DEPOSED IN PLANO, ENTHRONED IN BIRMINGHAM

ACNA bishops strip Derek Jones of holy orders and confess their own silence. The new ARCC archbishop answers with a charge of “defamation in the public square.”

By David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueonline.org | September 24, 2026

The verdict was never in doubt. Only the sentence remained.

This week, meeting in special session in Plano, Texas, the College of Bishops of the Anglican Church in North America deposed Bishop Derek Jones from the sacred ministry, determining that over a period of many years he had offended against God and the Body of Christ through acts of wickedness, cruelty, and abuse of power against chaplains who had little recourse.

Deposition is the heaviest sentence the province’s canons allow, which run from admonition and censure through suspension to removal from holy orders. It brings to a close a year-long canonical saga that began with an inhibition in September 2025 and has since spawned a breakaway denomination, two federal lawsuits, and a trial conducted in the defendant’s absence.

Guilty on All Four Counts

The deposition follows the August 19 Final Judgment of the ACNA’s Court for the Trial of a Bishop, which unanimously found Jones guilty of all four canonical offenses in the Presentment of October 21, 2025: willful refusal of a Godly Admonition, willful contravention of the canons, conduct giving just cause for scandal or offense (including abuse of ecclesiastical power), and promoting and causing schism.

Jones never appeared to defend himself. Served by process server on April 24, he let the May 26 deadline for an Answer pass in silence. The Provincial Prosecutor moved for summary judgment on July 7; the court heard argument on August 10 and granted it. Jones lodged no appeal within the thirty-day window, leaving sentence to the bishops.

The court’s findings make grim reading. It described a chaplaincy culture that “promoted isolation, authoritarian submission, doubt, hopelessness, and deceit.” A chaplain’s “good standing” was tied to mandatory donations of up to ten percent of salary to the jurisdiction’s nonprofit, a lever the court found was used against those who tried to transfer elsewhere. Chaplains seeking pastoral care were steered to counselors of Jones’s choosing, and speaking to other bishops or the archbishop without his knowledge put their standing at risk. In one case, he backdated a document in an attempt to discipline a military chaplain who was not even under his canonical authority. Abuse of power, the court concluded, lay at the very heart of the case.

The court also found that Jones had defied his inhibition, continuing to vest and function as a bishop, most notably by consecrating Andrew Hayler to the episcopate on June 10. That consecration was cited as evidence of schism.

A College Confesses

What sets the bishops’ statement apart is not the sentence but the confession that accompanies it.

“The pain and destruction to these chaplains and their families is loathsome, and we are deeply ashamed and lament that members of this body who knew about this behavior neither urgently nor robustly addressed concerns and complaints regarding Mr. Jones,” the bishops wrote.

“Having read the affidavits and victim statements, we commit to continual prayer for victims known and unknown, pleading for God’s healing and hope. We also commit as a college to do everything in our power to address these injustices.”

The bishops acknowledged that they cannot fully undo the pain, destruction, and despair inflicted on those who suffered, but pledged a process through which wronged chaplains may obtain canonical and pastoral restoration. That answers the court’s own invitation to consider reversing disciplinary actions Jones had imposed on men under his care.

“As part of our collective repentance, we recognize the culture of our college must change and we are seeking to understand how this abuse was allowed to happen. The goal of disciplining a bishop is to protect the sheep and to invite the fallen shepherd to repent,” they concluded.

It is a remarkable admission. Jones’s victims said as much last November in an open letter, charging that the College had been willfully blind, incompetent, and negligent, and had habitually failed to hold its own members accountable. The bishops now concede the substance of that charge. What they have not said is who knew, when they knew, and why nothing was done.

“Real or Make-Believe”

Jones, now Archbishop of the Anglican Reformed Catholic Church (ARCC), was unrepentant.

“Like other ministries, the ACNA has a First Amendment right to conduct internal church proceedings—real or make-believe, and to issue ecclesiastical rulings—rational or deranged, within the walls of the church,” he said. “What it may not do is publish defamation in the public square.”

The ARCC’s position, voiced by a spokesman after the August verdict, is that the ACNA never had authority over Jones at all, because the province never consummated its agreement with the Church of Nigeria, where the chaplaincy held canonical residence until 2021. The ACNA’s answer is that a bishop under discipline cannot resign his way out of it, and that the chaplaincy was a canonical ministry of the province, not a private corporation.

