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By Jon Brown, I Christian Post Reporter I March 05, 2026 A recent survey of American adults found that despite a surge of interest in Christianity and church attendance in the months since Charlie Kirk's assassination, the number of people who adhere to a biblical worldview remains critically low, including just 1% of Gen Z. Conducted in January by Arizona Christian University's Cultural Research Center under the guidance of researcher George Barna, the latest installment of the American Worldview Inventory asked 2,000 American adults a series of 53 questions to discern if they live consistently with a biblical worldview. "The survey results indicate that despite the increased attention given to faith matters after the Charlie Kirk murder, and the growth in church attendance and individuals purchasing Bibles immediately after that incident, there is no hint of improvement when it comes to biblical worldview," the survey said. The results found that only 4% of Americans overall possess "religious beliefs and worldview-related behaviors ... consistent with biblical principles, beliefs and behavior," according to a demographic the survey called "Integrated Disciples." Ten percent qualified as "Emergent Followers," defined as those whose biblical worldview is marked by syncretism. The vast majority — 85% — classified as "World Citizens," who might have some beliefs and behaviors consistent with a biblical worldview, but overall adhere to something else. The last category has grown 16 percentage points from the 69% measured in 2020. Rates were especially low among young people, and the survey found a large age gap among the generations. Among Gen Z adults, only 1% had a biblical worldview, compared to 2% of millennials, and 7% of Gen X, baby boomers, and those older. A segment of the survey examined the effect of church attendance on a biblical worldview and found that the rate of "Integrated Disciples" among Evangelical churchgoers has plummeted in recent years, from 21% in 2020 to 11% this year. Evangelical churchgoers were only modestly more likely to have a biblical worldview compared to those who attend churches that don't generally believe that Jesus Christ is the only means to salvation or that the Bible is the Word of God and a reliable guide for life. The survey found that 53% of self-identified Christian respondents classified as "Notional Christians," which the survey defined as those who do not believe that salvation comes through a personal confession of sin and acceptance of Jesus Christ as Savior. The survey also saw a strong correlation between biblical worldview and political orientation, with 12% of political conservatives possessing one, compared to only 1% of moderates and 1% of liberals. Even among conservatives, the rate has dropped from 16% in 2020. Among those who identify as LGBT, only one-half of one percent had a biblical worldview, compared to 5% who identify as straight. Commenting on the results of the AWI 2026 survey, Barna said "the fate of our nation hangs in the balance" and that "the national divide is an indication of the spiritual battle for the soul of America." Describing the situation as "urgent," Barna warned that Americans are losing their historically Christian culture, and that with just 1% of Gen Z exhibiting a biblical worldview, it potentially faces "extinction" if trends are not reversed. "Make no mistake about it, we are losing American society and all that it has historically represented because we have succumbed to the influence of the culture instead of the exhortations and promises of God," he said. "Entertainment and media messages as well as public policies and errant public education have distorted the thinking and behavior of our young people." Barna suggested that even though the numbers remain sobering, the fact that they haven't continued to decline might offer hope that improvement is on the horizon. "A quarter century ago, 12% of the adult population held a biblical worldview," he said. "Since then, we have seen a steady reduction in that incidence. We reached a low point — 4% — in 2023." "The fact that we have not plumbed new depths since then hopefully suggests that we have bottomed out and are in line to experience positive growth in biblical thought and action." According to recent data from Pew Research Center's Religious Landscape Study analyzed by Lifeway Research, younger members of Gen Z — those born 2003 to 2007 — report higher levels of religious engagement than slightly older peers born between 1995 and 2002, pointing to a possible shift. Among that group, 61% identify with a religion, 35% pray daily, 37% say religion is very important in their lives and 41% attend services at least monthly. END

