ACNA: The Least of These, Disinvited

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 Archbishop Derek Jones of the ARCC and co-hosted with bishops of the Church of Kenya, who were themselves present. For standing in that room, beside those bishops, he lost his place at a conference named for the mercy of Christ.

[For the benefit of VOL readers, the Matthew 25 Conference is a Christian social‑justice and discipleship gathering built around Matthew 25:31–46.]

Weigh what was named against what was done. Matthew 25 is the chapter in which the Lord tells us the nations will be judged by how they treated the hungry, the stranger, and the prisoner. The ACNA took that chapter for a ministry, and then struck from it the one man coming to speak for imprisoned Christians — because he had stood in the wrong room, beside the wrong bishop.

Elavata is not the only one. The same Kenyan conference, held in Seattle this past weekend, had invited Archbishop Buba Lamido, former Dean of the Church of Nigeria, to attend and speak. He too was threatened and punished by the ACNA — his offense, having provided ministry at the ARCC’s synod in June. Had the Primate, Archbishop Henry Ndukuba, not intervened, Lamido might well have been barred from ACNA churches altogether. And the Kenyan bishops who did travel to Seattle, men whose names sit on GAFCON’s own statements? They have quietly disappeared from GAFCON’s listings. The old articles naming them remain, if you know where to look. The record was not corrected. It was scrubbed.

Then there is Dr. A.J. Nolte, among the foremost scholars of Christian persecution and antisemitism, invited to lecture at a coming conference on those very subjects organized by the Anglican theologian Dr. Gerald McDermott. When Bishop Felix Orji learned that Nolte serves under Archbishop Jones in the ARCC, he instructed the organizers to disinvite him. His reason deserves to be quoted in full: “It’s not personal as I don’t even know him. It’s just where things are at this point with the ACNA and Archbishop Derek and I don’t want to be caught in the middle.”

Read that admission slowly. No charge of false teaching. No question of character or competence. The bishop grants that he has never met the man. A serious scholar was removed from a conference on antisemitism — a sin that exists precisely because men are condemned for their associations rather than their deeds — for no reason but his associations. The irony would be comic if it were not so grave.

The pattern reaches the mission field. ACNA bishops have urged congregations to cut off financial support from a missionary serving the war-torn people of Ukraine — not because the work has faltered, for by every account it is thriving, but because the missionary remains under Archbishop Jones and the ARCC. Ministries to the pro-life cause, to children, to the marginalized have been told to sever ties with Jones or forfeit their funding and access.

The severity is selective. The same communion that cannot abide a scholar or a missionary standing near Archbishop Jones has proved willing to share platforms, dialogues, and partnerships with leaders whose theology it claims to reject. Courtesy is extended across genuine doctrinal chasms. It is withheld from fellow Anglicans who confess the same creeds, hold the same orders, and preach the same gospel. That contrast tells you what the real objection is. It is not theological. It is territorial.

The ACNA will call this church discipline — a matter of order and jurisdiction. The evidence says otherwise. Churches must guard their order, and disputes over the reception of congregations are as old as the church itself. But discipline addresses the party to the dispute; it does not hunt the bystander.

What has taken hold here is retaliation against a whistleblower, and it reaches past the dispute to punish those who had no part in it: an advocate for the persecuted church, a scholar of antisemitism, Ukrainian families in a war zone, ministries to the least visible. When the instrument of discipline falls again and again on the least of these, it has stopped being discipline. It has become leverage — power exercised for its own sake, with the vulnerable and the faithful left as collateral.

The gospel is not abandoned in a single vote or a press release. It is abandoned one disinvitation at a time, one defunded missionary at a time, one scrubbed name at a time, one slander at a time — until a communion that claims to preach Christ crucified no longer seeks Christ first, nor knows Him in the stranger it has turned away.

David W. Virtue DD is president and Managing Editor of Virtueonline, the Anglican communion’s longest running Anglican online news service. His Substack on the Middle East can be viewed here: davidvirtue2.substack.com Please consider becoming a paid supporter.