, and the universal witness of the Church for two millennia. Now, it appears, GAFCON has become a reflection of the ACNA’s incongruency.

By maintaining this "impaired communion," the ACNA signals to the watching Christian world that core doctrines of ministry and sacramental theology are negotiable based on diocesan preference. This is not the catholicity the ACNA claims to champion; it is the same trajectory of theological incoherence that destroyed The Episcopal Church. Once a church accepts that male-female distinction in leadership is merely cultural rather than creational, it has already conceded the anthropological ground necessary to resist subsequent revisionism on sexuality and gender.

Homosexuality: Selective Enforcement and Theological Drift

The ACNA was founded in 2009 specifically to maintain orthodox teaching on marriage and sexuality in opposition to The Episcopal Church's embrace of revisionism. Yet less than fifteen years later, the province demonstrates an alarming inability to enforce its own stated convictions.

The 2021 "Dear Gay Anglicans" controversy revealed deep fissures. When the ACNA College of Bishops issued a carefully crafted pastoral statement discouraging "gay Christian" identity language, the response was immediate rebellion. Bishop Todd Hunter of the Diocese of Churches for the Sake of Others (C4SO) publicly undermined the bishops' teaching authority, declaring that "The College of Bishops does not speak with the authority of a magisterium." Over 140 clergy signed a letter explicitly using the forbidden terminology. The Church of Nigeria's Primate, Archbishop Henry Ndukuba, warned that "the deadly 'virus' of homosexuality has infiltrated the ACNA" and called for discipline.

The ACNA's response? The letter was removed from the internet, but no one was disciplined. Not the bishop who publicly contradicted his fellow bishops. Not the 140+ clergy who signed in defiance. Instead, the province issued a bland statement insisting it "has not moved" while taking no personnel action whatsoever.

The pattern has continued. Multiple parishes in several dioceses have either moved toward affirming positions or left ACNA entirely over sexuality issues:

• St. Mary of Bethany (Nashville) departed in 2021 for the Communion of Evangelical Episcopal Churches, with the rector explicitly stating the CEEC's progressive stance on sexuality was "a better fit" and noting that "the holy catholic church lacks a uniform conviction" on marriage.

• The Table Indianapolis departed for The Episcopal Church in October 2023, with the rector stating the congregation had never been "in 100 percent agreement about the way the ACNA frames human sexuality and gay marriage."

• Resurrection South Austin voted 80%+ to leave ACNA for The Episcopal Church, with the rector explicitly citing the church's treatment of "sexual minorities" as a primary concern. Again, no discipline, just a pastoral "discernment process."

• Luminous Church (Franklin, TN) saw clergy publicly affirm LGBTQ+ Pride events in direct violation of ACNA's Fundamental Declarations. Rather than discipline, Bishop Hunter facilitated their departure to affirming jurisdictions. The priest who participated in Pride events remains on staff without discipline.

This pattern is not peripheral. It strikes at the heart of why the ACNA exists. If the province cannot or will not enforce basic sexual ethics, the very issue over which it separated from TEC, then its claims to orthodox witness are hollow performance.

Sanctity of Life

The Pro-Life position of the ACNA at its founding had become an inconvenience for many bishops seeking to increase their clergy rolls. Bishop Jones had confronted five different bishops in the previous year who had sent clergy to the JAFC for chaplaincy endorsement who reported openly and unapologetically to be pro-abortion. In two cases, the bishops “pushed back” on Bishop Jones when he refused to allow them to become chaplains, one of whom made a “spiritual abuse” claim when denied endorsement by the JAFC and Bishop Jones. The ACNA's lack of institutional support for Anglicans for Life, the Silent No More campaign, and other Anglican-connected ministries defending life has been virtually non-existent for several years now. Conversely, the JAFC’s Adoption Fund ministry was passed to Anglicans for Life in 2022. That ministry has grown significantly over the last few years. Yet, after the third attempt to ask the ACNA to report on the ministry, the response came that the ACNA was concerned that promoting a Pro-Life program might be offensive to some. It appears the ACNA has abandoned this moral and biblical imperative, and so JAFC, which is staunchly Pro-Life, saw an “unequally yoked” situation.

Critical Theory

The infiltration of Critical Theory and its derivatives throughout the ACNA represents perhaps the most insidious threat to orthodoxy. Critical Theory, whether in its Critical Race Theory or Queer Theory manifestations, operates from fundamentally Marxist assumptions about power, oppression, and liberation that are irreconcilable with Christian anthropology and soteriology.

Several ACNA diocesans have been at the vanguard of this infiltration. In pastoral correspondence, Bishop Hunter endorsed Critical Race Theory and stated that "all truth is God's truth," a category error that baptizes secular ideologies by claiming them as divine revelation. This is not mere political disagreement; it represents a theological methodology that undermines scriptural authority by subordinating biblical categories to secular critical consciousness.

