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“All of us have inflated views of ourselves, especially in self-righteousness, until we have visited a place called Calvary. It is there, at the foot of the cross, that we shrink to our true size.” — John Stott
“Either human intelligence ultimately owes its origin to mindless matter; or there is a Creator. It is strange that some people claim that it is their intelligence that leads them to prefer the first to the second.” — John C. Lennox
“The Western Church possesses things Christians of previous centuries could scarcely have imagined. We have theological colleges and seminaries, publishing houses, denominational headquarters, pension funds, endowments, professional staffs, sophisticated communications systems, conferences, consultants, strategic plans, demographic studies, livestreaming equipment, websites, podcasts, and libraries containing more theological knowledge than many generations of Christians could have accumulated in a lifetime. None of these things is evil. Many are genuine blessings. But they carry a peculiar danger. We can eventually build enough machinery that the machinery keeps running whether God shows up or not.” — Rev. Dr. Ronald Moore
“Beware of manufacturing a God of your own: a God who is all mercy, but not just; a God who is all love, but not holy; a God who has a heaven for everybody, but a hell for none; a God who can allow good and bad to be side by side in time, but will make no distinction between good and bad in eternity. Such a God is an idol of your own, as truly an idol as any snake or crocodile in an Egyptian temple. He is not the God of the Bible, and beside the God of the Bible there is no God at all.” — J. C. Ryle
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
The parallels could not be starker.
This summer the Vatican formally declared the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) to be in schism and excommunicated its bishops — Latin-loving custodians of Catholic orthodoxy who consecrated four new bishops in defiance of Pope Leo XIV and without papal approval. (Rome had lifted the Society’s earlier 1988 excommunications in 2009; it is the fresh, unauthorized consecrations that brought the hammer down again.)
The ACNA was formed as an alternative to the heretical Episcopal Church.
GAFCON and the GSFA were formed in opposition to the Church of England’s suicidal doctrinal drift and the Archbishop of Canterbury’s open promotion of pansexuality.
All these groups see themselves as upholders of orthodoxy as they watch their parent bodies compromise the faith, sending their followers to hell with a watered-down, compromised faith that the orthodox believe is no faith at all. At the end of the day, liberal or progressive Christianity is not Christianity at all.
The late J. Gresham Machen made the case more than a century ago that theological liberalism is not a corrupted form of Christianity but a different religion altogether — one belonging, as he put it, in a wholly separate category. It is the world’s values writ large with a soft overlay of watered-down doctrine.
It can be safely said that we live in spiritually perilous times. Nobody is safe. We must be sober and vigilant, because our adversary the devil walks around like a roaring lion seeking whom he might devour (1 Peter 5:8).
But Satan can also appear as an angel of light, and that makes him the more dangerous. Head-on confrontations rarely work for the Evil One. The subtler One tells Eve, “You will not surely die” — a direct contradiction of God’s warning in Genesis 2:17, quietly undermining God’s authority and promising safety in disobedience.
Some 40 million Americans have walked away from the church over the past quarter-century — the “great dechurching” chronicled by Jim Davis and Michael Graham — and COVID only accelerated the exodus. By all accounts they are not coming back. Gen Z has little interest in historic Christianity, preferring the more anemic and vaguer talk of spirituality.
But still the gospel continues on — not in megachurches, but in the quiet backwaters and homes of faithful believers, in small groups where discipleship is practiced, and in countries like Iran and China where the church is growing fastest. There are no fancy purple shirts and miters, no “father” to bless them as second-class Christians. God, apparently, needs none of the performance Christianity staged in the Vatican, even as the lavender mafia controls the inner workings of the largest church on earth.
Most of American Christianity is empty and vacuous — three thousand miles wide, half an inch deep, with wokery from the pulpit and talk of renewal where there is none. Revivals come and go. The faithful look up and are not fed. Of course, there are always pockets of resistance, for which we can be thankful. There are the 7,000 who have not bowed the knee to Baal. God has His faithful remnant. It is to them we turn in these dire times for guidance, and to Scripture as our guide.