The defamation charge carries a certain irony. Jones is himself the defendant in a federal defamation suit filed February 17 in the Northern District of Alabama by the ACNA’s acting archbishop, Julian Dobbs, who alleges that Jones knowingly spread false claims of financial misconduct against him during a video call with more than 120 chaplains. Former Archbishop Foley Beach told the College of Bishops that Jones’s allegations had been fully investigated and found groundless. Meanwhile, the chaplaincy’s own suit against the ACNA, alleging trademark infringement and seeking a million dollars, remains pending in federal court in South Carolina. In that complaint, the jurisdiction conceded it had lost roughly half its income and chaplains.

Meanwhile, in Birmingham

If Plano closes one chapter, Jones is already writing the next.

Three months before his deposition, the ARCC, incorporated in Alabama last December, convened its inaugural Synod in Birmingham from June 10 to 12, presenting itself as a new ecclesial body rooted in Classic Anglicanism.

The opening Eucharist featured the consecration of the Ven. Andrew Hayler, elected a suffragan bishop in June 2023, when the chaplaincy jurisdiction was still part of the ACNA. Hayler and his wife, Marissa, live in Japan and will soon return to the United States. He will provide episcopal care to the Diocese of St. Martin of Tours until an ordinary is found or elected.

The Synod also reshuffled the chaplaincy’s leadership. The Rt. Rev. Mark Nordstrom was elected and elevated as the second bishop of the Jurisdiction of the Armed Forces and Chaplaincy, succeeding Jones, who founded it in early 2007. The Rt. Rev. Marshall MacClellan was installed as coadjutor. Until then, Jones had served both as the jurisdiction’s bishop and as administrative bishop overseeing the formation of the ARCC. (Readers should not confuse it with the ACNA’s reconstituted Special Jurisdiction, now led by Bishop Jay Cayangyang. The rival claims to the name lie at the center of the South Carolina lawsuit.)

Ten days before the Synod, the ARCC received four churches to form a new Missionary Diocese of St. Simon of Cyrene. Samantha Vance, chairman of the ARCC Executive Committee, said requests had been arriving at about three a month since January but had been held until the church’s Constitution and Canons reached provisional form. The ARCC says at least two more congregations asked to join after watching the opening Eucharist online.

The Rev. Canon Rob Jackson, a U.S. Army chaplain and Canon to the Ordinary for the jurisdiction, called it the best gathering in his nearly nine years with Anglican Chaplains, with delegates “downright ecstatic” about approving the provisional canons.

Visiting dignitaries were given voice and, in some cases, full participation. One archbishop of a small continuing communion, in dialogue with the ARCC since February, entered a formal concordat, with an announcement promised. The ARCC House of Bishops also thanked several Anglican provinces that it says quietly conveyed prayers and support. It named none. “We have been purposeful not to discuss publicly any current dialogues in progress,” said Archdeacon Kenneth Gillespie, Dean of the ARCC. The church added that it would not respond to what it called misleading and false statements in tabloid news and on social media.

It is not the first time the ARCC has hinted at unnamed friends. Last December its website announced entry into the Union of Scranton, an Old Catholic grouping. After press inquiries, the page was placed behind a password, and ARCC leaders described it as a draft.

The Synod’s capstone was the election of Jones as the ARCC’s first Archbishop. Hands have already been laid on him; a formal installation has yet to be scheduled.

Two Verdicts, One Man

So, Derek Jones now carries two verdicts. In Plano, he is a deposed bishop, found to have used the livelihoods of the men he was consecrated to shepherd as leverage for money, loyalty, and submission. In Birmingham, he is an archbishop awaiting installation, cheered by a synod that regards the ACNA’s court as, in his words, make-believe. Both cannot be true.

In its judgment the court quoted one chaplain who put the matter plainly: “Surely a pastoral response to a wolf involves the protection of sheep.”

The ACNA has now put the wolf outside the fold. Whether it has learned how he got in, and why the shepherds who saw him said nothing, is the question its bishops have raised but not yet answered. Until they do, repentance remains a press release.

David W. Virtue, DD, is founder and managing editor of VirtueOnline. His writings can be found at www.virtueonline.org, where you can subscribe to receive his free biweekly VIEWPOINTS. His Substack on the Middle East is at davidvirtue2.substack.com

END