SIN MANAGEMENT OR COVENANT ACCOUNTABILITY?

ACNA's New Title IV Canons Put a Province on Trial

By David W. Virtue, DD

www.virtueonline.org

July 13, 2026

Are church canons little more than sin management?

It is a fair question, and a cynical age has earned the right to ask it. Canon law, in the hands of a church that has forgotten its Lord, degenerates into something worse than bureaucracy. It becomes power management dressed in legal vestments. The Episcopal Church proved the point for two generations, wielding the Dennis Canon to seize property and Title IV to prosecute the orthodox while the doctrinally heterodox sailed through untouched. You can read a province's real theology by watching whom its canons discipline — and whom they conspicuously never touch.

Last month, the Anglican Church in North America gave its own answer to the question. Whether that answer holds is now the most consequential test facing the province.

THE WRECKAGE THAT FORCED REFORM

Let us be honest about how we got here. The ACNA did not revise its disciplinary canons in a season of tranquil theological reflection. It revised them because the old ones collapsed under the weight of actual use.

Last December, the province's trial court acquitted Bishop Stewart Ruch of episcopal neglect after closed proceedings so troubled that two prosecutors resigned mid-trial. The province's own archbishop and primate, Steve Wood, stands accused of personal, financial, and sexual misconduct, inhibited from ministry, his trial now moved up to September 7 in Charleston. Bishop Derek Jones has decamped into schism with three suffragans, trailing indictments and a federal lawsuit behind him. Three bishops, three scandals, one province — and a set of disciplinary canons, inherited at the ACNA's 2009 founding from Episcopal Church texts that predated even that body's 1994 and 1997 reforms, that proved unequal to every one of them.

The old system had no standing investigative body. It required sworn statements from three bishops or ten persons merely to begin an accusation against a bishop — a drawbridge pulled up so high that by the time anyone crossed it, the castle was already burning. It made the archbishop the intake officer for complaints, including, absurdly, complaints that might one day concern an archbishop. And where the canons were silent, the vacuum was filled by the habits of American civil litigation: motions practice, attorney maneuvering, expense, and delay.

The wall was rebuilt because it fell down. Nehemiah would understand. But he would also ask what the builders believed.

WHAT THE PROVINCE ACTUALLY DID

The Provincial Council, meeting at Cornerstone Tulsa June 17-19, approved a comprehensive replacement of Title IV — thirteen canons, the culmination of nearly three years of work by the Governance Task Force under Canon Andrew Rowell, with the Title IV drafting subcommittee chaired by Notre Dame law professor Samuel Bray. Days later, a special virtual Provincial Assembly ratified it. Rowell told the Assembly that the scale of the changes matched the scale of the need.

He is right about the scale. The question is the substance, and here the drafters deserve a careful reading, because what they produced is not what cynics might expect.

The new canons open with Scripture, not procedure. Canon 1 grounds the entire disciplinary enterprise in the ministry of reconciliation of 2 Corinthians 5 and the shepherd's charge of 1 Peter 5. Pastoral resolution is declared the norm for disputes — but with a bright line the old Anglican establishment never drew: allegations of sexual misconduct and abuse within familial relationships are declared not susceptible to reconciliation. No more “handling it pastorally” as a euphemism for burying it. Presentments for sexual misconduct carry no statute of limitations at all, and willful concealment or obstruction lifts the ten-year limit on everything else. The bishop who hides the crime forfeits the protection of the calendar.

More striking still are the footnotes. The Task Force defends its evidentiary standard — clear and convincing evidence, deliberately higher than the civil preponderance standard some commenters wanted — by citing Deuteronomy 19 on the testimony of witnesses, 1 Timothy 5 on accusations against elders, Genesis 38 on corroborating physical evidence, and Canon 21 of the Council of Chalcedon on weighing the credibility of accusers. When was the last time an Anglican province in North America reached past American jurisprudence to Chalcedon? This is a deliberate attempt to recover canon law as theology rather than ecclesiastical human resources policy.

