Wagons in a Circle: The Architect Defends the Archbishop

On Bishop Phil Ashey’s May 4 Video Concerning Archbishop Stephen Wood’s Trial 

By A Concerned Anglican www.virtueonline.org                                                                                                                          May 9, 2026

On the eve of Archbishop Stephen Wood’s ecclesiastical trial, the Right Reverend Phil Ashey, styled by The Living Church as one of the original architects of the Anglican Church in North America’s canons, has released a video predicting that Archbishop Wood will be exonerated. Summarized in VirtueOnline on May 4, 2026, the video presents itself as the measured reflection of a canonical lawyer concerned with due process. Read against the documentary record now established in the Wood matter, and against the ACNA’s recent history of episcopal discipline, it reads as something else: an institutional defense in the dignified register of canonical jurisprudence, offered by the man who helped build the very canons whose selective enforcement is the substance of the present scandal. That this would happen is, regrettably, not surprising. It is the pattern.

What Bishop Ashey Said — and What He Did Not

Bishop Ashey addressed only the sexual misconduct charges, setting aside the additional allegations of misuse of church funds, plagiarism of sermons, and bullying of clergy and staff that the Board of Inquiry found probable cause to send to trial. He raised the question of how anyone could fairly respond to allegations from an unnamed accuser, recounted that the complainants “went to the Washington Post” after bishops declined to sponsor the presentment, and questioned why Archbishop Wood was formally inhibited after voluntarily stepping aside. He predicted that, in light of press coverage, there is “a good chance” Archbishop Wood will be exonerated, and described himself as a canonical volunteer who may be at the Archbishop’s side during the proceedings.

What he did not say is at least as significant. He did not address the sworn affidavit of the Reverend Andrew Gross, the ACNA’s former director of communications, alleging that Archbishop Wood and the then‑Dean of the Province had previously discussed appointing a “bishop‑friendly” Board of Inquiry should charges ever come, or Mr. Gross’s further allegation that the Archbishop offered to “secretly contribute” ten thousand dollars to send a priest on sabbatical out of fear that priest would file. He did not address the Provincial Office’s two‑week refusal to accept the original presentment on a procedural pretext found nowhere in the canons, the complainants’ documented yearlong effort to secure episcopal sponsors, or the invention of a “new provincial policy” referring complaints to a Director of Safeguarding whose office has no canonical standing, canons Bishop Ashey himself helped draft. Bishop Chip Edgar of South Carolina has publicly called for the College of Bishops to apologize for “disparaging statements” about the complainants. None of this appears in the canonical analysis offered on the eve of trial. Its omission is not neutrality. It is curation.

The Architect Defends the Architecture

Bishop Ashey drafted Title I, Canon 11, the Special Jurisdiction provision under which the ACNA insisted that the Jurisdiction of the Armed Forces and Chaplaincy could not lawfully disassociate from the province, and under which the Archbishop continued to claim jurisdiction over Bishop Derek Jones after that disassociation. The canon Bishop Ashey drafted is the canon the institution turned, in 2025, against the bishop who criticized its leadership. The man who built the discipline machinery is now offering, in advance of trial, the institutional argument for why its application to the Archbishop will be unfair, even as the same machinery, applied to a critic, was unfair in ways the institution has not acknowledged. The architecture is being defended by the architect at precisely the moment it is failing in the direction the architect would prefer it not be observed to fail.

Title IV as Directional Weapon

The pattern is visible in three cases. In the Diocese of the Upper Midwest, Bishop Stewart Ruch’s presentment arose from his diocese’s mishandling of clergy abuse disclosures. Survivors and advocates waited years for canonical engagement; when the trial came, its defensive institutional posture was widely received, even within the ACNA, as functioning to insulate the institution rather than deliver accountability.

Bishop Derek Jones, having publicly criticized the Archbishop’s office and having declined, on the canonical advice of the JAFC chancellor to submit to an investigation that violated Title IV’s own requirements, was met with what JAFC has called an unlawful and extracanonical process. Bishop Jones resigned from the College of Bishops. JAFC, a corporate entity older than the ACNA itself, with its own federal nonprofit status and endorsing authority, voted to disassociate from the province. It was after that disassociation that the Archbishop purported to inhibit Bishop Jones. There is no canonical theory under which a province’s Archbishop retains jurisdiction over a bishop whose endorsing body has departed; the inhibition was, on its face, institutional retaliation rather than ecclesiastical discipline. JAFC has filed federal litigation. Bishop Ashey has not been heard publicly raising due‑process concerns on Bishop Jones’s behalf.

In the Wood matter, the institutional response to sworn affidavits and a documented chronology of credible complaint was a yearlong refusal at the level of individual bishops to sponsor the canonical complaint, an invention of a “new provincial policy” referring it to an office with no canonical standing, and a procedural refusal at the level of the Provincial Office to accept the resubmitted complaint on a pretext. Only after sustained external pressure did the canonical process engage. Now, weeks before trial, the canonical architect of the province offers a public prediction of exoneration.

Title IV moves slowly or not at all when allegations point upward toward the institutional center. It moves swiftly and aggressively when allegations, or critiques, or the mere fact of departure, point outward toward the periphery. The canons function not as an even instrument of discipline but as a directional weapon. That is the meaning of wagons in a circle.

Whose Suffering Counts?

Across these proceedings, from the survivors in the Diocese of the Upper Midwest, to Claire Buxton and the second complainant in the Wood matter, to the chaplains and their families harmed by the inhibition of their endorser, a consistent feature of the institutional response has been the centering of bishops’ reputations and the marginalization of those whom bishops have wronged. Bishop Ashey’s framing—the trial as primarily a question of damage already done to the Archbishop’s reputation by press coverage—is itself an artifact of that pastoral inversion. The complainants appear in his analysis only as procedural irritants whose decision to involve a journalist has now created a fairness problem for the accused. This is not how a church grounded in patristic consensus understands the moral weight of accusation. It is, however, how an institution under reputational threat speaks when its central concern is institutional survival.

The Predictable Defense

The ACNA was formed, in part, on the conviction that the Episcopal Church’s discipline mechanisms had become instruments of partisan and institutional control rather than instruments of moral accountability. That critique was not wrong. The tragedy is that the province built to remedy it has, in its first generation, replicated precisely the pattern it was constituted to repudiate, differing only in the direction of the bias. The canons can be read either way; the institutional culture determines how they are enforced. And that culture, as the Wood matter illustrates, is one in which the architects of the system rise to defend the system’s most senior figures at the moment of greatest exposure, while the same architects were silent when the system was deployed punitively against bishops who criticized those figures.

The trial begins July 20, 2026. Faithful Anglicans should refuse the framing Bishop Ashey’s video has begun to establish. The central question is not whether press coverage has compromised due process. It is whether the conduct alleged occurred, and if it did, what the canonical and pastoral consequences must be. The Anglican tradition rests on on what the church has always confessed, everywhere, by all. The pattern of the ancient and undivided church is one in which discipline runs in every direction, including upward, and in which the protection of the vulnerable is not subordinated to the reputation of the great. The ACNA’s present moment falls measurably short of that standard. Wagons in a circle protect what is inside them. They also enclose. The question for the wider Anglican world, watching this trial approach, is whether to remain inside the circle, or to recognize that the circle was drawn to keep some things out and some persons in, and to look elsewhere, at last, for a more honest expression of Anglican faith and discipline.

Submitted under pseudonym to protect the author and those they serve.