Space to Speak, But Not to Stand

The new Archbishop of Wales offers dissenters "space." Bishop Bill Love, late of Albany, knows exactly how much that space is worth.

COMMENTARY

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

Give Cherry Vann her due. The Archbishop of Wales, the first openly partnered lesbian to lead an Anglican province, is not a shouter. She does not call her critics bigots, and in her interview with BBC Wales she said the right-sounding things. She respects those in the Church in Wales who "struggle." She takes the departures from her church "very seriously." She does not want anyone "shut down or silenced." Many progressive bishops on both sides of the Atlantic have been less gracious.

But read her words slowly, because the whole Anglican crisis of the last twenty years is folded inside them.

Here is the sentence that matters. Vann told the BBC that it is important for there to be "space" for people to say what they say. She then added that their criticism nevertheless hurts, because it "feels like an attack on who I am and who God has made me to be."

Notice what has happened. A disagreement about doctrine, about what Scripture teaches and what the Church has always taught about marriage, has been turned into an injury to a person. The critic is no longer making an argument; he is wounding someone. Once that move is made, the argument never needs to be answered. It only needs to be endured, regretted, and eventually managed.

And notice what kind of space is being offered. It is space to say. It is not space to stand.

We Have Seen This Film Before

Americans have watched this script play out to the end, and its name is William Love.

In 2015 the Episcopal Church authorized same-sex marriage rites, and traditionalists were assured there would be room for them. Bishops who could not in conscience permit the rites in their dioceses would not be forced to. That was the "space." It was the language of mutual respect, of honoring differing convictions, of finding commonality in Christ despite our differences. Those are very nearly Archbishop Vann's own words.

The space lasted three years. In 2018 the General Convention passed Resolution B012, which stripped bishops of that discretion and required that the rites be available in every diocese. Most of the remaining orthodox bishops found a way to accommodate it. Bishop Love of Albany did not. In November 2018 he issued a pastoral directive barring the rites in his diocese. He said what he believed, and then he acted on it.

That was the end of the space. He was referred to a Title IV Hearing Panel in September 2019, tried over Zoom in June 2020, and in October 2020 found to have violated his ordination vows. Rather than accept a discipline he could not in conscience accept, he resigned effective February 1, 2021, the fourteenth anniversary of his consecration. He crossed into the Anglican Church in North America, served briefly in the Anglican Diocese of the Living Word, and today serves in the Anglican Diocese of the Northeast. He is still a bishop, still orthodox, and no longer Episcopalian. The Diocese of Albany, the last holdout, soon fell in line.

Presiding Bishop Michael Curry said he regretted the pain the matter had caused across the theological spectrum. He regretted it while his church prosecuted the man.

That is what "space for disagreement" means in practice, in every Western province that has gone down this road. You may speak. You may grieve. You may struggle. You may not govern by your convictions, ordain by them, or teach them as the mind of the Church. The moment the dissenter stops talking and starts acting, the space closes, and the language of hurt becomes the language of canons.

Who Is Actually Leaving Wales

Archbishop Vann says that some, sadly, have felt the need to leave. The word sadly carries a quiet accusation. It frames the departures as the regrettable choices of people who could not cope, rather than the predictable result of a decision the Church in Wales made.

But orthodox Welsh Anglicans did not move. The Church in Wales moved. It authorized blessings for same-sex couples in 2021. In 2025 it elected as its primate a bishop in a civil partnership, who has said that she and her partner consider themselves to have married long ago. The people in the pews are holding the faith their grandparents were taught in those same chapels. They are not leaving the Church in Wales. The Church in Wales left them, and now regrets that they noticed.

The rest of the Communion noticed too. The Church of Nigeria broke ties. Archbishop Laurent Mbanda, speaking for GAFCON, said the Welsh church had bowed to worldly pressure that subverts God's good word. The majority of the world's Anglicans do not see a historic moment of welcome. They see one more province walking away from Lambeth 1.10 and Romans 1, and they are not prepared to call it unity.

A Church That Cannot Keep Its Own House

There is one more detail the sympathetic coverage passes over quickly. Vann did not inherit a healthy church. She succeeded Andrew John, who resigned in June 2025 after a safeguarding review at Bangor Cathedral exposed a culture of misconduct and blurred boundaries. In a later BBC Radio Wales interview Vann herself conceded that the collapse in attendance amounted to a potentially existential crisis.

So here is a province with collapsing congregations and a cathedral scandal still fresh. It has chosen this moment to tell the Global South that the faith of Africa and Asia is a matter of hurt feelings, and that the faithful who leave are struggling rather than standing.

The Question Vann Never Answers

The real question is not whether criticism hurts. Of course it does. Everyone who has ever been told he is wrong about something that matters has felt it. The prophets felt it. The apostles felt it. Bishop Love felt it when his own church convicted him of breaking his vows for keeping them.

The question is whether the Church's teaching is true. On that, Archbishop Vann offers only what she told Attitude magazine: "the church changes its position." That is not an argument from Scripture. It is a description of a process, and the process always runs in one direction.

A church that cannot say thus says the Lord will eventually say only this is how I feel. And a church that says only that will keep offering space to its dissenters until there are none left to offer it to.

Bill Love was given space. He was given it right up until the moment he used it.

David W. Virtue, DD, is the founder, editor, and publisher of VirtueOnline. His stories can be read here: www.virtueonline.org  His Substack on the Middle East can be read here: davidvirtue2.substack.com