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VirtueOnline — The Voice for Global Orthodox Anglicanism | July 17, 2026

We must allow the Word of God to confront us, to disturb our security, to undermine our complacency and to overthrow our patterns of thought and behavior. — John Stott

From Gallup: The average American teenager gives TikTok about 90 minutes a day, and close to five hours once you add the other platforms. Ninety minutes a day comes to 540 hours a year on a single app; five hours a day comes to roughly 1,700 hours annually across all of them. Set that against the same child who sits in church every Sunday and hears, at most, forty minutes of direct teaching — something near thirty-five hours in a year. Forty to one is the generous math; the honest number is far worse.

One grim study estimates that as many as a third of America's churches — some 100,000 congregations — could close in the coming years. At the very least, political scientist Ryan Burge expects tens of thousands of churches to close, many of them rural.

Anglicanism needs to return to its roots: the historic formularies — the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Book of Common Prayer, and the Ordinal. These provide the doctrinal and liturgical foundation of the Anglican tradition and should be the primary standard by which Anglican identity is measured. — Bishop Robert Todd Giffin

When we die in Christ, we too begin chapter one of the Great Story. We can face death with our hope firmly rooted in the resurrection of Jesus and His promise to bring to himself all those who call on his name (John 14:2–3). — Chris Findlay

I am not permitted to let my love be so merciful as to tolerate and endure false doctrine. — Martin Luther

Dear Brothers and Sisters, I www.virtueonline.org | July 17, 2026

LET THE AMERICAN CHURCH DIE

The collapse of Christian America isn't the end of the church, writes James Bell. We are spending millions of dollars a week to heat and cool buildings that are almost empty.

We have named the idolatry of power. We have named the hypocrisy, the political entanglement, and the theological failures that drove a generation of Christians away. But if we truly believe the American church is dying, we have to face the structural reality of what that loss has produced — not just spiritually, but institutionally, financially, demographically.

We have to take an honest look at where we actually are, and how we got here.

The Arithmetic of Decline

Half of all churches in the United States have fewer than sixty people in the room on a Sunday morning. Not the average — the median. Sixty. Half the churches in America are smaller than the average high school classroom. And that number is not leveling off. It is accelerating.

Over the last thirty years, forty million Americans have left the church. In a single recent year, more than 4,000 Protestant churches closed their doors permanently — far more than were planted. Giving to religious organizations, which once accounted for more than half of all charitable giving in America, has collapsed to under a quarter. Seminary enrollment continues to drop year over year, which means the next generation of leaders needed to replace an aging pastorate simply is not there.

The average senior pastor in America is fifty-eight years old. Seventy-one percent of current church leaders have no succession plan. They cannot produce one because, in many cases, there is no one coming. The young men and women who might have entered ministry a generation ago are either not in the church at all, or they have watched enough pastoral failure up close that they want no part of the institution.

We have been tempted to read these numbers as a temporary setback, a season of pruning, or a cultural phase that will eventually reverse itself if we just pray harder, vote better, or find the right consultant. We have hired church growth experts, rebranded our logos, updated our worship styles, and launched capital campaigns. We have read every book, attended every conference, and implemented every strategy.

It is none of those things. It is a death. And until we are willing to let the American church die, we will never see what God wants to resurrect.

An Architecture Built for Christendom

The crisis we are facing today is not the result of a sudden cultural shift in the 2020s. It is the inevitable outcome of a theological compromise that was made in the 1950s, institutionalized in the 1980s, and weaponized in the 2010s.

We built an architecture designed to manage a Christian empire, and we are shocked that it is failing now that the empire is gone.

In the post-World War II era, the American church entered a golden age of cultural alignment. To be a good American was to be a good Christian, and to be a good Christian was to be a good American. The Eisenhower administration added "Under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954 and put "In God We Trust" on the paper currency in 1956. Church attendance soared, not necessarily because of a massive spiritual revival, but because church membership was the primary marker of civic respectability.

In response to this cultural boom, the church began to build. And what it built was an infrastructure designed for a Christendom it assumed would last forever.

Denominations erected massive headquarters in major cities. Congregations bought prime real estate in the rapidly expanding suburbs and built sanctuaries designed to seat thousands. Seminaries expanded their campuses to train the professional clergy needed to staff these operations. The Christian publishing industry, the Christian music industry, and the Christian broadcasting networks exploded into billion-dollar enterprises.

