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The authority of Christ does not depend upon human recognition. He is not made Lord by our confession, nor does He cease to be Lord when men reject Him. – Rev. Dr. Ronald Moore

The incentive to peacemaking is love, but it degenerates into appeasement whenever justice is ignored. To forgive and to ask for forgiveness are both costly exercises. All authentic Christian peacemaking exhibits the love and justice—and so the pain—of the cross. – John Stott

The terrible, tragic fallacy of the last hundred years has been to think that all man’s troubles are due to his environment, and that to change the man you have nothing to do but change his environment. That is a tragic fallacy. It overlooks the fact that it was in Paradise that man fell. – Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

AMERICA PICKS UP ITS BIBLE AGAIN

A blessed Thanksgiving to you all. Among the things for which we can give thanks this year is this: Americans are picking up their Bibles again.

According to Barna Group’s State of the Church 2025 study, conducted with Gloo, 42% of U.S. adults now say they read the Bible weekly, up 12 points from a 15-year low of 30% in 2024. Among self-identified Christians the figure is 50%, the highest in more than a decade.

The surprise is who is doing the reading. Millennials jumped 16 points to 50%, and Gen Z rose from 30% to 49% in a single year. Young men now read Scripture more than young women, reversing a long pattern. Meanwhile the Boomers, once the most faithful readers in the land, now rank lowest of all generations at 31%.

Barna itself is careful not to call this a revival. Its researchers describe it as a “reset,” a return to the levels of Bible reading America knew about 15 years ago. That is a sober and honest word. Curiosity is not conviction, and an app on a phone is not a congregation.

The bigger question is where all this is going. Will churches fill up now? Will the pulpits be ready for them if they do? A generation that comes looking for the Word will not stay long in churches that have stopped preaching it. We await the future with great anticipation.

NEW ACNA BISHOPS UNDER A NEW CUSTOMARY

Earlier this month, two ACNA dioceses elected new bishops: Paul Donison, general secretary of GAFCON and rector of Christ Church, Plano, as bishop of the Diocese of the Western Gulf Coast (November 6), and Kris McDaniel as suffragan bishop of the Diocese of Churches for the Sake of Others (November 7). These elections, along with the election in October of Christopher Klukas as bishop coadjutor of the Diocese of the Great Lakes, are the first to take place under the new customary for episcopal elections approved by the College of Bishops in June.

We are glad the ACNA now has this customary. Established guidelines for vetting candidates are an important step in ensuring that bishops are well qualified to lead, and that any past problems come to light before a man is consecrated, not after. The customary sets minimum standards for every diocese in the province and aims, in the words of the ACNA’s press release, to inspire “greater confidence in the ACNA’s systems of accountability and oversight.”

WHY CHURCHES RESIST SAFEGUARDING

Churches must have robust safeguarding procedures: systems for vetting those who serve, especially those who lead and those who work with the vulnerable. Yet churches often resist them. One woman who asked her parish about background checks and training for nursery workers was told they did not need background checks on “grandmas who want to hold babies.” That sentiment is far too common.

Church leaders resist safeguarding because they would rather not believe that anything bad could happen in their own congregation. The thought of a parishioner abused or bullied by a volunteer or staff member is sickening. But Christians, of all people, should know that we live in a fallen world where, because of sin, people harm one another, often in small, forgivable ways, but far more often than we care to admit in damaging and abusive ones.

ACNA: NO VERDICT, NO RETREAT

The ACNA still faces significant hurdles. There is still no verdict in Archbishop Steve Wood’s trial, and the court has until December 31 to deliver one. Lawsuits involving Bishop Julian Dobbs and Bishop Derek Jones, formerly of the JAFC and now of the newly formed Anglican Reformed Catholic Church, remain outstanding. Nobody is pulling back.

