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Without the Holy Spirit, Christian discipleship would be inconceivable, even impossible. There can be no life without the life-giver, no understanding without the Spirit of truth, no fellowship without the unity of the Spirit, no Christlikeness of character apart from His fruit, and no effective witness without His power. As a body without breath is a corpse, so the church without the Spirit is dead.  — John Stott

Good bishops can be succeeded by bad bishops. Good archbishops can make mistakes. Priests can rebel unjustly. Accusers can lie. Institutions can protect themselves. Leaders can confuse their office with themselves. The Church has known all of this for two thousand years. That is why she developed councils. That is why she developed canons. That is why bishops are consecrated by bishops rather than appointing themselves. That is why authority in the Church is never supposed to stand alone. Authority must itself remain under authority.  — Rev. Dr. Ronald Moore

“Obedience is the only reality. It is faith visible, faith acting, and faith manifest. It is the test of real discipleship among the Lord’s people.” — J. C. Ryle

We are seeing the biggest move of God in history today. This is what it looks like. We don’t invite people to our church and denomination because we need more butts in the pews to pay the bills. We connect them to Jesus and help them form church by making disciples. This is why Iran is the fastest-growing church in the world today.  — Jerry Kramer

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

CANTERBURY GOES FROM BAD TO WORSE

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dame Sarah Mullally, is tone deaf and goes from bad to worse. To say she is a bumbling fool might be to underestimate her. Her utterances on Islam and her recent pilgrimage to Israel and the West Bank reveal a depth of ignorance unmatched in contemporary Anglican history.

This week her support for Islam reached a new nadir when she awarded Muslim leader Hafiz Muhammad Tahir Mehmood Ashrafi, chairman of the Pakistan Ulema Council, the Hubert Walter Award for Reconciliation and Interfaith Cooperation at Lambeth Palace on September 11 — the twenty-fifth anniversary of the attacks — cited for his longstanding support for religious minorities in Pakistan, particularly the Christian community. Minority rights, note well — but not a syllable about the rights of women. Ashrafi’s wife stood next to him in full hijab, in defiance of the very freedoms the West claims to defend.

Within the week Mullally was forced to withdraw the honor. Ashrafi’s past had caught up with him: this is the cleric who conferred the title “Sword of God” on Osama bin Laden — honoring the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks — in response to Britain’s knighting of Salman Rushdie in 2007. He has also defended Pakistan’s blasphemy and child-marriage laws and accused Jews and Christians of conspiring to destroy nuclear-capable Pakistan. The backlash on social media was swift and condemnatory.

It’s actions like this that make you understand why GAFCON leaders will have nothing to do with her. Her day leading the Anglican Communion is done. Lambeth Palace is an empty theological shell.

THE TRUE STATE OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND

Well, what is the true state of the Church of England?

Ask the men who run it and you will hear about a “Quiet Revival,” a warm tide of returning young men and rising Easter numbers. Ask the widow who still turns up on a wet Sunday in a village that has lost its priest, is losing its rectory, and will soon lose its building, and you will hear something else entirely.

A source deep inside the church, and intimately familiar with its real workings, summed it up like this:

“We are about to see a period of steep decline and closure, with a number of evangelical bishops now adopting a bizarre philosophy that ‘church’ does not require parish churches and parish priests. Everything can be done by informal lay groups, directed by ever-expanding diocesan offices, often many miles away. Rectories are being sold off, clergy not replaced, parishes being merged into large unwieldy clusters, and money increasingly being spent on staff at the office. We literally have bishops who do not believe in ordination or sacraments, and that they are the only actual ministers in the fantasy evangelical church which they have imagined for themselves.”

You can read more here: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/the-true-state-of-the-church-of-england

WALES PRESSES PAUSE

The bishops of the Church in Wales have quietly shelved their promised bill to let same-sex couples marry in church, pleading the need for more “theological reflection.” The province already has a lesbian Archbishop, Cherry Vann, in a civil partnership, for goodness’ sake! So how much “theological reflection” are we talking about? Everybody knows where this is going, so why pretend otherwise? Archliberal Bishop Gregory Cameron of St. Asaph is totally committed to the idea. He is a close friend of both Vann and Rowan Williams. Would anybody actually stop the inevitable from taking place?