THE ANGLICAN CHURCH IN NORTH AMERICA (ACNA) is slowly but surely heading toward an historic moment. An upcoming trial of its archbishop could well determine the church’s future. How it goes, how transparent it will be, and how the laity perceive it all remain to be seen. Women’s ordination hangs like a Damoclean sword over the whole denomination. More immediate are lawsuits that defy biblical prohibition. The church’s temporary dean, Bishop Julian Dobbs, has a suit against the departed Jurisdiction of the Armed Forces (JAFC) — now reconstituted as the Anglican Reformed Catholic Church — and the JAFC has responded in kind. Millions of dollars could be at stake for either side depending on how the courts rule. There are unconfirmed reports of a half-million-dollar legal war chest for Archbishop Steve Wood that, if true, defies everything we know about good stewardship. What would Jesus or the apostle Paul say about that? There are tens of thousands of Iranian and Syrian Christians without food and housing, and American Anglican bishops are bent on winning legal and ecclesiastical wars to benefit a mere 100,000 Anglicans. This cries out to heaven. You can be sure The Washington Post is waiting on the sidelines for round two.
You can read several of my pieces on all this here:
It should break your heart.
THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH lurches forward across a dozen dioceses in one sexual scandal after another, catalogued by Anglican Watch, the unofficial watchdog for the Episcopal Church.
In a piece titled “The Shepherds Who Feed Themselves,” Anglican Watch says TEC has perfected the art of protecting its bishops and abandoning the abused:
“The Episcopal Church likes to present itself to the world as the safest room in American Christianity — inclusive, enlightened, trauma-informed, ahead of every curve. For a season the boast had substance. A generation ago, its sexual-misconduct policies were held up as a model other communions were told to imitate. But a church can live a long time on the memory of its own virtue, and this one has. While the Roman Catholic Church was hauled through the courts and the Southern Baptist Convention was forced into a public reckoning with its predators, the Episcopal Church — small, genteel, and largely beneath the notice of the secular press — has quietly perfected a different art: the art of protecting its bishops and abandoning the abused.”
“The pattern runs across a dozen dioceses, and it is always the same. The clergyman survives. The bishop who shielded him retires with his pension intact. And the person who was harmed is handed a ‘pastoral response,’ shown the door, and told that the machinery of the church has, regrettably, done all it can.”
You can read more here:
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND will spend £100 million to atone for a sin its own ledgers may not record. The whole English edifice rests on Queen Anne’s Bounty, the fund founded in 1704 to relieve impoverished clergy, and on its eighteenth-century holdings in the South Sea Company. The Commissioners’ researchers concluded that the Bounty had grown fat on the slave trade. Archbishop Welby apologized for it. The Bishop of Manchester likened the Church to a burglar who cannot in conscience keep his loot. A hundred million pounds followed the apology out the door.
The trouble is that penitence without truth is not repentance. It is theatre. And the longer one examines the fund the Church now calls Healing, Repair and Justice, the more one suspects that the sin being atoned for was, in the crucial particular, misread.
Then the historians arrived. Professor Richard Dale — a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the author of a study of the South Sea Company — pointed out what the accountants had missed. The enterprise had two distinct parts. One traded in human beings. The other was a vehicle for government debt. Queen Anne’s Bounty put its money in the second: South Sea annuities, which were in plain terms gilts — loans to the Crown. To confuse the two, Dale wrote, was an elementary error. And the trade the Church now weeps over was, in cold fact, a chronic loss-maker; no investor grew rich on it, least of all one who never bought the trading shares. As Dale summed it up, the Bounty’s investments, in stock or in annuities, earned nothing from the slave trade.
The American precedent. VirtueOnline has watched a version of this play out in The Episcopal Church for more than twenty years, and the American experience is worth setting beside the English one — if only because it exposes how loosely the word “reparations” is thrown about.
It is often said that The Episcopal Church seeded reparations with $1.7 million. It did not. The national church’s contribution was a resolution, not a cheque. At the 2006 General Convention, Resolution A123 apologized for the Church’s complicity in slavery and directed every diocese to document that complicity — but it moved no money. The dollars, when they came, came piecemeal and from below: from seminaries and dioceses, not from any churchwide fund.
The $1.7 million was Virginia Theological Seminary’s, established in 2019. Unlike England’s still-unspent commitment, it has actually paid out. The seminary began issuing cash payments in February 2021 — roughly $2,100 a year to each identified descendant of the Black laborers, enslaved and free, whose work built the institution.
This is not the grumbling of a partisan. Even the Commissioners’ own historical advisers have conceded, in print, that the annuities and the trading securities were two separate instruments. When your own witness concedes the point, the case is in trouble.
You can read more here:
GLOBAL PERSECUTION haunts the world. More than 388 million Christians now live under high to extreme persecution for the name of Jesus Christ. That is one in every seven believers on earth — a record — and the number climbs with each passing year. Open Doors’ 2026 World Watch List, released in January, put the figure eight million higher than the year before — not a plateau, but an escalation.