The following communiqué was issued at the National Church Denominational Leaders Summit 2026 against a backdrop of worsening insecurity, Muslim extremism, kidnappings, abductions and the killing of Christians by Boko Haram and other extremist Muslim groups. From: Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) 1.⁠ ⁠PREAMBLE The Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) convened the National Church Denominational Leaders Summit 2026 to prayerfully review the state of the nation and chart a collective path towards peace, justice, security and national renewal. The Summit took place against the backdrop of worsening insecurity, economic hardship, declining public confidence in state institutions, growing social fragmentation, and increasing threats to the lives, dignity and well-being of Nigerians. Participants deliberated extensively on the challenges confronting the nation and the Church and resolved to speak with one voice in defense of truth, justice, human dignity and the sanctity of life. 2.⁠ ⁠CHALLENGES THAT LED TO THE SUMMIT The Summit was convened amid an unprecedented wave of violence sweeping across the country. Communities are under attack, citizens are kidnapped from their homes and places of work, travelers are abducted on highways, farmers are driven from their lands, while innocent men, women and children are killed, maimed, displaced and, in some cases, brutally beheaded by criminal and terrorist elements. Participants noted with deep concern the growing attacks on churches, schools and vulnerable communities, the increasing sophistication of criminal networks, and the apparent inability of existing security arrangements to provide adequate protection for citizens. The Summit further observed that thousands of Nigerians remain displaced from their ancestral communities, many families continue to live in fear, and victims of violence often receive little support, justice or compensation. 3.⁠ ⁠ATTENDANCE The Summit was attended by leaders of Christian denominations and blocs across Nigeria, including representatives of the Catholic Secretariat of Nigeria, Christian Council of Nigeria, Christian Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria, Organisation of African Instituted Churches, TEKAN/ECWA and other member bodies of CAN, alongside church administrators, legal practitioners, security experts and Christian leaders from across the six geopolitical zones. 4.⁠ ⁠CHALLENGES FACING NIGERIA AND THE CHURCH The Summit expressed grave concern over the deteriorating security situation across the country and recalled recent incidents of mass abductions, killings and attacks in Oyo, Ogun, Borno, Kwara, Kogi and other states. Participants noted with particular concern the abduction of schoolchildren and teachers, attacks on farming communities, continued terrorist activities in parts of the North-East, and the spread of kidnapping and violent crime into areas previously considered relatively safe. The Summit lamented the loss of countless lives, the destruction of livelihoods, the displacement of communities and the deep trauma inflicted on victims and their families. Participants warned that the continuing assault on human life, freedom and dignity poses a serious threat to national stability, unity and development. 5.⁠ ⁠RESOLUTIONS Following extensive deliberations, CAN resolved as follows: 5.1 CAN expresses profound alarm over the escalating violence across Nigeria, including killings, kidnappings, abductions, terrorist attacks and the destruction of communities. CAN condemns in the strongest terms the barbaric acts of murder, beheading, torture, rape, abduction and forced displacement being perpetrated against innocent citizens, and called on the Federal Government to declare a State of Emergency on Security across the country. 5.2 CAN reminds the Federal Government that the protection of lives and property remains its foremost constitutional responsibility and demanded urgent, decisive and measurable action to halt the bloodshed and restore public confidence. 5.3 CAN calls for a comprehensive review of the nation's security architecture, enhanced intelligence gathering, stronger inter-agency cooperation, improved operational effectiveness and greater accountability in the fight against terrorism, banditry and violent crime. 