The structural reforms follow the same logic. A standing nine-member Reports Investigation Committee replaces the ad hoc, one-and-done Boards of Inquiry that had to be invented afresh for every crisis. A non-clergy Reports Administrator — the canons forbid clergy from holding the post — becomes the intake officer, freeing the archbishop from a role he should never have held. Trials move from sprawling seven-judge courts to three-judge panels drawn from a standing Disciplinary Tribunal, on a model borrowed in part from the Church of Ireland. And the whole system pivots from an adversarial process, where lawyers duel before a passive court, to an inquisitorial one, where the tribunal itself controls the search for truth. Discipline becomes fact-finding, not litigation. That is not sin management. That is a province attempting, on paper, covenant accountability.

WHERE THE PROSECUTION PRESSES

On paper. Now for the cross-examination, because no honest observer should let this document pass unexamined, and the drafters themselves have left the evidence in their own margins.

First, the concentration of power. The Reports Investigation Committee investigates the report, decides whether a prima facie case exists, formulates the presentment, and then appoints the proctor who prosecutes it. Investigator, grand jury, and prosecutor in a single standing body. The drafters built in a genuine safeguard — every presentment must disclose all exculpatory material and explain any allegation not referred, a discipline American prosecutors honor mostly in the breach — but concentrated power is concentrated power, and standing bodies develop standing interests. The committee that develops “expertise over time” can also develop momentum, and momentum has victims.

Second, the adverse inference. Under the new canons, an accused cleric who declines to give a statement has not thereby failed to cooperate — but his silence may be considered relevant when the tribunal weighs the truth. No American court would tolerate that. The church is not the state, and there are defensible theological reasons why a shepherd accountable to God cannot plead the Fifth before the flock. But let no one pretend this is a small thing. A system that draws inferences from silence had better be very sure of its own righteousness.

Third — and here this correspondent must declare an interest — the confidentiality regime. The new canons impose a duty of confidentiality on all parties from report through ruling, and even a layperson's failure to keep silence may be weighed against credibility in adjudication. The Task Force's own marginal commentary laments disciplinary matters being fought out on the front pages of newspapers.

One understands the impulse; the Ruch trial was not improved by leaks and counter-leaks. But a church that was burned by press coverage has now written canons that lean against parties talking to the press, and this publication has spent thirty-five years documenting what flourishes in ecclesiastical darkness. Confidentiality that protects victims is a mercy. Confidentiality that protects institutions is a shroud. The canons do not yet tell us which one the ACNA has purchased.

Fourth, the accused still stands alone. On the floor at Tulsa, ten delegates moved to mandate an advocate for any accused clergyman, mirroring the advocate already provided for accusers. The amendment failed. The Task Force's own notes concede that defending a presentment that ends in dismissal could still cost an accused hundreds of thousands of dollars, and they express the hope — a hope, not a canon — of assembling a pro bono bar of proctors with the American Anglican Council and the Anglican Legal Society. Rowell has promised the question will be a priority in the next cycle. It should have been a priority in this one. A church serious about restoration defends the accused as vigorously as it hears the accuser, for the simple reason that some of the accused are innocent, and an innocent man ruined by process is a victim of the church as surely as any other.

THE TEST THE CANONS CANNOT ESCAPE

And now the irony that should keep every ACNA bishop awake at night. The new Title IV, by its own transitional provisions, does not apply retroactively. Archbishop Wood will stand trial on September 7 — barely two months after the Assembly's ratifying vote — under the very canons the whole province just agreed were fundamentally deficient — the ad hoc procedures, the civil-litigation habits, the seven-judge sprawl. The reform's credibility hangs on a trial it does not govern.

Dioceses have until December 1 to certify that their own disciplinary processes meet the new standard. The paper deadline will be met. The real deadline is different, and it has no date certain: the first moment the new machinery is asked to discipline a bishop who is a friend of the institution rather than an inconvenience to it.

So — are church canons little more than sin management? The ACNA has wagered its answer in thirteen canons that quote St. Paul and cite Chalcedon. The wager is honorable. But canons do not vindicate themselves. The Episcopal Church's Title IV also reads beautifully, and it became a sword against the faithful. Text is cheap. Enforcement is theology.

The province has built the wall. Whether God or the institution lives inside it, the trials will tell.

The Rev. Canon Andrew Rowell and the Governance Task Force's revision documents, with public comments, are available at anglicanchurch.net.

David W. Virtue, DD, is the founder and editor of VirtueOnline, the leading orthodox Anglican news and commentary service, www.virtueonline.org. More than 21,000 stories are archived at VOL.