IS ACNA ON A SUICIDE MISSION?

Three streams, two integrities, and a bishop elected by one vote

By David W. Virtue, DD www.virtueonline.org October 18, 2026

The issue of women's ordination bedevils the Anglican Church in North America.

The "two integrities" position the province adopted at its birth is not working. Sides have been drawn up and the fight is on. How it ends is anybody's guess. But the fault line runs deeper than a quarrel over who may stand at the altar. It runs to a more basic question: what, exactly, is an Anglican?

The ACNA's Anglican Diocese of the Great Lakes (ADGL) has elected the Very Rev. Chris Klukas, president of its standing committee, as its next diocesan bishop. Amid unusually low clergy turnout — just 53 of 89 clergy voted — Klukas carried the clergy by a single vote and the laity by 20.

The election of Klukas, whose wife is a priest and canon for safeguarding in the diocese, is a significant victory for proponents of women's ordination in the ACNA. During candidate walkabouts, Klukas said he intended "to be an advocate" for female priests as bishop ordinary "in the College of Bishops, in the Councils of the Church, and in our Diocese, to build a culture that's welcoming and safe for them." He also promised to "respect the consciences" of congregations within the diocese opposed to the practice.

His election will likely help solidify support for women's ordination in the College of Bishops, where nearly half of the ACNA's diocesan bishops — representing nearly 60% of the province by average Sunday attendance — already ordain women to the priesthood.

The Blender

Klukas is a proponent of what is commonly called "Three Streams" Anglicanism: the notion that Anglicanism is a confluence of three theological traditions — Evangelical, Catholic, and Pentecostal.

In a YouTube video titled "What is an Anglican?", Klukas put it this way: "Basically if you take a Baptist, a Presbyterian, and a Roman Catholic, and you stick them into a blender and turn it on and mix it all up, that's kind of what we are as Anglicans."

He cited the Theological Statement unanimously agreed by the ACNA's founding bishops in 2009: "To be an Anglican, then, is not to embrace a distinct version of Christianity, but a distinct way of being a 'Mere Christian,' at the same time evangelical, apostolic, catholic, reformed, and Spirit-filled."

Not everyone in the ACNA agrees. Sean Luke, a popular ACNA blogger and podcaster, shot back: "What a wretched description of an Anglican. No. We are Reformed Catholics."

The most persistent critic of the Three Streams idea is Canon Chuck Collins, director of the Center for Reformation Anglicanism. When I interviewed him for VirtueOnline, Collins granted that the notion of three equally weighted traditions merging to form Anglicanism is well-intentioned — but, he said, "it is a lie, and it contributes to the confusion about our Anglican identity."

Collins points out that the Three Streams vocabulary was not even invented until the 1950s and has no support in Anglican history. Worse, it has been used to divert attention from the true source of Anglican identity: the primacy of Holy Scripture, preserved in the historic formularies — the Thirty-nine Articles, the two Books of Homilies, and the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. He describes what he hears from too many Anglican pulpits, seminaries and leaders as a pick-and-choose buffet of novelties with little tie to those formularies. And he describes a province divided against itself: pledged on paper, in its Constitution and Canons and in the Jerusalem Declaration, to the formularies, while increasingly catechized in practice by Three Streams language.

Klukas' blender is the buffet Collins warned about. Pour in the ingredients, press the button, and nobody can say quite what comes out.

That would be a parlor dispute if Klukas were a bystander. He is not. The ACNA's official "about" page states, under a heading titled "Three Streams," that the Anglican ethos holds together three streams of the Christian Church, quoting Dr. Les Fairfield. And from 2009 to 2016 Klukas served on the ACNA's Liturgical Task Force, where, by his own account, he "wrote first drafts of the liturgies for Holy Communion and Baptism, which are now used throughout the province in the 2019 Book of Common Prayer."

Here is where the identity question and the ordination question meet. If Anglicanism is a blend, any ingredient can be added at any time, and the only test is whether the mixture tastes good to the people drinking it. If Anglicanism is defined by Scripture and its formularies, then who may be ordained must be settled by Scripture and the Ordinal — not by a diocesan search committee. Collins does not frame his critique around women's ordination. But the logic of it cuts straight there: a church that cannot say what it is cannot say who may minister at its altar.

A Hard-Won Victory for Women's Ordination

Klukas' election follows a selection process marked by deep tension over the ordination of women to the priesthood.

During candidate walkabouts, his opponent, the Rt. Rev. Allen Kannapell, stated in responses to candidate essay questions that he would not personally ordain women to the priesthood but would allow the practice to continue in the diocese. Kannapell also revealed that he had been barred from nomination for diocesan bishop on at least one prior occasion because of that conviction:

"In fact, a few years ago when I was proposed as a candidate for bishop ordinary, I was not allowed to go forward because of this issue, and so there was a sense in which the conversation from one side had stopped. But now it's possibly starting again. I believe that we have to come to know the mind of the Lord on this."