5.4 CAN calls for the immediate acceleration of constitutional and legislative processes leading to the establishment of State Police and other lawful decentralized security structures capable of improving intelligence gathering, rapid response and local accountability. 5.5 CAN urges stronger collaboration among government institutions, security agencies, faith-based organizations, traditional rulers, civil society groups and local communities to confront the growing threats to national peace and stability. 5.6 CAN demands the immediate and unconditional release of all abducted schoolchildren, teachers and other citizens currently held captive by criminal elements across the country and calls on security agencies to intensify rescue efforts until every victim regains freedom. 5.7 CAN calls on churches across the country to strengthen support systems for victims of violence, displaced persons and affected communities through humanitarian assistance, trauma care, peacebuilding initiatives, youth engagement programmes and public awareness campaigns. 5.8 CAN demands the establishment of a comprehensive compensation, rehabilitation and resettlement programme for victims of terrorism, kidnapping and violent attacks. Families who have lost loved ones, persons who have suffered permanent injuries, and communities whose homes, schools, churches and livelihoods have been destroyed deserve justice, support and restoration. 5.9 CAN further demands the safe return, protection and resettlement of displaced persons in their ancestral communities under adequate security guarantees. 5.10 CAN affirms that prayer must be matched with action and resolves to intensify advocacy, civic engagement and sustained dialogue with the Presidency, security agencies, the National Assembly and other relevant stakeholders. 5.11 CAN declares Friday, June 12, as the commencement of a three-day period of national mourning, to continue through Sunday, June 14, 2026. CAN further designates Sunday, June 14, 2026, as BLACK SUNDAY across churches in Nigeria in honour of victims of violence and in solidarity with families affected by insecurity. 5.12 CAN expresses grave concern that political calculations, defections and premature electioneering activities continue while many communities remain under siege. CAN therefore calls on political leaders and parties to suspend divisive political distractions and focus national attention on restoring security, protecting citizens and rebuilding public confidence. 5.13 CAN calls on the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), Nigeria Union of Teachers (NUT), student bodies, civil society organisations, professional associations, traditional institutions and all people of goodwill to join Christian Association of Nigeria in holding government accountable and ensuring a sustained commitment to securing lives and property. 5.14 CAN reaffirmed its commitment to Christian unity, peace, justice and the defence of human dignity. 5.15 CAN calls on all Nigerians, irrespective of ethnicity, religion or political affiliation, to unite in defence of human life, national security and the common good, recognising that the current security crisis constitutes a collective national emergency requiring urgent and coordinated action. 5.16 CAN notes with concern the apparent inadequacy of intelligence gathering and coordination mechanisms and criticizes recurring resort to conciliatory and pacifist rhetoric by senior government officials in response to grave security threats. CAN urges a more decisive, proactive and results-oriented approach to national security. CONCLUSION The Summit expresses profound appreciation to all Church leaders, bloc leaders, denominational leaders, delegates and participants from across the country for their commitment, unity, courage and patriotism in responding to the urgent challenges confronting the nation. Their frank contributions, collective wisdom and unwavering dedication to the cause of peace, justice, security and national renewal enriched the deliberations and outcomes of the Summit.. Church leaders reaffirms their resolve to remain united, vigilant and steadfast in prayer, advocacy and constructive engagement for the good of Nigeria, while trusting God to guide the nation towards peace, security, justice and lasting prosperity. Signed by the CAN President, His Eminence Archbishop Daniel Okoh.

