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The command to judge not is not a requirement to be blind, but rather a plea to be generous. Jesus does not tell us to cease to be men... but to renounce the presumptuous ambition to be God. --- John Stott

The church can live faithfully in post-Christian America because its life never depended upon America being Christian. Its life depends upon Christ, and Christ has not surrendered his throne. – Rev. James Bell

A sword that inevitably divides. There can be peace between two men who agree that religion is merely a private preference. There can be peace between them if Christ is only one teacher among many. There can even be peace if Christianity is reduced to a collection of harmless moral principles. But Jesus will not remain in that little box. He claims lordship. And lordship requires allegiance. That is where the sword appears. – Rev. Dr. Ronald Moore

The church does not need to control the culture in order to live faithfully within it. --- James Bell

"We are not primarily called to do something or go somewhere; we are called to Someone." --- Os Guinness

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

HOW TO BE CHRISTIAN WHEN AMERICA IS NOT

America is still full of Christianity, even as it becomes increasingly post-Christian. Churches stand in nearly every community, and Christian language continues to shape our holidays, political speeches, weddings, funerals, and arguments about morality.

According to the most recent national Religious Landscape Study from Pew Research Center, 62 percent of American adults still identify as Christian, while 29 percent identify with no religion. Christianity remains the largest religious tradition in the country by a wide margin.

But numbers alone do not tell the whole story. Not so long ago, in 2007, 78 percent of American adults called themselves Christian. Even more important than the numbers, though, is this: Christianity no longer shapes the way our country thinks about right and wrong the way it once did. Ideas that used to sound normal now seem odd. Many places that once took Christian values for granted now see the world very differently. Things like sex, marriage, freedom, the body, duty, and the meaning of life—these used to be understood through a Christian lens. Now, we have to explain what we mean, even in places where it once went without saying.

The question before us is therefore larger than whether America was ever truly Christian or which political party accelerated its decline. The more urgent question is how Christians should live when the culture no longer reinforces their faith, their neighbors do not share their moral language, and political power cannot be trusted to preserve a Christian social order.

If Christianity can remain faithful only when it is culturally dominant, then the end of Christian America will feel like the end of Christianity itself. If Jesus Christ is Lord, however, the loss of cultural privilege may reveal how much confidence we placed in arrangements that were never the kingdom of God.

The church does not need to control the culture in order to live faithfully within it.

American Christians have not experienced what they experienced. Losing an election is not exile. Being criticized on social media is not persecution. A Christian who is threatened, fired, or pressured to violate conscience may face a serious injustice, but we should still resist using the suffering of ancient Judah to make every modern Christian discomfort sound heroic. Christians in America retain remarkable freedoms, vast resources, thousands of institutions, and substantial political influence.

The New Testament gives the church an exilic identity even when Christians have not been removed from their homeland. Peter addresses believers as "elect exiles" and "sojourners" because their deepest identity is found in God's kingdom. The church is never fully at home in any nation, even when that nation quotes Scripture, honors Christian holidays, and protects Christian institutions. Every country can be loved where it is good, served where service is just, and resisted where obedience to the state would require disobedience to God, but no country can bear the full weight of Christian hope.

The Christian meaning of exile is therefore not a story in which we are always the innocent victims and our opponents are always Babylon. It is the recognition that every nation is temporary, every culture is morally mixed, and every Christian belongs first to Jesus Christ.

A church prepared to live faithfully in exile must first allow God to expose the empire it has permitted within itself.

Exile is not the whole Christian story. Scripture does not end with Babylon ruling forever or with God's people escaping creation. It ends with Babylon fallen, the nations healed, the dead raised, and the holy city coming down from God. Our hope is not that Christians will finally find a nation comfortable enough to become their permanent home. Our hope is that God will dwell with his people, judge every evil, wipe away every tear, and make all things new.

I am indebted to a Rev. James Bell, Baptist Substack contributor for these thoughts. His writings can be seen here: https://jamesbell333289.substack.com/

A SECOND CAROLINA BISHOP IN THE DOCK: EDGAR TO FACE DISCIPLINE OVER A CHAPEL

The Anglican Church in North America finds itself in a continued beleaguered state. It was announced this week that South Carolina Bishop Chip Edgar will face a presentment following his dedication of a school chapel with the Episcopal Bishop of South Carolina, The Rt. Rev. Ruth Woodliff-Stanley. Bishop Edgar submitted a letter to Bishop Julian Dobbs, Dean of the Province, indicating voluntary submission to discipline in the matter of the Porter-Gaud chapel dedication.