Behind the number are faces. Among the persecuted are 201 million women and girls and 110 million children under the age of fifteen. In the last reporting year alone, 4,849 Christians were murdered for their faith, 4,712 were detained, and more than 3,600 churches and Christian properties were attacked. This is not a distant abstraction, a line on a chart, a cause for a committee. It is the Body of Christ, and it is bleeding.
Nowhere is the wound deeper than sub-Saharan Africa. Of the 4,849 Christians killed for their faith last year, 3,490 — more than seven in ten — died in Nigeria, where Boko Haram, the Islamic State West Africa Province, and Fulani militants raid Christian villages at will while a paralyzed government looks the other way. Whole communities have been erased from the map. Girls carried off a decade ago have never come home. The slaughter has grown so routine that the world has all but stopped counting.
Many of the slain are Catholics and Anglicans, though Pentecostals and evangelicals fall in the same cross-hairs. But that is not the whole story. The more Nigerian Christians are persecuted, the more the church grows — with some Christian groups reaching out to Muslims with the gospel of Jesus Christ.
The irony should not be missed. Western Anglicanism is dying — not from persecution (why would anyone bother to persecute a theologically diluted church that holds no real convictions?) but from irrelevance to God and to the culture that has already assimilated it. You can read more here:
THE EPISCOPAL DIOCESE OF NEW YORK and its bishop, the Rt. Rev. Matthew F. Heyd, would like you to believe they are on the cutting edge of renewal — a word more often associated with evangelicals than with liberals.
Heyd wrote a commentary for Religion News Service titled “The Episcopal Church Is a Story of Renewal, Not Decline,” holding up two congregations in Kingston, New York, becoming one as a symbol of that renewal.
What Heyd actually points to is two small Kingston congregations — St. John’s and Holy Cross–Santa Cruz, long known for their feeding programs — that have merged into the new Church of the Holy Spirit. He describes the result as “exceptional,” but says what is happening in Kingston isn’t unique — that it offers a picture of congregational life across the Diocese of New York. The frame is explicitly tied to Sean Rowe’s restructuring: Rowe is reconfiguring the wider structures of the Episcopal Church to better support local communities, and through this work, Heyd writes, “we have come to believe that our story is renewal — not decline.” The theme is renewal “at ground level,” through local congregations, chaplaincies, and schools.
Heyd isn’t actually claiming church growth in the Tim Keller sense — no plants, no new attendance numbers, no multiplication. He is redefining “renewal” as vitality in existing congregations (feeding programs, local presence) rather than numerical expansion. Keller’s plants and weekly attenders were countable; Heyd’s “renewal” is asserted as a matter of belief — note the language, “we have come to believe that our story is renewal.”
Tim Keller expanded his ministry through a deliberate strategy that moved from a single congregation to a global church-planting movement. Heyd’s talk of renewal is fictional. He is taking a word and turning it upside down to make it mean what he wants it to mean. Keller didn’t just grow a church — he built a reproducible model and a training pipeline, which is why observers credit him as a pioneer of the contemporary urban church-planting movement rather than simply a successful pastor.
By contrast, the Diocese of New York has gone steadily downhill. Average Sunday attendance in 2015 was 16,878; by 2024 it had dropped to 9,486 — a decline of 43.8 percent, and it is still falling. From 2015 to 2019 the diocese was in a slow bleed, from 16,878 to 15,594. Then attendance fell off the edge — 15,594 down to 6,945 at the 2021 trough. That is a 55 percent collapse in two years. COVID didn’t dent this diocese; it cut it in half.
The years 2021 to 2023 brought a real but partial bounce, back up to 9,866 by 2023. But here is the number that matters: even at that recovery peak, the diocese was still 37 percent below its 2019 level. The bounce recovered barely a third of what the cliff took. And then 2024 — the “renewal” year — went back down, from 9,866 to 9,486.
For the national frame in the same table: the Episcopal Church as a whole went from 614,241 in 2015 to 413,034 in 2024, down 32.8 percent, with the same trough-in-2021 shape. So New York didn’t underperform the denomination by accident — at −43.8 percent it fell harder than the −32.8 percent national average, in the very city where Keller built a global church-planting network from a standing start.
Keller’s line went up because people were counted coming in. Heyd’s line went down, and “renewal” is the word chosen to describe the descent. Two Kingston congregations with feeding programs don’t move a curve that lost 7,400 Sunday worshippers in a decade — they are the candle, and the chart is the dark.