Kannapell appeared to be referring to ADGL's 2020 episcopal search, during which the standing committee explicitly required that all candidates "recognize the leadership skills of women, appropriately promote them, and ordain them as deacons and presbyters."

When a group of clergy and lay leaders questioned the requirement, the standing committee wrote a three-page letter to the diocese citing similar requirements in other "dual integrity" dioceses — the Anglican Diocese of Pittsburgh and the Anglican Diocese in New England.

The Diocese of the Mid-Atlantic (DOMA) went a step further in its 2022 episcopal search, requiring candidates to offer "genuine support" for women's ordination to the priesthood.

So much for two integrities. One integrity is now a condition of eligibility for the episcopate; the other is a disqualification.

The Priesthood Is Not Ours to Change

Few people have thought harder about this question, or from closer range, than Alice C. Linsley. For sixteen years she served as an Episcopal priest. She renounced her orders in March 2004, leaving Episcopal ministry on the Sunday Gene Robinson was consecrated. A scholar who has spent more than 35 years on what she calls Biblical Anthropology, and who taught philosophy, ethics and world religions at Midway University in Kentucky, she came out of years of study persuaded that women's ordination is the root cause of the schism within Anglicanism.

If she is right, the ACNA carried the seed of the original quarrel out of the Episcopal Church with it.

Linsley's argument is not sociological but sacramental. The priesthood, she contends, was not invented by the Apostles or by the Church; it predates both, and finds its one true form in the Messianic priesthood of Jesus Christ, who offered his own blood. Every priest stands as a sign pointing to that one Priest, and the Church therefore has no authority to alter the pattern. Attempts to change it, she writes, "corrupt the sign so that it no longer points to Messiah." Scripture and Holy Tradition honor women leaders — Deborah and Huldah among them — but not one woman, she notes, can be identified as a priest.

She has a pointed word, too, for evangelicals who back the practice: they claim the authority of Scripture, she has said, and then allow cultural accommodation to govern how they interpret it. That charge lands squarely on an evangelical-majority province that left the Episcopal Church precisely to resist cultural accommodation.

Her view also explains why the fight over "respecting consciences" keeps ending at the altar rail.

Respecting Consciences?

DOMA's search produced the election of the Rt. Rev. Chris Warner in 2022. During walkabouts Warner promised — as Klukas has — to respect congregations and clergy who disagree, practicing "generous orthodoxy" by providing "space" over the ordination of women.

In 2025, however, a congregation's entire vestry and search committee alleged that Warner had violated the "dual integrities" commitment by requiring that their next rector receive Holy Communion from a woman.

DOMA's standing committee responded by reaffirming its commitment to accommodating differing convictions. But its denial that Warner had sought to impose a female rector did not address the specific allegation: the requirement to receive Holy Communion from a female priest.

For someone who holds Linsley's view, that is not a matter of taste or temperament. It goes to whether a sacrament has been celebrated at all. A promise to "respect consciences" that stops at the altar rail is no promise.

Nor is the opposing side going quietly. Ahead of the 2024 archiepiscopal election, nearly 300 ACNA priests signed The Augustine Appeal, urging that only men be ordained to the priesthood. Kannapell was right: the conversation is starting again. Meanwhile influential voices within the ACNA now portray refusal to recognize women's ordination as incompatible with "basic Christian behavior."

Klukas has promised both to advocate for female priests and to respect the consciences of congregations that oppose their ordination. His election raises the same question at the heart of the DOMA controversy: what protections, in practice, will be afforded to clergy and congregations who disagree with their bishop? Will ADGL's commitment to respecting consciences extend to ensuring that clergy who oppose women's ordination are never required to receive Holy Communion from a female priest?

Two integrities were meant to be a truce. It is becoming terms of surrender, negotiated one standing committee at a time.

Chuck Collins says the ACNA no longer knows what it is. Alice Linsley says it has kept the very innovation that broke the Episcopal Church. The headline asks a question; it does not pronounce a verdict. The verdict is not yet in, and the ACNA still has time to choose. But if Collins and Linsley are right, the question deserves a serious answer from the College of Bishops.

The ACNA left the Episcopal Church to escape a revisionism that began at the altar. It would be a bitter irony if it carried that revisionism out the door in its luggage.

David W. Virtue, DD, is the founder and publisher of Virtueonline and has covered religion and world affairs for more than 35 years. His website can be accessed here: www.virtueonline.org Virtue also writes on the Middle East. His stories can be seen here: davidvirtue2.substack.com