THE WOOD TRIAL IS OVER

The trial of ACNA Archbishop Steve D. Wood in Charleston is over. The bishops are mum, with as long as 101 days to decide his guilt or innocence. Some 38 witnesses stepped up to the plate to testify across five days of proceedings. We won’t know the verdict until December. If he is found guilty and appeals, he can drag it out another 30 days. The absolute last day the court may release an opinion, it has said, is December 21, 2026. My suspicion, based on my view of human nature and bishops, is that they will drag it out as long as possible, hoping time will kill the opposition, and then quietly declare him innocent of all charges.

Wood faces three charges arising from the presentment brought against him: violation of his ordination vows; conduct giving just cause for scandal or offense, including the abuse of ecclesiastical power; and sexual immorality.

TEC’S FIRST TRANSGENDER DEAN

In a first for TEC, the Episcopal Church has installed its first transgender dean in the person of the Very Rev. Micah Cronin at All Saints’ Cathedral in Milwaukee. He — formerly she — is the first transgender-identifying dean in the history of the Episcopal Church. Cronin is a biological woman who identifies as a man, married to another biological woman, the Rev. Elias Henry, who also identifies as transgender and serves at a Lutheran, LGBT-affirming campus ministry at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. You can’t make this stuff up. The hollowed-out Episcopal Church has demonstrated for all to see that the less you believe, the faster you dissipate. The Episcopal Church has gone from binary to buggery in one generation. You can read more here: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/first-for-tec-the-episcopal-church-installs-a-transgender-cathedral-dean

FLORIDA ELECTS A BISHOP AT LAST

The Episcopal Diocese of Florida has finally elected a bishop after putting itself through three years of ecclesiastical torture over gay marriage. On September 11 the diocese chose the Rev. J. Randolph Alexander Jr. as its ninth bishop, closing out nearly two decades under Samuel “John” Howard and the bruising, drawn-out transition that followed his retirement.

Consider what the wider world managed in the same span: wars in Europe and the Middle East, regime changes and geopolitical realignments, catastrophic natural disasters, and a U.S. presidential election. And a single Florida diocese, still holding a preponderance of conservative believers, spent three years maneuvering toward a bishop who would satisfy the pansexual elites of the wider church. Clearly, persistence pays. That they settled on a straight white male is the only concession the progressives apparently made. No queers this time.

A NEW ARCHBISHOP FOR RWANDA

The Anglican Province of Rwanda has a new archbishop. The Rt. Rev. Dr. Manasseh Gahima, Bishop of Gahini, has been elected as the next Archbishop and Primate of Eglise Anglicane du Rwanda (EAR — the Anglican Church of Rwanda). He succeeds the 71-year-old Archbishop Laurent Mbanda.

Archbishop Mbanda had been due to retire at 65 in 2019 but was granted an extension by the province — an accommodation that allowed him to complete the reordering of Rwandan diocesan life and to steady the province through the Mugisha affair in Shyira, in which the Rt. Rev. Samuel Mugisha Mugiraneza faced a diocesan forensic audit and a Rwanda Investigation Bureau inquiry into alleged misuse of diocesan funds. His suspension in 2024 led to criminal conviction. Mbanda led GAFCON — now reconstituted as the Global Anglican Council — through the tumult of the Canterbury succession. He leads a province that ordains women priests and frames his opposition to Mullally around doctrine and the majority Communion belief that women cannot be ordained to the episcopacy.

The archbishop-elect’s installation is planned for October 25, when he will also take on the role of Bishop of Gasabo, as is the custom of the primate in the province.

SCANDAL AT THE FALLS CHURCH

Sex scandals are not the exclusive property of the Episcopal Church, though barely a month passes without another priest or bishop dragging that failing denomination into the headlines. Orthodox jurisdictions have their share of shame too, and honesty requires saying so plainly.

