ACNA: Provincial Council Reveals Divided Church

Lawsuits, small parishes, theological differences, divided leadership, women's ordination rankle the orthodox Anglican denomination.

By David W. Virtue, DD I www.virtueonline.org I June 24, 2026

Gloating about being orthodox as opposed to revisionist might seem like a winning ticket.

After all, the Anglican Church in North America was born from the Episcopal Church's embrace of pansexuality, and it has watched as that revisionist denomination has paid a steep price in lost membership, declining attendance, and an aging Boomer generation slowly disappearing from the pews.

It was ACNA's moment. Or it should have been. But it has not worked out as seamlessly as hoped.

Across 17 years, the headline number is around 130,000 members with just under 100,000 in weekly attendance. Even its apparent "growth" in recent years partly reflects better data collection rather than actual new members. The denomination has seen multiple bishops depart under a cloud — several forced out over sexual misconduct. The current Archbishop Steve Wood was compelled to step aside and now faces an ecclesiastical trial on allegations of sexual misbehavior, bullying, and plagiarism. No ACNA archbishop in the denomination's short history has faced such a constellation of charges.

Yet hope springs eternal. Mark Eldridge of the American Anglican Council, fresh from the Provincial Council meeting in Tulsa, Oklahoma, declared that reports of ACNA's death have been grossly exaggerated by social media bloggers. While lauding the camaraderie of assembled delegates, he soberly noted that half of the 1,005 churches comprising the ACNA average fewer than 50 in Sunday attendance, and nearly 75% average fewer than 100. The data confirms what many have long suspected — and what this writer knows firsthand: my own parish in Germantown, Philadelphia was forced to close for lack of growth, interest, and inadequate leadership.

That reality has prompted Anglican Revitalization Ministries to launch three programs — Revive, Renew, and Reframe — with church planting described as "desperately needed in a growing province." But a closer look at the methodology raises serious questions about whether ACNA is on the right track.

The old "come and hear" model has not worked in decades. The imperative is "go and tell" — but that begs the question of how. Trained missiologists and frontline church planters who have succeeded on the global stage believe ACNA has it backwards. If "church" means a building with professional paid clergy, the growth strategy is dead before it starts.

Disciple Making Movements

Jerry and Stacy Kramer, two Anglican missionaries are part of a team that have planted 15,000 churches across 12 countries using a lay-led, bottom-up discipleship model. They have demonstrated what multiplication actually looks like.

The Kramer's Love Shows Up (formerly Love for the Least) ministry represents a striking departure from traditional Western mission models. Rather than planting expatriate-led congregations or building institutional infrastructure, they pursue a Disciple Making Movement (DMM) methodology—training indigenous believers to rapidly reproduce house churches through oikos (household) networks, with an emphasis on "persons of peace" as entry points into unreached communities. The approach is radically decentralized: the missionary's goal is to become unnecessary as quickly as possible, equipping local disciples to evangelize, baptize, and plant without foreign dependency.

Justin Long a missionary researcher has been involved in missions research for over 30 years, and presently works to help rapidly multiplying movements to Christ identify unreached gaps and send workers to those who haven't yet heard the Gospel.

Long is a committed advocate for Disciple Making Movements (DMM) and Church Planting Movements (CPM) as the scalable answer to the remaining missionary task. He stresses why multiplication of church planting movements matters and why Christians must stay ahead of cultural trends and population growth. Critically, he has documented a major shift in how movements now spread: over 90% of new movements started in the past five to ten years have been started by teams sent out from existing movements — without any Western cross-cultural workers involved — because insider near-culture believers can reach neighboring unreached peoples more easily, without learning a new language or culture, and do so intentionally since their own movements began out of a vision to reach the unreached. This multiplication dynamic, he argues, means the completion of the Great Commission task is genuinely within reach.

Meanwhile, the Rev. Canon Tony Melton, Director of Always Forward, offered the notion that churches would grow if delegates thought of the "church as mother" — a metaphor that left at least one observer wondering if it belonged in a Monty Python skit.

The hard questions remain unanswered: What is the actual strategy? Has ACNA catalyzed multiplication of disciples and churches — and where? What tools are being used? What metrics will determine success? How will multiplication be baked into the ACNA's DNA? If the answer is simply a more polished invitation to church under an Anglican brand, it is dead on arrival, say those who have actually done it. The only credible metric is multiplication — and by that measure, ACNA has come up short.

One Bright Spot

The Anglican Diocese of the South (ADOTS) celebrated the approval by the Provincial Council to establish the Anglican Diocese of the Mid-South as a new diocese within the province.

The new diocese, developed from the Mid-South Missionary District of the Anglican Diocese of the South, covers Missouri, Arkansas, West Tennessee, Mississippi, and parts of eastern Texas. As part of this transition, the Anglican Diocese of the South will release fifteen of its parishes to form the founding congregations of the Anglican Diocese of the Mid-South.

Turmoil Over Women's Ordination

One simmering issue that refuses to go away is women's ordination. It recently erupted in the Diocese of the Western Gulf Coast, which has been locked in a standoff with provincial leadership over its refusal to ordain women to the priesthood — despite the ACNA's "two integrities" policy theoretically permitting it. The conflict came to a head during the episcopal election process, with candidates favoring women's ordination effectively excluded. The broader significance is clear: ACNA's uneasy truce on this question satisfies neither convinced egalitarians nor committed complementarians, and the Wood crisis has made it far harder to manage at the provincial level.

Power Struggles

Power struggles have already emerged over who will lead ACNA if Wood is formally removed. Two names — Chip Edgar and Julian Dobbs — have surfaced as likely contenders. An insider told VOL there is no small amount of jealousy directed at the Carolina dioceses because of their comparative success. Whatever happens, the bishops will circle the wagons — and only when the white smoke rises will we know the outcome.

ACNA must resolve its divisions quickly if it is to have a future. One genuine bright spot is Trinity Anglican Seminary, which offers outstanding theological formation.

Dean Bryan Hollon has demonstrated the kind of new-generation thinking the province desperately needs — if the incoming leadership is wise enough to draw on it.

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