South Carolina Calls for Greater Transparency in ACNA

Bishop Charles (Chip) Edgar | Anglican Diocese of South Carolina

By Arlie Coles I THE LIVING CHURCH I May 19, 2026

As the Anglican Church in North America’s yearly governance meeting approaches, the Anglican Diocese of South Carolina has proposed resolutions seeking “justice and transparency” in the denomination, the diocese’s standing committee announced on May 15.

The ACNA’s Provincial Council is slated to meet in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on June 17-19 to conduct annual business and consider comprehensive reform to the church’s Title IV disciplinary canons.

The Council’s gathering will be its first since the ecclesiastical acquittal of the Rt. Rev. Stewart Ruch, who had been accused of neglect in handling abusive ministers in his Diocese of the Upper Midwest. Bishop Ruch’s closed and virtual trial fell into difficulties when two provincial prosecutors—one from South Carolina—accused a presiding court member of judicial misconduct and resigned mid-proceedings.

South Carolina’s proposed resolutions, whose texts are not yet published, promote the public release of the transcript of the Ruch trial, and of the eventual findings of a third-party review of the trial’s procedural handling. The review was commissioned by the church in March.

“We are seeking to build a coalition of other ACNA dioceses who share our concerns about the work of the Court for the Trial of a Bishop and the importance of transparency,” the standing committee wrote of the resolutions in a letter to diocesan clergy.

The unicameral Provincial Council is largely composed of diocesan delegations, each including the bishop ordinary, one cleric, and two lay persons. Matters are decided by a majority vote of its 119 members, according to the Council’s rules. ACNA spokeswoman Marion Ahlers confirmed to The Living Church that the church’s Executive Committee, which sets the Council’s agenda, had received South Carolina’s resolutions and would consider them during its May 19 meeting.

The ACNA’s canons provide two paths for groups other than its Executive Committee to send an item for the Council’s consideration before it meets. Any ten delegates may add a matter to the agenda, or a diocese may “refer” a matter to the Council, but exercising either path is uncommon.

South Carolina’s effort to discuss the release of the Ruch trial transcripts and third-party review findings through the Council marks its second attempt to have the documents published. If the resolutions claim to effect the release of the documents by their enactment, it also could represent a first test of provincial legal interpretation regarding the power of the Council as the church’s constitutionally designated “governing body.”

In February, the diocese’s standing committee had asked the ACNA’s Executive Committee to commit to the documents’ release when negotiating the scope of the review, but the Executive Committee replied that it was improper for a single diocese to make the request, and that no entity could order the court to release any documents.

Under provincial interpretation, “the canons do not grant the Provincial Council the authority to oversee the Court or its judicial proceedings,” but the Council does have “canonical authority to ‘deliberate upon matters affecting the interests of the Church’ and may consider resolutions accordingly,” Ahlers told TLC.

Controversies of constitutional or canonical interpretation have previously been decided by the ACNA’s Provincial Tribunal, a court created for that purpose and without analog in the Episcopal Church. Several individuals sitting on the seven-member court have a connection to the Ruch procedures at the crux of any potential dispute.

Of the Tribunal’s judges, the Rt. Rev. Chip Edgar (South Carolina) signed his standing committee’s announcement in support of releasing the trial transcript and review findings; the Rt. Rev. Alex Cameron (Pittsburgh) served as chair of Bishop Ruch’s standing committee during Ruch’s leave of absence pending trial; and the Rt. Rev. Phil Ashey (Western Anglicans) delivered remarks defending the court’s procedural actions in a May 2 lecture on ecclesiastical justice. The Rt. Rev. Alan Hawkins (Christ Our Hope), who sits as an alternate, also led oversight of the provincial investigation into Ruch now being reviewed.

The South Carolina standing committee also criticized Bishop Ashey for other comments he made during the lecture that “prognosticat[ed] about the outcome” of the pending case against Archbishop Steve Wood and “promoted falsehood” about its complainants. Ashey is advising Wood as he awaits trial on canonical charges of personal and sexual misconduct.

In a lengthy retraction sent to the church’s bishops a week later, Ashey apologized for his speculation that Wood would be exonerated and for his “inaccurate” portrayal of the complainants, some of whom now belong to the Diocese of South Carolina, as “aggrieved” terminated employees. Of the complainants formerly employed under Wood at St. Andrew’s Church, Mount Pleasant, none were terminated, and all resigned, though Wood asked most of them to stay, one complainant told TLC.

While the province contends that the Council is without authority to govern the court’s protocols with regard to the Ruch documents, the Council’s main item of business at its June meeting will be a vote on a comprehensive Title IV revision that fully restructures the church’s disciplinary bodies and their procedures.

If passed, the new canons will phase out the current seven-member Court for the Trial of a Bishop and replace it with a tribunal from which smaller panels are drawn, and will introduce norms of public trial procedure=—two features also found in Episcopal Church canons.

In January, the ACNA’s College of Bishops called for a special meeting of the church’s Provincial Assembly, a second body that typically meets only every five years to ratify canonical changes passed by the Council, to be held a week after this year’s Council meeting “to ensure these disciplinary reforms can be implemented immediately.” The bishops also “voted unanimously” with the Executive Committee to prohibit Council members from amending the reforms from the floor, according to a communiqué from the church’s Governance Task Force.

“Meetings of the Provincial Council are not really a good forum for wordsmithing changes on the fly,” ACNA chancellor Bill Nelson said of the prohibition at a February town hall. “And this is particularly true in the case of a highly integrated set of canons … that have been the subject of great study, comment, and revision by the entire province for a full year.”

The Council’s current rules provide no mechanism for forbidding floor amendment, but the prohibition would become codified if Council members also vote to adopt a proposed rule that bans floor amendments to any proposed canonical revision, reaching beyond the current Title IV initiative. “Motions to amend the Constitution & Canons shall be subject to an up or down vote,” the proposed rule reads.

Some have called for further amendments notwithstanding the potential rule. The Rev. Matthew Wilcoxen and the Rev. Elijah Lovejoy, delegates to the Council and Assembly respectively, published two intended amendments to the Title IV revision in a blog post on May 17. The two priests seek to place an alternate proposal, identical to the original but for their further changes concerning pastoral care and guidance for clergy respondents, before the Council as a separate item of business rather than by revising the proposal during floor debate.

“The [Governance Task Force] has proposed for us a much stronger Title IV. While we should have real gratitude for that, the Provincial Council need not simply rubber stamp it as it is,” Wilcoxen and Lovejoy wrote. “They should exercise their canonically given agency to amend it where it clearly needs improving.”

Growing bottom-up efforts to govern the ACNA by acts of its Council come amid other pending measures that may further clamp down on individual delegates’ ability to legislate. An amendment passed by last year’s Council, up for potential ratification by this year’s Assembly, will create a Provincial Constitution and Canons Committee that is appointed by the Archbishop and Executive Committee, is not composed of Council members, and will have exclusive authority to regulate how or if future amendments are presented to the Council for a vote.

The multidirectional momentum surrounding the coming governance meetings demonstrates the church’s persistently competing visions of who should decide how clergy misconduct issues are handled, even as it prepares to try its primate. The Council and Assembly gatherings in June will fall between the second set of pretrial hearings in the matter of Archbishop Wood, scheduled for May 20, and the beginning of his ecclesiastical trial, scheduled for July 20.

Arlie Coles is a lay Anglican from the Diocese of Dallas who writes about modern Episcopal history and polity. She is also a machine-learning researcher serving on General Convention’s Task Force on Artificial Intelligence and Intellectual Property.