The latest erupts at the flagship parish of the Anglican Church in North America — The Falls Church Anglican in Falls Church, Virginia.

On September 15 the U.S. Department of Justice announced the arrest of Jeffrey Turner Taylor, 66, now of Milford, Ohio, on federal charges of enticing minors for illegal sexual activity and traveling with intent to engage in illegal sexual activity with minors. Taylor was arrested and made his initial court appearance on September 14. According to court documents, he served as a youth minister at The Falls Church from 1990 to 2002, where he allegedly groomed and molested multiple boys under the guise of spiritual mentorship — sexual “horseplay,” probing questions about the boys’ private habits, and lurid disclosures about his own. He is said to have taken boys to ministry events in other states and abroad with the intent to abuse them. Investigators trace his alleged grooming and abuse from at least 1990 through 2008, including at two churches in Atlanta. If convicted, he faces the possibility of life in prison. Arraignment is set for September 24 in the Eastern District of Virginia.

But here is the fact most reports have glossed over: when these crimes occurred, The Falls Church was not an Anglican parish at all. It was an Episcopal one.

You can read more here: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/falls-church-abuse-case-a-crime-that-predates-acna

EXILE AND RETURN

Exile and Return: A Pastor’s Reckoning with the Mainline Church. This is the harrowing story of one orthodox priest’s twenty-year ordeal at the hands of revisionist bishops — the dark ecclesiastical back-alleys they inhabit, and how they nearly destroyed the life and ministry of a faithful man.

The Rev. Jacob Dell had a single passion — to be an Episcopal priest. He had the best education money could buy: Yale, Nashotah House, the backing of his father, and, above all, an overwhelming experience of call that came upon him while he was worshipping at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York City. But Dell got the runaround for over twenty years.

He was blue-blood material, the kind of young man the Episcopal Church once said it wanted and needed. He looked the part and could play it. His only problem was that he believed too much. For the “sin” of being faithful to the gospel, he was given the runaround for more than twenty years — marked as a “dead cat,” one of those priests the institution quietly decides to discard, blacklisted by bishops who keep their own private lists. You can read his story here: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/exile-and-return

THE WEST, THE CHURCHES, AND THE FAITH BETRAYED

I wrote a think piece on the state of the West and the churches that inhabit it. Muggeridge saw it. Solzhenitsyn named it. Melanie Phillips is living it. Os Guinness traced it to the root. And the churches, God help us, have joined the demolition crew.

Civilizations, we are told, fall to barbarians at the gate. The truer and more terrible story is that they open the gate themselves, hand the barbarian the torch, and applaud the blaze as an advance in lighting.

Malcolm Muggeridge understood this better than any man of his generation, and he was my friend. He said it with a mordant glee that never quite concealed the grief beneath it: whereas every previous civilization had been brought down by attacks from without, ours had achieved the unique distinction of training its own destroyers at its own educational institutions, then paying, out of the public purse, to broadcast their destructive creed far and wide. What is called Western Civilization, he wrote, is in an advanced state of decomposition, and another Dark Ages will soon be upon us — arriving so gradually, through the steady erosion of our values, that we should scarcely notice the lights going out. He was not describing a foreign invasion. He was describing a suicide. You can read more here: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/a-death-wish-dressed-as-progress

TRINITY LAUNCHES ‘HOLY ORDER’

Ambridge, Pa.-based Trinity Anglican Seminary has announced the launch of Holy Order, a new podcast exploring how Scripture and the Anglican tradition — in all its richness and depth, both catholic and reformed — form Christians for faithful living in a disordered age. Though produced by the seminary, the show is not about Trinity itself. Rather, it extends the seminary’s teaching ministry beyond the classroom, making the formative riches of Scripture and the Anglican tradition more accessible to the wider Church and the world at a time when many are seeking a deeper, more rooted faith. You can read more here: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/trinity-launches-holy-order-a-new-podcast-exploring-faithful-christian-living-in-a-disordered-world

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