YOUTH PASTORS are in short supply, according to an article in The Gospel Coalition. “There’s way more demand for youth pastors than folks who want to do it,” says Sam Bierig, dean of Spurgeon College at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. You can read more here:
The Episcopal Church does have youth ministry, but it looks quite different from the megachurch model, where a dedicated, full-time, seminary- or Bible-college-trained youth pastor is a standard staff fixture. A few things distinguish the Episcopal picture.
The role is overwhelmingly lay, part-time, and precariously funded. In Episcopal parlance the position is usually titled “Director of Youth Ministry,” “Youth Minister,” or “Youth and Family Minister” rather than “youth pastor,” and it is understood as lay ministry rather than an ordained office. The Episcopal Church’s own youth-ministry network explicitly casts a wide net to include anyone serving “paid, volunteer, part-time, full-time, or just starting out” — which tells you how thin the professional ranks actually are. Many of the current openings are part-time, and the field has long struggled with underpayment and short tenures. It is concentrated in larger, wealthier parishes; a full-time paid youth minister is really only sustainable in a sizable, resourced congregation.
The bottom line is that with the slow passing of the baby boomers in TEC, and churches now averaging around 38 in Sunday attendance, youth ministry will soon be a thing of the past.
AI TO THE RESCUE — or so some imagine. Did you know that 48 percent of practicing Christians now say they would trust AI with their own spiritual growth? Not the casual attenders, not the Christmas-and-Easter crowd — practicing Christians, the people who show up, give, serve, and open their Bibles. According to Barna’s latest research, conducted with Gloo, nearly half of them would entrust their spiritual life to a machine.
It gets more personal than that. Nearly one in three American adults now rate the spiritual counsel of AI as trustworthy as a pastor’s — a figure that climbs among the young, approaching two in five among Gen Z. And roughly a third of practicing Christians say they want their own pastor to walk them through it, even as only 12 percent of pastors feel equipped to do so. They are worried about the thing — worried about Scripture mangled, worried about a machine that begins to play God — and they are using it anyway, living inside a tension they cannot resolve. The shepherd is asleep at eleven o’clock at night; the algorithm is awake. That is the whole problem in a sentence.
ARCHBISHOP SARAH MULLALLY: And Ten Urgent Challenges for the Church of England (Darton, Longman & Todd), edited by the religion journalist Tim Wyatt, is out now. Wyatt supplies a biography and an exclusive interview; ten Anglican writers each take a challenge — spirituality, mission, Anglican unity, safeguarding, the climate, same-sex marriage, transgender inclusion, and the rest — and Rowan Williams adds a consoling afterword.
Reviewing the book in Premier Christianity, Rachel Bedford — herself a Church of England minister — praises the portrait of Mullally but faults the volume for missing the greatest challenge of all. The book has chapters on racism, ableism, LGBT inclusion, climate change, and the divisions of the global Communion, she notes, yet it barely engages the Church’s first calling — to go and make disciples.
One contributor names the tragedy of a “flat-tyre community, too secular in its preoccupations, in a spiritually hungry society,” and reaches for the old word respair — recovery from despair — as England’s deepest need. The people of England are hungry for the Church’s spiritual leadership, and there is a deep hope that the Church would show moral courage in proclaiming the good news of Christ. Apart from the odd sentence like that, Bedford writes, the gaping omission is any serious reckoning with mission and evangelism. If the Church’s primary calling is to “go and make disciples,” it is a glaring absence to find no chapter on the Church’s need to grow in confidence and effectiveness in proclaiming the Gospel — and none, either, on the collapse of the young in the pews. The most recent Statistics for Mission put the average number of under-18s in a Church of England parish at fewer than seven.
The early Church did not survive because it settled every doctrinal dispute. It survived because it preached Christ and formed disciples. Yes, and amen.
Don’t look to Mullally to change the church’s direction. It is not going to happen. The Church of England is on suicide watch; the Global South owns the Anglican franchise now; the Mother Church is gently floating down the Thames, hoping against hope that it won’t sink by the time it hits the North Sea.
To all who have been supporters of Barnabas Aid: There will be a Thanksgiving Service for the founder of Barnabas Aid the late Dr Patrick Sookhdeo on Wednesday September 2 in Oxford.
Promoters apologise that they have not been able to contact those who have been supporters directly but their requests for an invitation to be sent to the 100,000 supporters of Barnabas Fund have been consistently refused.
Those wishing to attend and give thanks for Dr Patrick’s life and ministry should please email adminsa@ocrpl.org for details of the time and the place. The service will also be livestreamed.
We ask that church pastors and leaders make this known to their congregations, many of whom will include those who supported Dr Patrick and Barnabas Aid.
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