ACNA: PRIDE GOETH BEFORE A FALL

COMMENTARY

By David W. Virtue, DD I www.virtueonline.org I May 20, 2026

It is an old axiom. Pride goeth before a fall. The real sin of ACNA is pride, not just its collective sins.

Proud that we are not like TEC. Proud that we have not embraced pansexuality. Proud that ACNA is growing and TEC is not. Proud that we are orthodox and TEC is heterodox. In a nutshell, proud that we are not like them.

Of course, ACNA is trying desperately hard not to break up over women’s ordination, and the denomination is trying desperately hard to define itself — are we conciliar or confessional?

But pride is a poor foundation for any church, and ACNA is discovering this the hard way.

The irony is almost too rich to ignore. ACNA was born out of a righteous rejection of The Episcopal Church’s apostasy — and that origin story, noble as it was, has become something of a golden calf. We tell the story of our founding so often, and with such satisfaction, that we have begun to confuse the act of leaving with the act of arriving. Separation from error is not the same as arrival at truth. It is merely the beginning of the journey.

The women’s ordination question is Exhibit A. ACNA has managed to hold together Anglo-Catholics who regard female ordination as an ontological impossibility and evangelicals who regard opposition to it as mere tradition dressed up as theology. That is not a settlement — it is a ceasefire. And ceasefires, as history teaches, have a way of breaking down at the worst possible moment, usually when the combatants are already exhausted from fighting on other fronts.

The conciliar versus confessional question cuts even deeper. A conciliar church derives its authority from gathered episcopal consensus. A confessional church derives it from agreed doctrine. These are not merely different polities — they are different ecclesiologies, and they produce different answers to almost every hard question a church will eventually face. ACNA has tried to be both, and in trying to be both, risks being neither.

Meanwhile, the Diocese of the Western Gulf Coast reminds us that the structural tensions within ACNA are not theoretical. When an episcopal election becomes contested enough to require referral to the House of Bishops, it reveals something the denomination’s boosters would prefer not to dwell on: that the same politicking, the same factionalism, the same institutional gamesmanship that drove faithful Anglicans out of TEC has not been left behind. It traveled with the luggage.

And then there is the wreckage at the top of the house itself. Archbishop Steve Wood — elected to lead ACNA with such fanfare in June 2024 — now stands suspended from ordained ministry, facing an ecclesiastical trial scheduled for July 2026 on charges of violation of ordination vows, conduct giving just cause for scandal, and sexual immorality.

The man appointed to manage the crisis, Bishop Julian Dobbs, carries his own shadow: longstanding allegations of financial irregularities involving missing chaplaincy funds, matters previously investigated, “resolved,” and now resurrected with a vengeance in federal court filings. A church that left TEC in large part because of its failure to hold leaders accountable now finds itself struggling to do precisely that — and doing so in the full glare of the Washington Post, Baptist News Global, and the federal judiciary.

The litigation involving the Jurisdiction of the Armed Forces and Chaplaincy is perhaps the most instructive episode of all. Bishop Derek Jones, after being inhibited by the very archbishop now facing trial himself, departed ACNA entirely, launched a rival denomination — the Anglican Reformed Catholic Church — and filed a million-dollar lawsuit against the church alleging trademark infringement and unfair commercial competition.

The JAFC’s chaplaincy operation, which gave ACNA a military presence wildly disproportionate to its size — roughly twenty times more per capita than the Southern Baptist Convention — has now become a weapon pointed back at the denomination. One is left with a portrait almost too grim for satire: the man accused of stealing money (Dobbs) disciplining the man accused of sexual misconduct (Wood), while battling the man who accused him of stealing money (Jones), who was himself suspended by the man accused of misconduct.

This is not biblical order. It is a Shakespearean tragedy dressed in clerical collars.

None of this is to say ACNA is without merit, or that its founding was not necessary. It was. But a church that defines itself primarily by what it is not — not TEC, not pansexual, not heterodox — will eventually have to reckon with what it actually is. That reckoning, long deferred, may now be arriving.

Pride goeth before a fall. The cure is not self-flagellation but repentance — genuine, corporate, and costly. ACNA would do well to remember that orthodoxy is not an achievement to be celebrated. It is a gift to be stewarded, humbly, and before God.

If you want to read more stories by this writer you can click here: www.virtueonline.org

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