He Said, He Said: Two Bishops Clash Over a Chapel, an Altar, and Holy Communion

COMMENTARY

By David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueonline.org  | August 27, 2026

On multiple fronts, the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) finds itself embroiled in one ecclesiastical fight after another, with no apparent end in sight.

Even as it heads toward the September 7 trial of its archbishop, Steve Wood, in Charleston — on charges of sexual harassment, bullying of staff, and plagiarism — another fire has broken out in the usually bucolic Low Country of South Carolina. This one is over the dedication of a school chapel, a shared altar, and the question of who may stand at it. At the center are two bishops: one of them orthodox in faith and morals, the other described by her critics as heretical and apostate, a woman whose theology her detractors say has already booked her passage to a warmer climate.

The optics were dreadful, and within hours the story was everywhere — including here at VirtueOnline, this reporter not being known for restraint at such moments.

Like a game of Whac-A-Mole, it popped up where no one was looking. The Anglican Bishop of South Carolina, Charles F. “Chip” Edgar III, was photographed standing shoulder to shoulder with the Episcopal Bishop of South Carolina, Ruth Woodliff-Stanley — the two of them smiling in the narthex like a pair of Cheshire cats caught making nice.

The occasion was the August 18 dedication of the new St. Timothy’s Chapel, a 600-seat church on the campus of Porter-Gaud School in Charleston. The photographs — the two bishops processing together, draping a hanging over the altar, laughing, embracing — raced across social media. An ecclesiastical storm erupted, with charges flying that could yet end in a defrocking.

Into the breach stepped Bishop Julian Dobbs, Dean of the Province and, since Wood’s inhibition last November, the acting Archbishop of the ACNA. It is Dobbs and his fellow bishops who will weigh what, if anything, is to be done.

Edgar Explains Himself

Reacting to the exposure, Edgar — genuinely orthodox and no man’s pushover — first got testy, lambasting the media for what he took to be overblown publicity. Then he sat down and wrote.

“I write to apologize for the hurt feelings and re-opened wounds that the photographs of my participation in the dedication of the new St. Timothy’s Chapel at Porter-Gaud School may have caused,” he began. He had heard from many — in his diocese, in the Province, and in the wider communion — that the images had caused pain and confusion. “I regret that very much.”

Edgar then laid out the history. Porter-Gaud is an Episcopal school; when his diocese left TEC, the board resolved that, to serve both ACNA and TEC families, both bishops would sit on it. “There is, of course, an inherent awkwardness in that arrangement,” he wrote.

“We in the ACNA are in broken communion with TEC. Our disagreements are real and substantial. I know that. I’ve lived that. In no way do I intend to diminish that hard reality.”

As a bishop and a board member, Edgar said, he was asked to take part in the dedication, and he weighed the cost. “I worried that it could cause consternation. I also knew that my refusal to participate would be dispiriting to our diocesan clergy and lay people who serve there, and the many diocesan families who send their children there.” The gospel, he argued, is bearing fruit at Porter-Gaud, and the diocese ought to press into that work, not retreat from it.

The liturgy, he insisted, had been planned so that neither bishop would preach or celebrate the Eucharist; one of his own priests, the chaplain, preached and proclaimed the gospel. But — and here is the rub that no amount of planning could smooth — “such services inevitably involve difficult choices and produce awkward moments.” Both bishops dedicated each piece of the new furnishings rather than dividing them up. Who would get the pulpit? The Table? Had he consulted his more seasoned brother bishops beforehand, he conceded, “some of this confusion could have been avoided; that’s on me.”

Then he addressed the two photographs that have done the most damage.

The first showed both bishops at the Table. Before the service, Edgar explained, they had been asked to help vest the newly consecrated altar. “Some who saw these photos online understood them to show that we celebrated at the Table together. We did not.”

The second — and the one that drew the loudest outcry — showed Edgar’s crozier in his hand and the Episcopal bishop’s hand resting on it. “I wish I could go back and change that,” he wrote. Neither bishop was to carry a crozier, the chapel being independent of both dioceses; at the last minute Edgar was asked to use his only to trace the sign of the cross on the threshold, after which he put it away.