Bishop Edgar was notified that a Presentment had been submitted to the Province charging him with just cause for scandal or offense in violation of the disciplinary canons of the ACNA because of his conduct during the dedication service on August 18. Bishop Edgar confessed to the truth of the charge in the Presentment, stating that he should not have participated in the dedication service in the manner that he did.

The College of Bishops will determine the punishment for Bishop Edgar at their meeting in Plano, Texas September 21-25, 2026.

The Rt. Rev. Julian Dobbs, Dean of the province later wrote sharing a statement with the province reaffirming his province's position of "principled disengagement from those who promote false teaching."

"The seriousness of the situation led a complement of Bishops within our College to submit a Presentment, that is, a formal canonical document that advances a disciplinary case by setting out allegations of canonical misconduct against a bishop." As a result there will be no board of inquiry, nor a trial.

A blogger, The Optimistic Jurist, asks a lot of awkward questions of Dean Dobbs regarding this presentment which you can read here: https://optimisticjurist.substack.com/

You can read my take on all this here: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/he-said-he-said-two-bishops-clash-over-a-chapel-an-altar-and-holy-communion

ACNA COURT FINDS BISHOP DEREK JONES GUILTY ON ALL FOUR CHARGES

The Anglican Church in North America has rendered its verdict on Bishop Derek Jones, and it is total. On August 19 the Court for the Trial of a Bishop convicted him unanimously on all four charges — defiance of a Godly Admonition, contempt for the canons, conduct giving cause for scandal through the abuse of ecclesiastical power, and the promotion of schism. The court found a bishop who had inverted his office: a shepherd who ruled as a lord, tying a chaplain's very livelihood to mandatory payments, weaponizing Title IV against clergy in and beyond his reach, backdating documents, and punishing those who dared to raise their voices. Sentence awaits only the running of the appeal clock and the judgment of the College of Bishops.

Rather than answer to the church, Jones bolted from it — standing up a rival denomination in Alabama, courting his own chaplains away, staging an unauthorized consecration, and suing the province he had sworn to serve for a million dollars. The court named this for what it was: schism. And the verdict lands on a province already reeling, for the very archbishop who signed the first admonition against Jones, Steve Wood, now stands suspended and faces the same court beginning September 7. The house that judges Derek Jones is a house on fire. You can read my full take here: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/acna-court-finds-bishop-derek-jones-guilty-on-all-four-charges

THE GLOBAL ANGLICAN COMMUNION COMES HOME TO ABUJA

If you had any doubts about where the Anglican Communion is heading, the Global Anglican Council — the conciliar body GAFCON raised up as an alternative to the Anglican Consultative Council, the Instruments of Communion, and the Archbishop of Canterbury — announced this week that the headquarters of the reordered Global Anglican Communion will be established in Abuja, Nigeria.

This should surprise no orthodox Anglican, whether of the West or the Global South, who have watched in vain for more than two decades for a single sign of repentance from Western Anglicanism and its pansexual agenda.

From Lambeth Resolution 1.10, through the Windsor Report, to the present hour, the West has been running Gadarene-like toward the cliff. It has ordained gay and lesbian bishops in the Episcopal Church and in the Anglican Church of Canada, and it has now enthroned a partnered lesbian, Cherry Vann, as Archbishop of Wales — the first such primate in the history of the Communion. Down the slope they go, hastening to join the swine our Lord sent over the edge two thousand years ago, never to return.

The decision to plant the Communion's headquarters in Abuja was taken at the Council's meeting in Recife, Brazil, on Saturday, August 22, 2026, and announced in a communiqué from its chairman, the Most Rev. Dr. Laurent Mbanda, "to strengthen and support the future life and ministry of the global fellowship."