What It Would Look Like for the U.S. Church to Be Twelve-Stepped By Jerry Kramer I www.virtueonline.org I June 1, 2026 Step One Love Shows Up Recovery does not begin with a program. It begins with an admission. Before an addict can be helped, he has to say the one sentence he has spent years avoiding: I have a problem, and I cannot fix it myself. The American church has a problem — rapid decline and deep unhealthiness — and it has spent forty years refusing to say so. What follows is the twelve-step arc applied to the institution itself: the church in the chair, not the church running the meeting. The Admission 1 We admit we are powerless — and that the life of the institution has become unmanageable. The church admits it is in rapid, measurable decline and is spiritually sick — and stops spinning it. No more reading the plateau as recovery. No more “headwinds.” No more clergy near-unanimously certain their own congregation is the exception. It says plainly what the data says: a net gain of roughly three hundred congregations a year against a growing population; some 176,000 closures coming by 2050; a funding base dying with the Boomers; young people leaving by the million.[1] The figures are not an attack. They are the intervention. Until the church can say we have a problem with no defense lawyer in the room, nothing else on this list is available to it. This is the step it has refused longest. Getting Into the Solution 2 We come to believe that only God can restore us to sanity. Recovery: a Power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity. — Insanity, the rooms say, is repeating the same act and expecting a different result. The church has spent two generations doing more of precisely what produced the decline — sharper branding, bigger programs, harder politics, another charismatic leader — and waiting for revival to arrive. Sanity begins by stopping. It comes to believe again that life is God’s work, received on God’s terms, and not a strategy the institution executes. 3 We surrender the church itself — the Kingdom is the goal. Recovery: we turn our will and our lives over to the care of God. — It surrenders the thing it has clutched hardest of all: the church itself. Somewhere the means quietly became the end, and the institution began to labor for its own survival as though the church were the point. It is not. The Kingdom of God is the goal; the church is how God brings us there — the vehicle, not the destination. To turn its will over to God is to hold the institution loosely again — ready to spend it, reshape it, even lose its familiar forms — for the sake of the Kingdom it was only ever meant to serve. 4 We make a searching and fearless inventory. Recovery: a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. — Not a narrative — an audit. The church writes down the actual wreckage: complicity in abuse and its concealment; the idolatry of size, money, and political power; clericalism and consumerism; a half-preached gospel that asked for decisions but never formed disciples; congregations built to produce church members and attenders rather than reproducing followers of Jesus; and, beneath all of it, the quiet abandonment of the Great Commission as the church’s organizing priority. It counts the cost it has caused. This is the humbling on which 2 Chronicles 7:14 hangs the whole promise of healing: if my people … shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven … and will heal their land. The healing is promised — but it is conditioned on the turning, and there is no turning from what has never been named. The inventory is where the humbling stops being a slogan and becomes specific. 5 We confess the exact nature of the wrongs. Recovery: admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being. — Public confession, not a press release. The church names specific sins out loud — to God, to itself, and to the people it actually harmed — and it says the hardest sentence first: our priorities have not been God’s priorities. 6 We become ready to have these defects removed. Recovery: entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character. — Willingness to lose even the load-bearing defects: the addiction to attendance metrics, to the donor-driven model, to political identity, to the strongman pastor. Ready to be changed, not merely forgiven. 7 We humbly ask Him to remove our shortcomings. Recovery: humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings. — Repentance as a permanent posture — the exact opposite of the persecution complex and the triumphalism. Among the first things repented of: that the church made the Great Commission optional — a department, a budget line, a missions Sunday — rather than the reason it exists. Humility in the place of grievance. 8 We list all we have harmed and become willing to make it right. Recovery: made a list of all persons we had harmed. — It names them: abuse survivors; the spiritually wounded; the de-churched it drove out; communities it exploited; a watching world it scandalized. And it becomes willing — the step before action. 9 We make direct amends wherever possible. Recovery: made direct amends to such people wherever possible. — Costly, concrete restitution. Independent abuse investigations with teeth; restoring the silenced; telling the truth publicly; returning what was taken. The amends an institution can least afford are exactly the ones that prove it is sober. 