We built an ecosystem that required enormous amounts of capital, massive cultural approval, and a steady stream of consumers to sustain it. And for fifty years, it worked.

But it worked because it was riding the wave of cultural Christianity, not because it was making disciples. The architecture we built was perfectly designed to manage the religious preferences of a Christianized culture. It was entirely unequipped to form resilient, counter-cultural disciples in a post-Christian world.

When the cultural wind shifted — when it was no longer socially advantageous to be a Christian, when the internet exposed the hypocrisy of religious institutions — the architecture began to crack. The buildings were too expensive to maintain. The programs were too exhausting to run. The professional clergy were burning out under the weight of managing organizations that functioned more like mid-sized corporations than spiritual communities.

And the people in the pews, who had been trained to be religious consumers rather than disciples, simply walked away when the product no longer met their needs or when the cultural cost of association became too high.

The Most Expensive Project in American Christianity

We are not experiencing a sudden crisis. We are experiencing the structural failure of an architecture built for a world that no longer exists. And nowhere is that failure more visible than in the buildings we are desperately trying to save. The refusal to let that old architecture die is currently the most expensive project in American Christianity.

Across the country, thousands of congregations of forty or fifty people sit in buildings built for five hundred. They spend every dollar they collect just to keep the lights on, fix the roof, replace the HVAC system, and pay a part-time pastor to maintain the machinery of a bygone era. They are exhausted. The volunteers are burned out. The deacons are aging. The Sunday school rooms are empty. The community around them has completely changed, but the church has not changed with it.

They have little to nothing left for actual mission, neighborhood renewal, or discipleship. The institution exists entirely to sustain itself. Every dollar that comes in goes right back out to maintain the building and the programs that serve the remaining members. There is nothing left for the neighborhood outside the doors.

What This Means for Anglicans

This is the situation we face today, dear friends. The Episcopal Church is in rapid decline, as are all the "seven sisters" denominations that once dominated the American religious landscape. The Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) needs to resolve its internal issues quickly, then develop new models of discipleship that will work in the 21st century. To its detriment, it is not yet doing so. Repeating the old rhythms of "come and hear" rather than "go and tell" offers no future; lay-driven models of discipleship offer real hope. But will ACNA embrace them, or carry on hoping things will simply work out? Time will tell.

CAPITULATION AT YORK: SYNOD EMBRACES KAIROS II

In a shameful capitulation at York, the Church of England's General Synod voted overwhelmingly to encourage members to "engage with" a Palestinian-Christian document accusing Israel of genocide, brushing aside warnings from the Chief Rabbi and other Jewish leaders. The motion, brought by the Diocese of Carlisle under the pious title "Standing in solidarity for a just peace in Israel and Palestine," commends the incendiary Kairos II declaration — a screed that describes the State of Israel as "a colonial enterprise built on racism" and brands its war against Hamas a genocide. Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis called the vote shameful, describing Kairos II as a document full of falsehood that rejects dialogue and challenges Israel's very existence. The bishops backed it 25 to 0, with five abstentions — not one could summon the courage to vote no.

A fig leaf was applied — "receive" became "hear" — but attempts to strip out Kairos II failed, and the motion presses Church investors to review policies in light of the ICJ's opinion on the occupation: divestment by another name. An amendment formally declaring "genocide" and blaming October 7 on Israeli oppression died only for lack of time. Here is a church that cannot fill its own pews yet finds time to prosecute the Jewish state — exchanging the Gospel of reconciliation for the gospel of accusation, and history will note which one it chose to preach. You can read more here: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/britain-s-pm-in-waiting-and-the-church-of-england-throw-israel-under-the-bus

But there was revolt within the Church of England against the motion. The Church's Ministry Among Jewish People (CMJ UK) wrote to General Synod affirming the importance of hearing the witness of Palestinian Christians, then added: "Our concern is not that these voices are being heard, but that they are presented largely in isolation from other faithful Christian perspectives." CMJ UK declared itself deeply disappointed by the Synod's acceptance of the Kairos II motion.