A CHAPLAIN’S COMPLAINT

New allegations of bullying and abuse of power by Jones have now surfaced from the Rev. Lance M. Lormand, a priest of the AMiA and an Active Duty Air Force chaplain. Lormand alleges that he became a victim of Jones’s abuse and that he sent complaints to both Bishop Julian Dobbs and REC Bishop Ray Sutton, who, he says, did nothing. You can read his account here: https://lancelormand.substack.com/p/the-affidavit-part-iv

He wrote: “In December 2023 Derek Jones, a man neither my bishop or endorser, wrote a backdated, uncanonical Letter of Godly Admonition against [me] in which he charged me with things not even possible and threatened to defame me and end my career. I appealed to every single senior leader of the ACNA to include Julian Dobbs, Ray Sutton, and Foley Beach, and they all failed to do anything about it.

“Later, as more chaplains piled up, I appealed through safeguarding to Steve Wood, who had by that time in 2025 had already upheld another of Derek’s abusive inhibitions and made his chancellor the replacement prosecutor in the trial of Bishop Ruch. In my opinion, he similarly failed to immediately and adequately respond to these well-found[ed] cases of abuse. They said they wanted to restore my credentials but they have done nothing tangibly to do so either with me or any other complainant.”

1,200 EPISCOPAL CHURCHES TO CLOSE?

In the numbers game over the Episcopal Church’s future, Anglican Watch, an unofficial watchdog in the Episcopal Church, has run its own figures. It estimates that “roughly 1,200 Episcopal congregations will close, merge, or otherwise cease operating as independent congregations during the next 10 years.” “We regard 700 to 1,800 as a reasonable range,” it said. You can read the full story here: https://www.anglicanwatch.com/anglican-watch-analysis-concludes-roughly-1200-episcopal-parishes-will-close-in-the-next-decade/

BISHOPS’ SALARIES AND PENSIONS

What organization would keep paying its executives top dollar while the business slowly collapses? Imagine Tim Cook pocketing millions as iPhones sit unsold and Samsung eats Apple’s lunch. His board would show him the door.

Yet that is exactly how the Episcopal Church pays its bishops. Salaries in the top-tier dioceses now exceed $291,000, and retirement pensions can top $100,000. Hardly anyone in the church questions it.

Almost no Episcopal bishop can point to a diocese that has grown on his or her watch. Pews empty, parishes close, and dioceses merge just to stay alive. Still the mitered ones are paid handsomely as it all crumbles. In any ordinary business they would have been fired long ago, and some would be lucky to land a job as a Walmart greeter.

So they hang on to their mitres in the name of “diversity,” “inclusion” and “justice.” They will not admit the truth: they have no gospel to proclaim. Pansexual inclusion, reparations and endless talk of racism have not filled a single pew. The parishes die while the salaries rise.

If the Episcopal Church were a stock, it would be a penny stock, and nobody would buy it.

You can read my full take here: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/emptier-pews-fatter-mitres

A FUNERAL PROCESSION WITH BETTER BOOKKEEPING

The Episcopal Church’s Joint Budget Committee has released a long, cheerful letter introducing the draft 2028–2030 budget. It spends some 1,800 words on accounting software and charts of accounts, and it contains no numbers at all. Buried inside, a member of Executive Council speaks of “the funeral procession that this church has been on for too long,” and that is the truest sentence in the document. A better spreadsheet will not stop a hearse.

You can read my full take here: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/a-funeral-procession-with-better-bookkeeping

CHURCH OF ENGLAND FACING “FINANCIAL DISASTER” UNLESS IT MAKES “DRASTIC” CHANGES

Two senior churchmen have now said out loud what the pews have been saying for years. In Wasted Money in a Diminishing Church, Canon Robin Gill and Professor John Craven, who sat on the Archbishops’ Council for nearly a decade, warn that the Church of England is heading for “financial disaster.” Thirty-seven of its 42 dioceses are running deficits, up from 19 only a few years ago. Attendance has fallen 25% since 2015, a third of those still attending are over 70, and giving is down 30% in a decade. Their remedy is blunt: cut the number of dioceses at least in half, make deep cuts to diocesan staff, and stop pouring money into schemes that churchgoers call “unrealistic, extravagant, unsustainable and deeply depressing.” Those schemes include the £100m Project Spire reparations fund and a £190m net-zero programme whose 2030 target the Church has already admitted it will miss, while worshippers sit shivering in buildings where new gas boilers are discouraged.