The trajectory is predictable and documented. Churches that embrace feminist theory's "hermeneutic of suspicion" toward male authority and "patriarchal" Scripture inexorably move toward accepting homosexuality and gender ideology. The progression is not accidental but logical: once you accept that biblical teaching reflects oppressive power structures rather than divine revelation, every "marginalized" identity becomes a site of liberation theology.

This is precisely what we see in C4SO, DOMA, and others: the dioceses most open to Critical Race Theory are also the dioceses with the most parishes moving toward sexual revisionism. When church leaders frame biblical sexual ethics as "harmful" to LGBTQ+ persons rather than as loving truth, they have already conceded the fundamental question. The ACNA cannot simultaneously embrace Critical Theory's anthropology while maintaining Christian sexual ethics. The foundation cannot hold.

Alarmingly, since Archbishop Wood's election, there appears to be an accelerating trend of institutional accommodation to woke ideology at the highest levels of provincial leadership. His appointments to senior positions have consistently favored those sympathetic to Critical Theory frameworks, signaling a shift in institutional priorities.

The Diocese of the Mid-Atlantic: Selective Discipline in Action

The contrast between the ACNA's tolerance of theological drift and its aggressive discipline of orthodox resistance finds vivid illustration in the Diocese of the Mid-Atlantic's handling of Incarnation Anglican Church in Williamsburg, Virginia.

The situation demonstrates the ACNA's priorities with alarming clarity. At Incarnation Anglican, a congregation that had never employed female celebrants, Bishop Chris Warner directed that a female priest be allowed to celebrate the Eucharist in February 2025. When attendance dropped, and the vestry expressed concerns, Warner responded not with pastoral sensitivity but with episcopal coercion, demanding "gender parity" on the vestry and "doctrinal openness" to female celebrants.

The vestry election that followed became, in the words of one DOMA deacon, "a battle between the women and the men." When the vestry, attempting to maintain the congregation's historic practice, filed formal misconduct charges against Bishop Warner in May 2025, outlining eight specific allegations of spiritual abuse and canonical violations, the DOMA standing committee refused to investigate, and the ACNA ignored the matter completely. Not a single charge was examined. The entire vestry subsequently resigned in protest.

Bishop Warner and DOMA then appointed a "transitional vestry" and confirmed that no investigation of the misconduct allegations would occur. The message could not be clearer: resistance to progressive innovation on women's ordination warrants aggressive episcopal intervention and institutional suppression, while documented allegations of abuse of authority receive no investigation whatsoever.

This stands in stark contrast to the ACNA's approach to C4SO's parish departures over sexuality. There, pastoral accommodation and facilitated exits were the norm. At Incarnation, orthodox resistance to women's ordination innovation was met with aggressive discipline and institutional stonewalling of accountability mechanisms.

The pattern is unmistakable: the ACNA accommodates theological drift toward revisionism while punishing those who resist it. For the JAFC, watching an entire vestry forced out for defending traditional practice while parishes that embrace Pride events and depart for affirming jurisdictions face no discipline, the conclusion was inescapable: the ACNA's enforcement priorities are precisely backward.

Canonical Irregularities and Targeted Discipline

Against this backdrop of theological incoherence and selective enforcement, the ACNA's pursuit of Bishop Derek Jones reveals startling hypocrisy. When accusations were made against Bishop Jones, did the ACNA follow its own canonical processes? No, they did not.

The accusations were presented through irregular channels that bypassed established safeguards. Key canonical procedures were ignored or violated. (Of note, all accusations had been previously reviewed and determined non-credible, one accusation that came from a defrocked by ACNA trial former priest.) The process bore the hallmarks of a targeted effort designed to remove a bishop who had become inconvenient, one who insisted on orthodoxy when others preferred accommodation, who challenged the status quo when others sought smooth relations, who held leadership accountable to its promises.

Consider the contrast: 140+ clergy sign a letter directly contradicting the College of Bishops on sexuality, no admonishments or investigations initiated. Bishop Hunter publicly undermines episcopal teaching authority, no admonishments or investigations initiated. Priests facilitate parish departures to affirming jurisdictions, no admonishments or investigations initiated. Multiple clergy participate in or endorse Pride events, no canonical process. But Bishop Jones, who has consistently championed orthodox positions and held ACNA leadership accountable to its founding principles, was being forced to agree to a noncanonical investigation and improper admonishment based on accusations, already determined to be unfounded, from the Archbishop who threatened he would do as much just one month into his term. It is also now known that this action by the Archbishop was on the heels of Bp Jones confronting him on what is now public knowledge of Wood’s misconduct. and ethical and moral improprieties.

The JAFC Executive Committee, watching this unfold, reached an inescapable conclusion: the ACNA could not be trusted to handle the matter fairly. Not because of one instance of injustice, but because of a pattern of selective enforcement that consistently favors those who accommodate cultural pressure over those who resist it.