10 We keep taking inventory and admit wrong promptly. Recovery: continued to take personal inventory and promptly admitted it. — Reckoning built into the polity itself — permanent transparency, structures that surface wrong early, rather than structures engineered to protect the institution. A church that can correct itself, instead of one built to defend itself. 11 We recover the interior life. Recovery: sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God. — The Office, contemplation, sacrament, and Scripture restored above activism and administration. The church’s program-driven hyperactivity was itself a symptom of the disease. It learns to abide before it acts. 12 Having been awakened, we carry the message — in all our affairs. Recovery: having had a spiritual awakening, we carry this message and practice these principles in all our affairs. — The fruit is mission. A recovered church becomes apostolic again — planting, multiplying, sending, which is the one thing the evidence shows still grows. And in all our affairs is the sting: not a recovery program bolted onto the same institution, but a wholly new way of being the church. This is where getting into the solution finally lands — the movement, not the maintenance. Sanity: Stop What Isn’t Working Recovery is not only confession; it is changed behavior. Sobriety asks the church to do two concrete things, and in this order. First — stop what isn’t working. Stop measuring health by attendance and budget. Stop importing the corporate growth model and the attractional, consumer-driven service as the engine of mission. Stop gating ministry behind seminary credentials and professional clergy. Stop treating the maintenance of buildings and bureaucracy as the work itself. Stop chasing cultural relevance and political leverage as if either ever raised the dead. None of it produced life; all of it produced the table of decline. To keep doing it and expect revival is the very insanity Step Two names. Then — pursue the healthy practices that bear fruit. The church relearns the pattern God actually blesses, and practices it until it becomes habit. It recovers the complete gospel — not forgiveness offered without lordship, but the whole call to die and rise with Christ — because only the complete gospel forms healthy, multiplying disciples. It sets out to make disciples, not church members: followers who obey Jesus and teach others to obey, counted by reproduction rather than by seating. Its practices are simple, obedience-based, and local; its ministry lay-empowered rather than credential-gated; its authority relational and polycentric rather than top-down and self-protective. Underneath all of it, dependence on the Holy Spirit and the Word in place of the institution’s own machinery — with the Great Commission restored to the center as the very reason the church exists. This is what Step Eleven means in practice: to seek only knowledge of His will and the power to carry it out — and then to carry it out. This is no innovation; it is a return to the church we already see in the Book of Acts — Spirit-filled, multiplying, ordering everything around the Kingdom. It is also, not coincidentally, the one shape of church the evidence still shows growing today. A Sign of Hope — and a Warning There is, already, a flicker. A small but real turning among the young — Gen Z, and disproportionately young men — back toward the older and sturdier rooms of the faith: liturgy, sacrament, the historic and established churches rather than the next new thing. After two generations of exodus, even a flicker is worth naming, and it is real cause for hope. But a flicker is not yet a fire, and hope is not the same as readiness. If this is the leading edge of something broader — a true and wider revival — the sobering question is whether the church is in any condition to receive it. An institution that has not done its inventory cannot steward an awakening; it will only pour new wine into the same cracked skins. The honest response to the first signs of life is not to congratulate ourselves that the tide has turned. It is to get well now — to do the work of Steps One through Eleven — so that when more come, there is a healthy, multiplying church for them to come home to. Revival will find us as we are. The time to prepare for it is before it arrives. The Shape of the Whole Thing Steps 1–3 are surrender. Steps 4–9 are the painful housecleaning the church keeps trying to skip. Steps 10–11 are how it stays well. Step 12 is the apostolic multiplication that was the point all along. The reason the church cannot reach the growth of Step Twelve is that it will not do the admitting of Step One, the amends of Steps Eight and Nine, or the plain repentance of ceasing what does not work. It wants the awakening without the inventory. No addict is offered that deal — and neither is an institution. LOVE SHOWS UP loveshowsup.net [1]Figures from the companion brief, The Stabilized Decline: net U.S. congregational growth of ~300 per year and ~176,000 projected closures by 2050 (Pinetops Foundation, 2018); Boomer giving concentration and die-off (Church Answers / FaithFi, 2023–24); generational attrition and the ~94% of pastors expecting their church to survive (Pew Research Center, 2025; Lifeway Research, 2025). Full citations appear in that document.