THE SUICIDE OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND

The Church of England is committing suicide. With Kairos II, its Synod has aligned itself with the spirit of the age as surely as the compromised German state church of the 1930s aligned itself with its own — clergy blessing what the culture demanded and calling it prophecy. The Church of England is killing itself.

When an institution dies, someone must render a verdict. Was it murder? Misadventure? Natural causes? I have watched the Church of England die by inches for more than forty years, and I can render only one verdict: suicide. No secular assassin crept into Lambeth Palace by night. No parliament outlawed the gospel. No persecutor burned the churches. The Church of England took the knife to her own throat, slowly, deliberately, and with the full approval of her own leadership.

The numbers tell the story the bishops will not. Average Sunday attendance has collapsed from roughly 785,000 in 2013 to 581,000 in 2024 — a Church a quarter smaller in a single decade. The bishops now trumpet several consecutive years of modest post-pandemic upticks, but a bounce off a Covid trough is not a revival; the long arc bends steadily downward. More than 3,500 church buildings have closed across Britain in the past decade — some converted into pubs, gyms, swimming pools, and, in the bitterest irony of all, mosques.

A church that once baptized, married, and buried a nation now struggles to fill its pews on Easter morning. Decline of this magnitude does not simply happen. It is chosen. And the Church of England chose it, decision by decision, Synod by Synod, sermon by mumbled sermon.

If a single sentence captures the suicidal instinct of the Church's leadership, it came from a former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who declared that the Church "has a lot of catching up to do with secular values." "Be ye transformed," said St. Paul — quite the opposite notion from Archbishop Williams. You can read more here: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/the-suicide-of-the-church-of-england

JEW-HATRED WILL BACKFIRE ON ITS HATERS

Hatred of Jews has a bad habit of backfiring. Antisemitism has gone global. In one country after another, Jews are being excoriated over Israel's conduct of the war in the Middle East. Israel stands accused of genocide, of baby-killing, of deliberately starving the citizens of Gaza. October 7, 2023 — the slaughter of some 1,200 Israelis and the dragging of roughly 250 hostages into the tunnels of Gaza — is now brazenly repositioned as payback for Israel's treatment of the Palestinians. Never mind that two million Arab citizens live inside Israel in peace and prosperity, with seats in the Knesset, judges on its Supreme Court, and doctors in every Israeli hospital. Israel alone is blamed for the devastation of Gaza, with barely a mention of Hamas, which started the war and has hidden behind Gaza's civilians ever since. So when the Church of England blasts the Jews, that too will backfire. When the CofE has vanished, as surely it will, the Jews will still be around. Israel will get the last laugh. You can read more here: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/jew-hatred-will-backfire-on-its-haters

SIN MANAGEMENT OR COVENANT ACCOUNTABILITY?

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. You can read more here: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/sin-management-or-covenant-accountability

SIMPLER, HUMBLER, DODGIER: COTTRELL'S FAREWELL

The Archbishop of York's farewell address to Synod was a masterclass in saying nothing beautifully. Stephen Cottrell rose to deliver his final presidential address of the quinquennium, and it must be said at the outset: the man is good at this. He has spent five years perfecting a rhetorical form all his own — the address that absorbs every criticism, confesses every failure, and leaves no one, least of all the speaker, as the subject of an accountable sentence. This performance was the finest of the genre. It deserves to be studied the way one studies a conjuror: not for what appears, but for what disappears. The Church is being humbled, but by whom? You can read more here: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/simpler-humbler-dodgier

NET ZERO: THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND'S ONE UNQUALIFIED SUCCESS

On the lighter side, you can read my satirical essay on NET ZERO. The CofE announced this week that it will not meet its target of net-zero carbon emissions by 2030, and the faithful across England wept — all eleven of them. This is, of course, deeply unfair to the church. The Church of England is in fact well ahead of schedule on net zero. It is simply measuring the wrong thing. While the bean counters at Church House fret over boiler emissions and the carbon footprint of votive candles, the church has been quietly achieving net zero where it really counts: in the pews. You can read more here: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/net-zero-the-church-of-england-s-one-unqualified-success

