ACNA SHOULD END THE LAWSUITS

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 Church in North America.

It is a sad state of affairs, and it did not have to come to this. These suits should never have been filed.

Bishop Dobbs, of all men, knows his New Testament. He knows what the apostle Paul told a quarrelsome congregation that had taken to dragging its disputes before pagan magistrates — that believers are to settle their grievances within the household of faith, for the sake of the Church's unity, her honor, and her witness, reserving the courts for the rare cause where justice truly requires them.

What Paul actually said

“Dare any of you, having a matter against another, go to law before the unjust, and not before the saints?” (1 Cor. 6:1). Paul's concern is twofold. There is the witness of the church before a watching world — every believer hauled before a secular court is a sermon preached against the Gospel. And there is the maturity of the church before her Lord — a people schooled in forgiveness, reconciliation, and the long-suffering of Christ ought to be able to settle a quarrel without a docket number. Paul does not soften it: “Now therefore there is utterly a fault among you, because ye go to law one with another. Why do ye not rather take wrong? why do ye not rather suffer yourselves to be defrauded?” (1 Cor. 6:7). To win such a suit, he says, is already to have lost.

And here is the hard part for Bishop Dobbs, and I say it as a friend of the ACNA. He may well be in the right. Bishop Jones charged that Dobbs “absconded with” some $48,000 in chaplaincy funds; the disputed sum turns out to have been $3,750 misdirected into the wrong account back in 2019, tracked in the books and spent as intended. A provincial investigation under then-Archbishop Foley Beach in 2020 found no impropriety, and that very report now sits as an exhibit in Dobbs's own suit. On the merits, a court may vindicate him entirely.

But Paul's counsel is not addressed to the man in the wrong. It is addressed precisely to the man in the right — the one who could win — and it tells him to rather be wronged. The higher ground is available to Bishop Dobbs at this moment. It will not be available forever.

What the world sees

The rest of the world does not follow the canonical fine print. Bishop Jones has separated himself from the ACNA and formed his own jurisdiction; rightly or wrongly, the die is cast, and there seems to be no going back. One bishop may frame all this as a matter of church discipline. The man in the pew reads a newspaper headline, sees a suspended archbishop, sees clergy suing clergy, and quietly wonders what became of the church that was supposed to be different. Across the aisle, Episcopal Church leaders watch and murmur that perhaps the schism was not worth it after all.

And it is about to get worse. Next month — September 7 through 12 — Archbishop Steve Wood, suspended from ministry since last November, goes to trial before the Court for the Trial of a Bishop on three charges: violation of his ordination vows, conduct giving just cause for scandal or offense, and sexual immorality. Whatever the verdict, none of it will leave him, or the province he led, looking anything but wounded.

The harder, better road

So let me say plainly what many are thinking. Bishop Dobbs should withdraw his defamation suit now — before a trial he might lose, before compensatory and punitive damages are argued over in open court, before the whole miserable arithmetic of it is printed in the papers. And Archbishop Wood should spare the church the spectacle: step down, own what is his to own, offer the apology the body of Christ is owed, take his pension, and go. A resignation is a wound that heals. A public trial is a wound that scars.

If they do not, the Washington Post will be all over this again, and again, keeping every unhappy detail before the public eye. So ask the only questions that finally matter. How does any of this advance the kingdom of God? How does it make one disciple for Jesus Christ? How does it commend the Anglican way to a single soul weighing whether to walk through the door?

The ACNA already carries the strain of its unsettled debate over the ordination of women; it does not need these self-inflicted encumbrances heaped on top. There is still time to choose the harder, better road — the road of the wronged man who lays down his right for the sake of the Body. But the window is closing.

End it now, brothers, before the damage is done that cannot be undone. Paul told us how this story ends when the saints go to law against one another. He called it a defeat. Let us not prove him right.

David W. Virtue, DD, is founder and editor of VirtueOnline.