ACNA: Women's Ordination ... Again

The issue that will not die has found new champions — and one bishop's letter shows how the door gets opened from the inside

COMMENTARY

By David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueonline.org | November 1, 2026

It won't go away. Women's ordination has become the bête noire of the Anglican Church in North America. It is the recurring bad dream from which the province cannot wake. It is the guest who was never formally invited to the founding in 2009, yet has had a seat at the table ever since.

Every new bishop now arrives with a settled opinion, for or against, and each one carries it with the urgency of a man who believes he will remake the ACNA. The province was supposed to have settled this in 2017. It settled nothing. It only postponed the reckoning.

Consider the last few weeks alone.

Bishop Alan Hawkins: Opening the Door from the Inside

The most revealing document in this saga is not a statement from an advocate of women priests. It comes from a bishop whose own diocese does not ordain them.

The Anglican Diocese of Christ Our Hope, which Alan Hawkins has led as bishop ordinary since 2024, holds a complementarian position. Women may be ordained to the diaconate, and to the diaconate only. That is the diocese's settled practice.

Yet in a six-page letter dated September 12, Hawkins urged his synod, which meets this coming Wednesday, November 4, to reject a canonical amendment that would bar him from licensing women already ordained to the priesthood in other ACNA dioceses. His words were blunt: "I urge the Synod of 2026 not to pass this amendment."

He went further. He argued that every ACNA cleric, by subscribing to the provincial constitution and canons in his ordination vows, has already agreed that women's ordination is not a first-order issue. He cited his own willingness to receive Holy Communion from a female priest. And he made clear that if the synod rejects the amendment, he intends to bring a canonical amendment of his own next year.

Let us be clear about what this means. A diocese that does not ordain women to the priesthood may soon find women priests licensed to serve within it, by the authority of its own bishop. Nothing in the diocese's doctrine will have changed. Its practice will simply have been hollowed out by licensing. This is how innovations are normalized in Anglicanism: not by frontal assault, but by exception, by courtesy, and by the quiet redefinition of what counts as "second-order."

The Episcopal Church took this road in the 1970s and 1990s. First women priests were permitted. Then they were tolerated. Then dissent became intolerable. In 1997, Episcopal bishops who dissented were told by a woman bishop that there would be no dialogue with those who did not accept women's ordination. ACNA's founders lived through that. Some of them seem to have forgotten it.

Two of the amendment's sponsors deserve mention. The Rev. Benji Davis, chair of the diocese's College of Presbyters, argued that the amendment merely makes explicit what the diocese's constitution and canons already assume. The Rev. Blake Johnson was a co-author of the 2024 Augustine Appeal, signed by some 300 ACNA clergy, which warned that the unresolved question "imperils the mission of our Province." On Wednesday we will learn whether Christ Our Hope agrees.

Bishop-elect Chris Klukas: The Advocate

If Hawkins is opening the door, Chris Klukas intends to walk through it and hold it open for others.

On October 17, the Anglican Diocese of the Great Lakes elected the Very Rev. Christopher Klukas as bishop coadjutor on the first ballot. By the diocese's own official figures, he won 57 of 94 possible clergy votes and 28 of 49 possible lay votes. The College of Bishops is expected to take up consent in January 2027.

Klukas is a capable churchman. He is a Nashotah House graduate, worked on early drafts of the baptismal and Holy Communion liturgies for the 2019 Book of Common Prayer, and has fourteen years' experience as a rector. Nobody should doubt his gifts.

Nor should anyone doubt his intentions. His wife, the Rev. Canon Carrie Klukas, is a priest and diocesan canon. During the walkabouts he pledged to be "an advocate" for female priests "in the College of Bishops, in the Councils of the Church, and in our Diocese." He also promised to "respect the consciences" of congregations that object.

Respecting consciences is a fine phrase. The question is how long it lasts once the advocate is in the College. With nearly half of ACNA's diocesan bishops already ordaining women — dioceses representing close to 60 percent of the province by average Sunday attendance — Klukas does not tip the balance. He consolidates it.

Bishop Julian Dobbs: The Holdout at the Top

Against this stands Bishop Julian Dobbs of the Anglican Diocese of the Living Word, now provincial dean and acting archbishop while Archbishop Steve Wood awaits the verdict in his ecclesiastical trial.

Dobbs has never been ambiguous. At his Reformation 500 synod in 2017, he told his diocese that only men may serve as presbyters, and that women are honored in the vocational diaconate. He described male-female complementarity as running "from Genesis through Revelation" — equal, but different.

The irony is plain. The man presently holding the province's highest office holds the position that a growing number of its bishops are working to marginalize. An acting archbishop can preside. He cannot hold back a tide that has been running since the College of Bishops chose to leave the question to individual dioceses in 2017.

Archbishop Robert Duncan: The Founder Who Ordained Women

Then there is the ACNA's first archbishop, Robert Duncan. He ordained women to the priesthood as Bishop of Pittsburgh, and his senior staff once included women priests. At the province's founding in 2009 he offered the formula that has governed the ACNA ever since: those who believe women's ordination a grave error and those who believe it scripturally justifiable "should be in mission together until God sorts us out."

That was the founding bargain. Seventeen years later, God has not sorted it out, and neither has the College of Bishops.

Earlier this year Duncan was named interim bishop of the Diocese of the Western Gulf Coast. That diocese ordains women to the diaconate but not the priesthood, and it is still reeling from a deadlocked election in which women's roles were a live issue. In June, Duncan withdrew, citing only "circumstances" that had developed since he said yes. He gave no further explanation. Yet the episode is a small parable of the province. Even its founding archbishop could not step into a divided diocese without the ground shifting under him.

Two Integrities, or None?

ACNA's answer has been "dual integrities." The College of Bishops' 2017 statement conceded that women's ordination to the priesthood is "a recent innovation to Apostolic Tradition and Catholic Order," and that there is "insufficient scriptural warrant" to make it standard practice across the province. Then it left the practice in place, diocese by diocese.

But an integrity that can be licensed across diocesan lines is no longer an integrity. It is a policy waiting to become the default. If a complementarian diocese cannot even keep women priests from being licensed within its borders, what exactly is being protected? Either holy orders mean something objective, or ordination is merely a function to be allocated by vote and by courtesy. The ACNA cannot finally have it both ways.

The Diocese of Fort Worth knew this when it described its membership in ACNA as provisional. The Jurisdiction of the Armed Forces and Chaplaincy cited the province's incoherence on women's orders on its way out the door in January. The Reformed Episcopal Church has been praying for years that ACNA would one day reject the practice. These are not marginal voices. They are pillars of the coalition that built the province.

The Dream That Keeps Returning

Bad dreams recur because something has not been resolved. Women's ordination keeps coming back to the ACNA because the province's founders chose truce over theology, and every new bishop inherits the unfinished argument.

Hawkins says it is not a first-order issue. Klukas says he will advocate. Dobbs says Scripture says no. Duncan said, long ago, that God would sort it out.

On Wednesday, a single diocese in North Carolina will vote on whether its doctrine means what it says. The rest of the province should watch closely. What happens in Christ Our Hope will not stay in Christ Our Hope.

The ACNA was founded to escape a church that redefined holy orders a little at a time, until nothing was left to define. It would be one of history's crueler ironies if it began walking the same road — politely, canonically, and one license at a time.

David W. Virtue, DD, is the founder, editor, and publisher of VirtueOnline. His writings can be accessed here: www.virtueonline.org His writings on the Middle East can be viewed here: davidvirtue2.substack.com