TESTIMONY BEHIND CLOSED DOORS

If the Kairos II debacle wasn't enough to render the Church of England speechless at Synod, both Canterbury and York tried to muzzle the testimony of ex-gays behind closed doors, fearing the wrath of the homosexualists in the church. The Church of England has found a new use for safeguarding: silencing the testimony of Christians whose lives have been changed by Jesus Christ. Archbishops Sarah Mullally and Stephen Cottrell threatened to cancel a General Synod fringe event in York examining how the Labour government's proposed conversion practices ban could criminalize Christian testimony, prayer, and pastoral care. After media exposure, they backed down — but only halfway. What remains is a Church willing to hear the Gospel only in private, apparently. You can read more here: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/testimony-behind-closed-doors-canterbury-and-york-try-to-muzzle-changed-lives-at-general-synod

A GLIMMER OF GOOD NEWS: MARRIAGE DOCTRINE HOLDS

There was a glimmer of good news in the Church of England. A Private Member's Motion on same-sex relationships, brought by Professor Helen King, that would have undermined the doctrine of marriage was defeated. The amended motion stated that it is a legitimate theological perspective to believe that a committed, faithful, intimate same-sex relationship is entirely compatible with Christian discipleship and ministry — whereas only last year the House of Bishops affirmed that sexual intercourse, as an expression of faithful intimacy, properly belongs within marriage exclusively, and that the Church of England's doctrine of marriage has not been altered. The amended motion passed in the House of Clergy and the House of Laity, but was thankfully defeated in the House of Bishops.

The voting:

House of Bishops — For 11, Against 14, Abstentions 4

House of Clergy — For 93, Against 79, Abstentions 0

House of Laity — For 101, Against 83, Abstentions 0

Because a motion must carry in all three Houses, the bishops' narrow majority killed it. A knife-edge veto is a reprieve, not a victory — but we thank God for it.

VINDICATED: BERNARD RANDALL WINS HIS SEVEN-YEAR BATTLE

In other news, after a seven-year legal battle fought on multiple fronts, the Rev. Dr. Bernard Randall — supported throughout by the Christian Legal Centre — has secured a legal settlement with Trent College and overturned, in substance, the Church of England's safeguarding blacklisting of him. His offense? Preaching a sermon on freedom of belief and gender identity. Dr. Randall, 53, a former Cambridge University college chaplain, is now free to preach in church and to work in education for the first time in seven years. The Employment Appeal Tribunal ruled the original judgment against him unsafe on grounds of possible panel bias, Trent College was ordered to pay £20,000 in costs, and a confidential settlement followed. A diocesan safeguarding review, two years in the making, found no safeguarding concern whatever.

Remember what occasioned all this. In July 2019, Dr. Randall preached in a CofE school, in a CofE chapel — precisely the setting where pupils might reasonably expect to hear orthodox Christian teaching. The sermon was pastoral, rooted in Anglican belief, and encouraged debate. It came after the school had invited in the external campaign group Educate and Celebrate, which openly stated its aim to "smash heteronormativity" and to embed Queer Theory throughout the culture of the school. For that, a chaplain was dismissed, reported to the government's Prevent counter-terrorism program, and blacklisted by his own Church. Secular authorities vindicated him repeatedly; the Church that should have defended him has yet to offer so much as an apology.

ANN WIDDECOMBE, 1947–2026

Ann Widdecombe, one of Britain's most recognizable Christian voices in public life, was found dead at her home on the edge of Dartmoor on July 9, having sustained serious injuries. Police have described the killing as a targeted attack and launched a murder investigation; a 28-year-old man arrested in South Yorkshire on suspicion of murder was subsequently rearrested by counter-terrorism police on suspicion of terrorism offenses as investigators work to establish a motive. He has not yet been charged or named.

Widdecombe, 78, served as Conservative MP for Maidstone from 1987 to 2010 and as a junior minister under John Major. She later sat as a Brexit Party MEP (2019–2020) and, since 2023, served as Reform UK's immigration and justice spokesman. After leaving Westminster, she became widely known for her television appearances, writing, and public speaking. Raised an Anglican, she left the Church of England in 1993 over the ordination of women and converted to Rome, where she remained, a Catholic of firm and public conviction, until her death. She opposed abortion and assisted suicide without apology or equivocation, championed animal welfare, and never once trimmed her convictions to suit the age. Britain has lost one of its bluntest and bravest Christian voices. May she rest in peace, and may justice be done.

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