The numbers tell the real story. Since 2005 diocesan staff have grown about 80%, from 1,300 to 2,300, with net-zero officers, safeguarding specialists and racial justice leads added even as parish clergy numbers keep falling. There are now four times as many bishops as in Victorian England and nearly twice as many dioceses as in 1800, all presiding over a smaller and older flock.

This is what happens when a church swaps the gospel for the agenda of the day. It raises up administrators instead of shepherds, spends on penance for the past instead of mission in the present, and then wonders why the faithful have stopped giving. Ordinary Anglicans have worked out what Lambeth will not admit: you cannot fund a revival by multiplying committees, and people will not pay for a church that has stopped telling them why it exists. The money is following the people out the door, and the people left when the Word did. You can read the full story here: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/church-of-england-facing-financial-disaster-unless-they-make-drastic-changes

TWO MOVEMENTS, ONE COLLISION COURSE

There are two movements that will challenge orthodox Christians and Jews in America as the nation marches to the beat of a new political drummer in 2027.

The first is the rise of political Islam. The second is the forward march of LGBTQ ideology: gay rights, full transgender acceptance, what some are now calling the “rainbow wave.” Both movements rode this month’s midterm results into new positions of influence. Add abortion to the mix and Christians will once again feel the heat of the culture wars they fought so hard and, it seems, so often lost.

The scale of what happened on November 3 is not in dispute. By the Associated Press count as of November 12, Democrats had won 255 House seats to the Republicans’ 169, with some races still being counted, and held 55 Senate seats to 44. Republicans began the year with a 53–47 Senate edge that no one thought was at risk. Democrats took Republican seats in North Carolina, South Carolina, Ohio, Texas, Kansas, Iowa and Maine. In Texas, James Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian who argues from the Bible for positions orthodox Christians have rejected for two millennia, defeated Ken Paxton to become the first Democrat elected to the Senate from that state since Lloyd Bentsen in 1988.

Evangelicals, who remain President Trump’s political base, will now either fall in line or fight even harder. The jury is out.

Liberal Protestant denominations like The Episcopal Church have long since made their peace with the LGBTQ agenda. When it comes to Islam, the Episcopal Church has for four decades approached it almost entirely through dialogue, hospitality and solidarity. Since 1979, General Convention has passed resolutions endorsing substantive dialogue between Episcopalians and Muslims on theological and humanitarian matters. In 2024 the 81st General Convention went further and adopted “Christian-Muslim Relations: Theological and Practical Guidance for the Episcopal Church.”

 The guidance coaches Episcopalians to observe the Islamic calendar when planning events and to avoid assuming that Muslim women who wear a head covering are in some way oppressed.

You can read the full story here: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/two-movements-that-will-challenge-orthodox-christians-and-jews-after-the-democratic-wins

DID LIBERAL PROTESTANTISM CREATE CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM?

Christian nationalism is usually blamed on Trump and MAGA, but movements arise in a vacancy, and the mainline churches left that vacancy when they traded the gospel for progressive causes while teaching America that the church’s real business was winning arguments in Washington. Evangelicals took over the mainline’s public role without its theology of church and state, and too many filled the gap with the same mistake from the other end. The remedy for both is the same: preach Christ crucified, make disciples, and never confuse the kingdom of God with any party, nation or man.

You can read my full take here: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/did-liberal-protestantism-create-christian-nationalism

GOOD GROUND, STONY PLACES

The ACNA’s first annual impact report is 24 glossy pages of planting stories, strategic pillars and 2 Corinthians 9, and it gives the province’s worst year one paragraph. It says nothing of slowing attendance growth, a falling parish count, an archbishop awaiting a verdict, a bishop suing the province in federal court, or cash reserves “depleted” by unnamed causes.

Defenders will say an impact report is a thank-you to donors, not a disciplinary file, and that lawyers counsel silence while a case is before the court. Fair enough. But a province that can find 24 pages for its harvest ought to find more than a paragraph for its drought. The growth is real, but the question is depth, and the sun is coming up in a Charleston courtroom.