“Clearly, both of our hands should not have been on it, even if only momentarily. In hindsight, I wish I had insisted on using the processional cross.” He understood, he said, how the image “suggests more than it was, and has become for some a source of anger and pain.”

“Brothers and sisters, where my actions have offended, forgive me,” he closed. “At the same time, please pray for the good work that many in our diocese are engaged in at Porter-Gaud School.”

The Communion Question

Here is where the accounts part company — and where the fight will finally be settled. Edgar’s careful line is that neither bishop celebrated the Eucharist, and that is true as far as it goes. But independent accounts of the service, including this one’s earlier reporting, describe Holy Communion distributed at two stations, with both bishops taking part in administering the Sacrament. Neither presided; both, it appears, distributed.

That distinction is the whole quarrel in miniature. To Edgar’s defenders it is exculpatory: no concelebration, no joint consecration, nothing that formally breaches the broken communion between the two churches. To his critics it is beside the point. Sharing in the distribution of the Body and Blood alongside a bishop one holds to be apostate is, they say, precisely the scandal — celebrant or no. A remnant that bled for a decade and forfeited its buildings to walk away from that altar does not much care who held the paten.

Edgar has asked the College of Bishops to spend a season of prayer and reflection and to give guidance on how ACNA bishops should conduct themselves in these shared settings. “As a bishop in the church, I will follow the College’s conclusion,” he said. That conclusion will come sooner rather than later.

Dobbs Draws the Line

It did not take long. Within hours of the diocese releasing Edgar’s letter, Dobbs issued his own — and it carried the unmistakable chill of a man who has already made up his mind.

“A situation has arisen in our Province that has given great offense to many who worship in our churches,” Dobbs wrote. “I want to address this and be plain about the position of the Anglican Church in North America.” Many in the Province, he said, had been shocked by “what appears to be renewed communion with The Episcopal Church.”

Then the history, delivered in the cadence of a man reading out a verdict. “It is now nearly two decades since many of us separated from The Episcopal Church, whose leadership abandoned the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints. Departing from those with whom we worshiped and served was costly to our parishes and to our souls. It remains painful for many of us. It was, however, the right thing to do.”

Dobbs invoked the Global Anglican Council, which last March called Anglican leaders to a “principled disengagement” from those who remain in communion with churches that have abandoned biblical teaching. That same principle, he said, governs the ACNA’s dealings closer to home. “Those who hold ecclesiastical authority in our Province bear a solemn responsibility to uphold this position.”

“Disengagement does not mean indifference,” he added. The ACNA prays for those who have departed the faith and pleads with the Lord to restore them. “Until it comes, however, we cannot be in communion with those who have distorted God’s Word.”

And then the sentence Edgar surely read twice: “Next month, as part of the scheduled College of Bishops meeting, I will lay the seriousness of this situation before the bishops and ask them to consider with me what faithfulness to our Lord and the faith we have received requires of those who have been entrusted with ecclesiastical authority.”

Cui Bono?

There is a veiled threat in that language, and no one in the ACNA will have missed it. Edgar is on the hot seat. The man putting him there is the acting head of a province already convulsed by the inhibition and looming trial of its archbishop, and by a run of lawsuits among its own bishops — hardly a house at peace with itself, and hardly the setting for a caretaker to be sitting in judgment on a diocesan.

It should be said that Edgar did not act from weakness. When he stood beside Woodliff-Stanley he did so not as the grateful leader of a remnant but as the shepherd of a diocese nearly three times the size of hers — a man with standing, not a supplicant. That makes the miscalculation more puzzling, and the response to it more revealing.

Read one way, this is a straightforward matter of a line that must hold: the ACNA is not in communion with TEC, and a bishop who blurs that line invites correction. Read another way, it is something older and more human.

Whatever else it accomplishes, this episode retires any notion that Edgar — able, orthodox, and widely respected — might one day succeed Wood. That would leave the top slot open to the man now holding it.

We shall see.

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.