By Chuck Collins I www.virtueonline.org I June 1, 2026 Anglicans can’t avoid the 16th century Reformation. It’s more than the elephant in the room; it’s the room! Ashley Null wrote this about the man who composed the Book of Common Prayer, the confession for the Church of England (The Articles of Religion), and compiled the Homilies library: “Thomas Cranmer devoted the full powers of his position as Primate of All England to inculcating the Protestant faith into every fibre of English life.” Whether or not he was successful is the question that literally colors our view of English church history, and quite literally determines Anglican worship and the way we think about God and his church. Anglican identity, the perennial crisis facing us, hinges on how we see the elephant room. There are three big-picture ways Anglicans have dealt with the Protestant Reformation. The most prevalent group in American Anglicanism today sees the Reformation as a mistake, an unfortunate distraction from the true catholic church. They see it as a temporary historical deviation from some amorphous sense of a “great tradition.” The great tradition, or some sense of common consensual Christianity (usually described as the church fathers, creeds and councils), took a leave-of-absence in the period from Archbishop Cranmer to Archbishop William Laud to clean up a few obvious Medieval mistakes, so that the Laud and the Caroline divines could pick up where the church left off before King Edward VI. This group views Scripture as the birth-child of the church and therefore it is a co-equal authority with tradition, they prefer the altar to the pulpit, see salvation as a cooperative venture between God and man, and they consider the sacraments (they usually identify seven of them) as automatic purveyors of God’s grace whether or not faith is present. Some will hang out the banner of “catholic and reformed” erroneously borrowing the phrase from William Perkins without any reference to Perkins, and as a euphemism for “Laudian catholic.” Many in this group identify with the Anglo-Catholic preferences for high church ceremonial they call “the beauty of holiness” (John Keble). They almost always introduce themselves, and their families introduce them, as “father,” and they are unusually fond of putting a “+” before or after their names when writing emails. This group will eventually consider Roman Catholicism, and they would convert if it wasn’t for the pope and the pesky sex abuse scandals. A second group speaks of a long Reformation: beginning with Wycliffe, Tyndale and Cranmer, but continues along the road of history picking up the Caroline divines and anyone else they fancy, up to our own day. They reference the English reformers who spoke of the church always reforming herself (ecclesia semper reformanda est), but in a completely different context from what the reformers intended. These folks see Scripture as a co-equal authority with reason, a Schleirmacherian marriage of convenience between the Enlightenment and traditional Protestantism. They consider Anglican theology as a buffet of attractive choices to pick and choose from: theologians, movements, sweet pickle relish from the state of Washington, and whatever else tickles their fancy. These folks emphasize the generosity of our Anglican heritage over any particularities or distinctives. This second group makes plenty of room for such aberrations as the three-legged stool (Scripture, tradition and reason), Instruments of Unity (rather than the true instruments of unity: Anglican formularies), and three-streams (catholic, protestant and pentecostal). In this way, the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) has become the Episcopal Church without the nastier sins. The last group considers the English Reformation as determinative for Anglican identity. They see the reigns of King Edward VI and Queen Elizabeth as critical for what is called “the Settlement” or “the Elizabethan Settlement.” The Settlement is based on the supreme authority of Holy Scripture as understood and explicated in the Book of Common Prayer (1662), the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion (1571), and the Edwardian and Elizabethan collections of Homilies. These came to be known as Anglican formularies because they have served to varying degrees as place markers for the elephant room. The formularies unambiguously value the Bible as uniquely inspired and the norming norm for all other authorities (over tradition, reason and experience). They value its perspicuity: the Bible is clear enough for the simplest person to live by, deep enough for readers of the highest intellect, and clear in all essential matters of faith and practice. Reformation Anglicans value both word and sacrament, and they see the communion table as an extension and explication of God’s written word; what is experienced by one human sense in preaching (hearing), is experienced by all senses in the two sacraments of the gospel, baptism and holy communion. Reformation Anglicans are passionate about proclaiming Christ in all matters of church life, and they abhor moralistic sermons that end with advice for trying harder that detracts from the centrality of the Cross of Christ. They believe that salvation is a loving gift for