What We Brought Across the Line

By David Straw www.virtueonline.org  November 1, 2026

When my wife’s grandmother learned we were engaged, her reaction was pure and uncomplicated. “Good Lord,” she said, “she’s marrying a college-educated Episcopalian. She’s hit the jackpot.” That was 1990. I was still taking some undergraduate classes, and more than fifteen years away from ordination.

My parents had raised me in the Episcopal Church. My family lived in a neighborhood called Country Club Estates. The house was paid for. My parents owned more than one business and put me through a state college without borrowing a dime; the agreement was that I worked to pay for my books and fees. By ordinary American standards, we were very comfortable. Inside our parish, though, we were the poorest family that regularly showed up. That never seemed remarkable. It was simply the air we breathed.

The Episcopal Church was still the denomination associated with the most respectable people, the place where families of a certain education and social standing naturally belonged. It was also a denomination that often went to the beat of its own drummer. It did not necessarily have the same priorities as a lot of other denominations. My dad once joked, “We’re devout Episcopalians. We make it to church close to two dozen times a year.” Back in the 1940s there were discussions about whether Episcopal bishops should be taking two-month vacations. I never lived up to my wife’s grandmother’s billing.

I spent twenty years working for the Indiana Department of Child Services. The rest of my working life has been in ordained ministry and medical case management. I chose to work in the so-called helping professions, where the help is generous and the pay is usually not. I do not feel bad about it. That is often the trade-off when one follows the path I chose. The Episcopal Church that earned the reputation my wife’s grandmother noted so memorably did not survive. Somewhere along the way the currency that the church ran on actually changed. Flaunting wealth and knowing which forks to use at dinner gave way to flaunting political ideology.

Some of the old instincts remained, like, “We all know Fr. Smith has some heretical theology, but he comes from such a good family and his father is a bishop,” but the court of appeal changed. New teachings were no longer judged first by whether they belonged to the faith once delivered to the saints. The question became whether they fit the moral assumptions and political convictions of the present moment. The endowments that once paid for beautiful buildings and educated clergy also insulated those clergy from the people in the pews.

When the bills are paid by dead people’s money, there is little incentive to listen carefully to the living. In the 1990s, questionnaires sent out by the denomination elicited requests for more biblical and educational curriculum; those requests were met instead with more social-justice initiatives and progressive politics, even as attendance and membership continued their long decline. Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century the very purpose of the Church itself began to shift. Saving souls from the fires of hell gave way to whatever was the political flavor of the week.

The problem is that progressive politics has a short shelf life. Once a church becomes a vehicle for it, the church must keep chasing the next cause or risk looking outdated.

Instead of listening to St. Paul tell us to run the race to win an imperishable crown, we were given a social and political treadmill with no finish line. The Episcopal Church was never built for that. It was built for faithful adherence to Scripture, the Articles, the Creeds, and the steady rhythms of the Book of Common Prayer and the Lectionary. When the final break came in 2008-2009, many of us who left thought we were escaping the whole project. In 2026 I am a whole lot less certain.

We changed national churches faster than we changed formation. So what did we actually bring with us? What crossed the line into the Anglican Church in North America was not only a group of bishops and congregations who rejected the progressive trajectory. In my experience, some of those who left were progressives who simply drew a personal line at the blessing of same-sex unions.

They brought with them the same historical-critical assumptions about Scripture, the same comfort with institutional culture, and the same progressive way of reading the faith, only under a different banner. Others came out of the renewal movements, and that is a different story.

Two of those imports have caused real trouble. They did not come from the same place, but they share the same flaw. The first is three-streams theology. Evangelical, Anglo-Catholic, and charismatic are treated as coequal foundations of Anglican identity. I want to be fair. I have seen miracles. I believe God acts in our lives. I am open to anointing, healing, and prayer for miracles. Some of the finest Christians I have ever known are charismatics, and a great many of them sit in our pews. On some level I believe in a great deal of what they are saying.

I would never tell anyone to stop praying or believing that way. But being open to something is not the same thing as making it a foundation. The catholic order of the ancient Church and the confession of the Reformation have formularies, creeds, and centuries of tested practice behind them. The charismatic movement is a modern renewal movement. Whatever good it has done, it does not possess the historical continuity or confessional standing of the ancient Church or the Reformation.

There is a place for it in the life of the Church. It should be welcomed and tested, not placed on the same footing as what the Church has received. What we do together on Sunday morning is common prayer. Experience, however real, is not a new source of doctrine or an independent court of appeal. The gifts are as old as Pentecost. The particular modern charismatic movement really isn’t. While more traditionally minded Anglicans argue about which Prayer Book to use, some ACNA churches have simply jettisoned the idea of a Prayer Book altogether. I look at that the same way that I once looked at a young college graduate who informed me, “I am more of an authoritarian liberal,” with complete and utter confusion.

The second import is women’s ordination, treated in many quarters of the ACNA as settled and non-negotiable. Defenders point to Junia, Phoebe, and Galatians 3:28. They argue that they are recovering something older, not following the culture. I understand the argument. I am just not persuaded by it. For nearly two thousand years, across East and West, the Church’s presbyterate and episcopate remained firmly male. That consistency does not end the argument, but it most certainly should establish the burden of proof. Those who would alter the received order must show from Scripture and the apostolic faith why the historic Church was mistaken. An appeal to historical progress, or to the Spirit’s present activity, cannot by itself establish that a proposed change is faithful to apostolic teaching. So a large number of people woke up in the mid twentieth century and declared that a system that had been handed down from those trained by Jesus Himself and endured for two millennia had been getting this wrong all along, and that they had finally figured out what Jesus really taught.