Abuja was the natural — perhaps the only — choice. It was there, at G26 in March, that the Abuja Affirmation declared the old Instruments of Communion to have failed and proclaimed the Anglican Communion reordered into a truly global Church, with the Jerusalem Declaration as its doctrinal spine and the newly minted Global Anglican Council as its conciliar voice. The city that named the new order should fittingly become the seat from which it is governed. You can read more here: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/the-global-anglican-communion-comes-home-to-abuja

WOMEN'S ORDINATION GOES GLOBAL — AND THE GLOBAL SOUTH BREAKS RANKS

The ordination of women to the priesthood and now, with more frequency to the episcopacy, has gone global. Where it was thought that the Global South would hold the line has now proven not to be. Kenya has formally appointed two women to the episcopate in the Anglican Church of Kenya (ACK), marking historic milestones in a country where women bishops remain controversial. But this is not the only province to do so.

Kenya and South Sudan, both aligned with GAFCON or the GSFA, have consecrated women as bishops, and a growing number ordain women to the priesthood. The Jerusalem Declaration treats the ordination of women as a secondary matter, noting that full agreement has not been reached among all signatories and that it is not held to affect one's salvation. Its proponents emphasize that while they maintain a unanimous view on primary matters, the diversity of opinion on women's ordination is acknowledged within their global fellowship.

The ACNA is firmly against ordaining a woman to the episcopacy, but even ordination to the priesthood is raising talk of internal schism. The Reformed Episcopal Church (REC) is firmly opposed to the ordination of women in any order, and there are rumblings that it might be the first to show ACNA the back door. The ACNA's Anglo-Catholic wing is also opposed to the ordination of women as are some evangelicals. The province's two-tier approach to women's ordination is showing its fragility in the face of Anglo-Catholic and confessional-evangelical resistance. You can read more here: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/on-muddying-the-anglican-waters-over-women-s-ordination

RICH IN ENDOWMENTS, POOR IN SOULS

The decline of church life in the West is now almost a cliché. The Episcopal Church recently reported it had $31 billion in the Church Pension Group to keep the church afloat indefinitely, or at least till the last priest dies. No worries there.

So also for the Church of England which has two major financial pillars keeping it afloat: The Church Commissioners' endowment (~£11.6 billion) and the Church of England Pensions Board assets (~£3.5 billion), which translates into just over $20 billion in US dollars.

An insider told VOL that there are sufficient endowments to ensure that all 43 dioceses continue to have bishops, and to keep the archbishops in the lifestyle to which they are accustomed. The façade will survive (like the Church of Ireland) with grand cathedrals and state occasions. There simply won't be parish churches and clergy any longer except in large towns. Like a sort of Museum of Religion where you can see the expensive relics – such as Doollally – but you are no longer able to find a local church in which to worship if you are so minded.

BRAZIL: A TALE OF TWO CHURCHES

They never met, and there was never any intention that they should. Two bodies of Anglican leaders — with different gods, different gospels, and different destinations — passed each other like ships in the night in Brazil this August, a communion in unambiguous schism. In São Paulo, seven Canterbury-aligned primates of the Americas, among them Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe and Brazil's Marinez Bassotto, issued a statement deploring colonialism, secularism, migration, corruption, and climate change — naming every crisis in the world except the one consuming their own provinces. Not a word about the collapse of attendance across the Anglican West, not a word about the doctrinal earthquakes that have shattered the Communion they represent. It is more congenial to pronounce upon the state of the planet in righteous indignation than to stare the state of one's own church in the face.

In Recife, under the banner of God's faithfulness, a very different assembly gathered — the Global Anglican Communion (GAFCON) — to install the Very Rev. Gabriel Uchôa Cavalcanti as Dean of the Catedral Anglicana do Espírito Santo, thirty years after his father, Archbishop Miguel Uchôa, planted that church with thirty souls. Their story is one of hope purchased through severe trial: expelled from the IEAB in 2005 for refusing to bend on Scripture, robbed of their buildings and standing, they endured even the murder of Bishop Robinson Cavalcanti in 2012, and yet grew from an embattled diocese into a province. The São Paulo primates, meeting in the same country the same month, made no mention of this schism, these losses, this exile — for one cannot lament what one has caused. Two gatherings, two gospels, two destinations. One lamented the world; the other saved souls out of it. One counted its causes; the other counted its converts. And the arithmetic is merciless: only one of them was growing. You can read more here: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/brazil-a-tale-of-two-churches