The Final Betrayal: Broken Promises on Canon 11

The irregular proceedings against Bishop Jones were just one more “straw”, but they fell on a camel already staggering under accumulated burdens. The most significant of these was the ACNA leadership's failure to fulfill its solemn promise regarding Canon 11, thereby preventing the JAFC from becoming officially part of the ACNA.

When the JAFC left its canonical relationship with Nigeria in 2022 to fully join the ACNA, it did so with explicit commitments from Archbishop Beach, later affirmed by Archbishop-elect Wood, that Canon 11 would be revised to reflect the JAFC's actual structure and operational requirements. This was not a side issue but the fundamental requirement for full integration as a super diocese (Jurisdiction as defined in the ACNA’s Constitution), the commitment to a canonical revision was the entire basis for JAFC's decision to leave Nigeria.

Yet under Archbishop Wood's tenure, not only was this promise unfulfilled, it was actively undermined. Rather than moving toward canonical coherence that would enable JAFC to function properly within the ACNA, the issue was buried. This was not mere bureaucratic delay but intentional obstruction, a demonstration of bad faith that violated the explicit commitments upon which the JAFC's integration was premised.

This broken promise demonstrated that the ACNA's commitments to orthodox partners are negotiable, subject to political calculation rather than integrity. For the JAFC, a jurisdiction serving chaplains who daily confront challenges to Christian orthodoxy in increasingly hostile institutional environments, the lesson was clear: the ACNA's word cannot be trusted.

Conclusion: An Institution in Crisis

The JAFC's disaffiliation from the ACNA was not an attempt to evade accountability, but a recognition of the ACNA's fundamental unsuitability as an ecclesiastical home for orthodox Anglicans. The decision emerged from:

1. Broken promises on Canon 11 that demonstrated leadership's bad faith

2. Theological incoherence on women's ordination that embarrasses orthodox Christianity globally

3. Selective non-enforcement of sexual ethics, tolerating drift while punishing orthodox resistance

4. Departure from affirming life in the womb.

5. Infiltration of Critical Theory that undermines biblical authority and anthropology

6. Irregular and non-canonical processes targeting faithful bishops while ignoring widespread theological deviation

The attempted irregular proceedings against Bishop Jones were not the cause, but the catalyst - the final confirmation that the JAFC's growing concerns were justified. So, the Executive Committee faced an even more sobering question: Would the ACNA survive as an institution given these profound theological and structural deficiencies? After careful deliberation, the answer was clearly that it could not. The combination of theological incoherence on Holy Orders, inability to enforce sexual ethics, departure from protecting human life, embrace of Critical Theory ideology, broken promises to partners, increasingly selective discipline, and then falsified claims against one of the few honest, integrity-driven bishops, all under Archbishop Wood's tenure, suggests an institution in terminal decline.

Even if the ACNA were to survive its current crises, an increasingly doubtful prospect given Archbishop Wood's own inhibition in November 2025, the Executive Committee concluded it would not represent the true future of orthodox Anglicanism in North America. A province that maintains "dual integrity" on women's ordination, tolerates parishes moving toward sexual revisionism while disciplining orthodox resistance, embraces woke ideology through provincial appointments, and breaks solemn promises to orthodox partners has already chosen its trajectory. It is following the same path of accommodation and theological drift that nearly destroyed The Episcopal Church.

The provisional relational status between the ACNA and the JAFC has now become permanent separation, not because the JAFC abandoned orthodoxy, but because the ACNA has proven structurally incapable of maintaining it consistently and unwilling to keep its word to those who do.

The tragedy is not the JAFC's departure but the ACNA's trajectory. A province founded to uphold biblical teaching on marriage, life, and sexuality now struggles to discipline those who violate it while aggressively pursuing those who resist innovation. A province claiming global orthodox partnership maintains positions on Holy Orders that most of its partners reject as incoherent. A province birthed in opposition to cultural accommodation increasingly accommodates the very ideologies, feminism, Critical Theory, and identity politics that destroyed its parent body.

The JAFC's decision to seek ecclesiastical partnership elsewhere reflects not a failure of nerve, but a commitment to principle. When promises are broken, when discipline is selective, when theology becomes negotiable, when canonical processes serve political ends, and when an institution's leadership demonstrates neither the will nor the capacity to maintain orthodoxy, separation becomes not schism but faithfulness.

The Executive Committee concluded that remaining in the ACNA meant yoking the JAFC's future to an institution that lacks both institutional integrity and theological coherence. An institution that, even if it survives, will not represent authentic orthodox Anglicanism. For chaplains serving in some of the most challenging ministry contexts in the world, such an affiliation would compromise their witness and undermine their mission. The JAFC chose instead to seek partnership with those who share not only orthodox convictions but the courage to maintain them consistently, regardless of cultural pressure or political cost.

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