That is a lot of faith to put in a single generation. Now, some who support women’s ordination get there through careful study of Scripture and not through culture, and I do not doubt their sincerity. But most of the time the argument is made through an appeal to justice, a claim that the Spirit is doing a new thing, or a reading of Scripture that subordinates its received meaning to cultural development. Made that way, it is the same interpretive toolbox used to defend same-sex marriage.

The conclusions are different, but the underlying question is the same: Does the Church receive a faith that judges every age, or does each age acquire the authority to revise that faith? For many who left the Episcopal Church, women’s ordination stopped being a question on its own. It became a sign of the larger drift. That association still shapes how people understand authority in the Church.

These two imports are not identical, but they expose a common danger. One appeal says, in effect, “The Spirit is certifying this now.” The other says, “History is moving, and the Spirit is certifying the direction.” When either becomes a reason to set aside the received faith, the present begins to certify itself, and the Church is left without a norm capable of correcting it. It is the same kind of problem that hollowed out the Episcopal Church. I do not say this as an outsider. I crossed that line too, and I am not entirely sure I left behind everything I meant to.

Recent attendance numbers have produced a certain amount of self-congratulation. More concerning is which dioceses are posting the strongest growth. In the Diocese of the Great Lakes a man who has said he intends to be an advocate for women priests in the College of Bishops was elected bishop coadjutor.

In Churches for the Sake of Others, one of the largest dioceses, Kris McDaniel has been put forward as the sole nominee for suffragan bishop. In 2015 he invited people to the Table regardless of sexual conduct. He has since said he “spoke too broadly.” I take him at his word. I do not see how a growing progressive wing avoids the question that forced the formation of the ACNA in the first place. Yes, we are growing. But if the parts of us that are growing the quickest are not that different from the Episcopal Church, what have we accomplished? After all, the Episcopal Church had numerous generations behind it and a carefully built identity that comes with the passage of time. It had the social and intellectual elite. It had the legitimacy of being the unofficial official national church, and presidents still have their state funerals at its National Cathedral.

What does the ACNA have? Scripture and two thousand years of Church tradition, if we hold to them. If we adopt the same modern progressivism that has gutted the Episcopal Church, the PCUSA, the ELCA, and a host of others, we will have neither. Popularity has never been a reliable test of truth. In the generation after the Civil War, Spiritualism attracted millions of followers, including a First Lady, through séances and the promise of communication with the dead. It surged again after the First World War before dwindling to a handful of small societies. The point is not that every popular movement will eventually disappear. It is that popularity cannot establish the truth of its claims.

The Church of England once examined Spiritualism. Archbishop Lang appointed a committee; when it reported in 1939 the bishops kept the report private rather than give the movement a standing it had not earned. Three-streams theology deserves that same scrutiny. Anglicanism makes a different kind of claim. It understands itself as the continuation of the Church in England from the early centuries to the present. The English Reformation was not a destruction; it was a rescue mission. Bishop George Bull put it this way in the preface to his Vindication of the Church of England: the Church of England “was not erected anew, but only reformed, purged from the corruptions with which it had been defiled for many ages.”

The Reformers did not invent a new faith. They sought to reclaim and restore what the early Church had believed and practiced, purging accretions so that the ancient faith could be held more purely. That is a claim of continuity, not novelty. Its truth cannot be measured by headcount. Old-style low-church evangelicals and traditional Anglo Catholics have lived together in the same church for a long time. They have disagreed about real things, sometimes fiercely. Yet both understood themselves to be answerable to a faith they had received, not one they were free to invent. Both know that the Church is judged by a standard outside itself.

Both know that the Thirty-Nine Articles are living standards, not historical curiosities, and that the Prayer Book, the Creeds, and the plain sense of Scripture are not optional ornaments. The fault lines that matter most today are the ones that redefine the Church’s authority: making charismatic experience a foundational stream and treating women’s ordination as irreversible progress. The common ground is still wide enough to hold us. It is the ground worth defending. Until the ACNA settles the authority question, it remains vulnerable to the same slow emptying that overtook the Episcopal Church. Are Scripture and the historic order the fixed norm? Or can the Church revise its received teaching whenever someone says the Spirit is doing something new?

Three-streams theology papers over that question. It cannot answer it. I want to be clear about something. Unlike some other traditionalist clergy, who are more or less through with the ACNA, I am not. I want it to survive. I think we need it. It would be much healthier for us to have a strong national church, made up of a decent number of people and recognized by the GAFCON primates. I really do like the idea of what the ACNA could be, and that is why this is hard to write. Here is the problem. In 2009 we broke away from the Episcopal Church to form the Anglican Church in North America.

In my observation, the progressive side is gaining ground again. How do you stand against that? I do not have a complete answer. I just know the question has to be asked out loud. I still believe Anglicanism, at its best, is an expression of the ancient Church, which holds itself accountable to Scripture and Tradition outside itself. Living it is also very doable for the average person: Go to church. Use the Prayer Book. Hear the Scriptures. Say the Creed. Try to live as though those things are true. Our Reformation tradition has always been willing to be small, poor, and serious rather than large and compromised. A remnant that recovers confessional Anglicanism is still possible. That is the through-line worth fighting for. Everything else is just the long echo of what we brought across the line.

The Rev. David Straw is Rector of Trinity Anglican Church (ACNA/REC) in Evansville. He is a church planter who has helped plant three Anglican churches He was ordained to the diaconate in 2007 and to the priesthood in 2008. He is a graduate of Wesley Seminary. He and his wife have been married for nearly 35 years and have four children.