You can read my full report here: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/good-ground-stony-places

SELLING 815

At the October 19 meeting that approved the sale of 815, House of Deputies President Julia Ayala Harris read from 2 Samuel 7. There David, comfortable in his house of cedar, is troubled that the Ark of God still dwells in a tent. It was a better text than she knew. When David offers to build God a house, God refuses: “Also the LORD telleth thee that he will make thee an house.” The promise points to a Son of David whose throne will stand forever. The lesson is not that God’s people must learn to let go of buildings. It is that God builds what man cannot, and he builds it in a Person.

Consider the record. In 2025 Presiding Bishop Rowe laid off the two staff members who had built the church’s network of church planters. A year later he sells the house to fund church planting. General Convention ordered 815 sold in 2012, and the church’s own CFO now says the delay cost $85 million. A quarter of the proceeds will go to new offices for the bureaucracy before a single congregation is planted. In 1963, when 815 opened with room for 500 staff, the Episcopal Church counted some 3.4 million members. Today, by Ayala Harris’s own reckoning, Executive Council is larger than the average parish it governs.

You can read more here: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/selling-the-house-losing-the-soul

TWELVE CHURCHES AND A COMMUNION REDRAWN

The Diocese of the Southern Cross, Australia’s orthodox Anglican refuge, is quietly growing. Two deacons were ordained in Brisbane, a Sudanese pastor was priested in Perth, and the Anglican Church of the Torres Strait is about to become its twelfth Member Church. Twelve churches will not shake Lambeth Palace. But Southern Cross is a local sign of a global realignment that, in the year since Sarah Mullally was named Archbishop of Canterbury, has moved from protest to permanent structure. GAFCON declared itself the authentic Anglican Communion, formed a Global Anglican Council in Abuja under Rwanda’s Archbishop Laurent Mbanda, and named Abuja its headquarters.

The picture is not simple. The GSFA shares GAFCON’s grief but is building its own covenanted house next door, and the Abuja Affirmation never mentioned it. Meanwhile Mullally is courting the moderate Africans with visits to Ghana and Cameroon and a handshake with Pope Leo XIV. It is a sophisticated play, but a photo opportunity is not a doctrine of marriage. Canterbury still has the cathedral, but the Anglican future is being built somewhere else.

ANiE PLANTS A NEW CHURCH IN EUROPE EVERY MONTH

The Anglican Network in Europe started in 2020 with 30 congregations and now has more than 120, with six bishops, over 160 clergy and more than 6,000 attendees across 12 countries. Bishop Josep Rosselló says honestly that some of that growth is existing congregations joining, not new plants, but church planting is now the main work, and six new churches opened in a single month this summer. Backed by GAFCON and outside the Church of England, ANiE is growing as Canterbury shrinks. Orthodox Anglicanism is not dying in Europe. It is being planted again, one congregation at a time.

Reformation Anglicanism: A Vision for Today’s Global Communion

Canon Chuck Collins says Anglicans can’t sidestep the 16th-century Reformation. In his words, “It’s the room, not just the elephant in the room.” He describes three camps: those who treat the Reformation as a mistake and drift toward Rome, those who see it as one long buffet of options and end up with the three-legged stool and three streams, and Reformation Anglicans, who hold to the Settlement and the formularies (the 1662 Prayer Book, the Thirty-nine Articles and the Homilies) under the supreme authority of Scripture. His conclusion is that this last road is the Communion’s only way forward, and that every other is “place markers for individual pet peeves.” You can read his full take here: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/reformation-anglicanism-a-vision-for-today-s-global-communion

END OF YEAR APPEAL

As the year closes, VOL has seen its numbers grow daily. In the last two months we have gained more than 4,000 new readers. Readership was up 146 percent in September, and unique visitors were up 191 percent. We are now read in 186 countries, and page views are well over one million. I also now write on Middle East affairs on my Substack, where you can read my commentary on Israel: davidvirtue2.substack.com

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David W. Virtue, DD President and Managing Editor