ROWAN WILLIAMS: ON HIS KNEES BEFORE TERROR

Twenty-five years ago Rowan Williams was a hundred yards from the towers when they fell, and to his credit he stayed — praying with the frightened, comforting the trapped. But out of that morning came Writing in the Dust, seventy-eight pages of deliberate irresolution that has governed the Anglican mind ever since. Williams offered no verdict, no just-war reckoning, only a "breathing space" in which the West might decline to answer violence with violence. He would call the atrocity a crime; he would not call it evil. Of the men who murdered three thousand people he could say they had "serious moral goals." His title was his confession: from John 8 he took the bent, silent Christ writing in the dust — but inverted every role, lifting mercy off the guilty and laying it over the aggressors while recasting the grieving West as the bloodthirsty mob. Melanie Phillips named it exactly: a churchman "on his knees before terror."

Set beside him the passengers of Flight 93, who did the one thing the book forbids — took a vote, said the Lord's Prayer, stormed the cockpit, and answered force with force to spare the Capitol. That is the line Williams cannot draw: between revenge, which feeds itself, and justice, which shields the innocent. The root is a habit of mind — a Hegelian to the marrow, for whom evil is never a thing to be named and resisted but a moment in some larger process awaiting reconciliation. Yet the Bible knows no such synthesis; its moral world is stubbornly two-fold, Christ and Belial with no treaty between them. Handed a front-row seat to the clearest evil of our lifetime, close enough to choke on its dust, Williams spent the rest of his life reasoning it away. The stones, Your Grace, had already been thrown. The hour called not for another man to understand them, but for one with the nerve to stand in their way. You can read my full take here: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/on-his-knees-before-terror-rowan-williams-and-the-death-of-christian-nerve

AN OLD HERESY IN NEW CLOTHES: THE SYNOD TURNS ON ISRAEL

What the Church of England now calls conscience is in truth an old heresy wearing new clothes. The hostility to Israel that the Synod voted to "hear" is supersessionism revived — the ancient conceit that the Church has displaced the Jew in the economy of God, that the promises made to Abraham were revoked and reassigned. Cranmer's church once knew better. The Reformers were Hebraists who prized the Old Testament as the very Word of God; the churchmen of Balfour's generation read Scripture and saw a people with a covenant and a claim. Their successors read the morning headlines and see a grievance to be curated. A church that has forgotten how to read its own Bible will always mistake the latest cause for the eternal one.

And so the Mother Church has arrived at a strange inversion. It can bless what Scripture forbids and will not bless the people to whom Scripture was first entrusted. Its bishops, moderate men of every opinion and no conviction, hurry to affirm each passing fashion while the pews empty beneath them, mistaking the applause of the age for the approval of God. Mullally's belated regret changes nothing; the retreat was tactical, not repentant. A church that trims its witness to the mood of Birzeit and the fashions of the Synod floor has not grown more compassionate. It has merely grown ashamed of the gospel it was ordained to preach, and a church ashamed of its gospel has nothing left to say to England, to the Jew, or to God. You can read more here: https://davidvirtue2.substack.com/p/new-british-pm-backs-ukraine-turns

FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF THE EPISCOPAL ABSURD

The Bishop of Northern Michigan Bishop Rayford Ray, recently blessed Monarch butterflies describing the act as "definitely relational" and "an act of reverence" as they headed to Mexico for warmer climes.

A New York priest, The Rev. Tommy Dillon has been a Dolly Parton fan most of his life. He not only loves the country singer's music and movies, but he's also been to Dollywood, her amusement park in Tennessee, more than once. Most of all, he admired Parton's dedication to social justice and philanthropy, especially through her nonprofit, the Dollywood Foundation. "Dolly really lived out the example of what the kingdom of God looks like on Earth," Dillon told Episcopal News Service. "She welcomed everybody." Not a word on what the Apostle Paul might have thought about this, ere he headed to execution for the "crime" of believing in the Resurrected One. No butterflies on him.

In more flatulent news, penguin poop is being analyzed for climate change. I'm sure there is an Episcopal bishop out there ready to bless penguins and their poop ere they head to Antarctica for the winter. It is hoped the Episcopal Church might discover Jesus before it disappears into the sunset, but don't count on it.

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