undeserving sinners, and that we are reconciled to God by grace alone through faith alone This is the logic and rhythm of Cranmer’s liturgy that is heard Sunday by Sunday. Reformation Anglicans believe in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, not in the bread and wine, but in the hearts and affections of those who receive the grace of the sacrament by faith with thanksgiving. Reformation Anglicans view ordained ministry, not as a tactile unbroken succession of bishops, but in the light of 1 Corinthians 12 and the universal priesthood of all believers. They largely value the principle of simplicity: Anglican worship is most dignified and orderly when it is pared down of all words, actions and ceremonial that distracts from the goal of pointing people to Christ, rather than to fancy-dressed priests prancing around an altar and lifting up the sacrament. Queen Elizabeth’s favorite advisor, Sir Christopher Hatton, writing three decades after she became queen, spoke of the static and settled theology of the Church of England: “The queen had at the beginning of her reign placed her reformation as upon a stone to remain constant.” And the 1571 (and final) version of the Thirty-nine Articles succinctly states their lasting purpose: “For the avoiding of diversities of opinions and for the establishing of Consent touching true religion.” Every priest, bishop and layperson has their good foot in one of these camps regarding the place of the 16th century Reformation. But in a day when we are tempted to close a blind eye to our Anglican theological distinctives for conciliar solutions to address our brokenness, it couldn’t be more important to find again the ancient landmark of our fathers to anchor our faith and practice. A Reformation Anglican church that sees its authority in Holy Scripture as understood and explained in the traditional formularies is our only way forward. All other ways are place markers for individual pet peeves. At its heart, this is a church that is thoroughly biblical, theologically confessional and reformed, pastorally generous, and liturgically beautiful. Dean Chuck Collins is a reform theologian and historian who regularly writes on Anglican issues. He resides in Texas.

Billy Graham vs. John Stott — A Historic Debate Framing Today's Culture Wars OPINION & ANALYSIS By David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueonline.org | June 1, 2026 The Lausanne Moment: 1974 In 1974 I attended the International Congress on World Evangelization convened in Lausanne, Switzerland—a gathering that would prove to be one of the most consequential moments in twentieth-century Protestant Christianity. Organized largely through the vision and energy of Billy Graham, Lausanne brought together some 2,700 evangelical leaders from 150 nations. Its stated purpose was to define the mission of the global church. What emerged instead was a profound and lasting theological fault line. The two men who captured this historic moment were evangelist Billy Graham and Biblical scholar John Stott. But before they took center stage, the Congress was opened by Malcolm Muggeridge—a figure whose influence had persuaded me to become a journalist. Invoking Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Muggeridge turned the lens on his own civilization and declared it "clear beyond any shadow of doubt" that Western civilization was "in an advanced stage of decomposition," and that another Dark Age would soon be upon the world, perhaps already beginning. In hindsight he was prescient. Graham's instinct was characteristically direct: preach the Gospel, call sinners to repentance, and trust the Holy Spirit with the rest. Souls, he believed, were the currency of the Kingdom. Social transformation was the byproduct of individual conversion, not its prerequisite. His model had electrified stadiums from Los Angeles to London to Seoul. It had brought millions to faith. I heard him preach in Wellington, NZ in 1959. His was a simple, uncomplicated message of sin and salvation. John Stott, the brilliant and erudite rector of All Souls, Langham Place in London, saw things differently. Stott was a rock-ribbed evangelical, a man who believed in the authority of Scripture. But he argued, with needle-like Biblical precision and pastoral weight, that an authentic Gospel could not be indifferent to the poor, the oppressed, and the structurally marginalized. The Great Commission, he insisted, could not be cleanly severed from the Great Commandment to love one's neighbor. Without saying it, he saw in Graham the Great Omission, but he was too much of a gentleman ever to say so. The resulting Lausanne Covenant—drafted under Stott's editorial hand—was a diplomatic achievement that tried to hold both impulses together. It affirmed evangelism as "primary" while insisting that "socio-political involvement" was also "a part of our Christian duty." It pleased no one entirely and has animated evangelical controversy ever since. Billy Graham (1918–2018) was arguably the most influential Protestant evangelist in American history. His crusades brought an estimated 215 million people under his preaching across six decades and six continents. His theology was straightforward: sin, grace, repentance, new birth. His political instinct was to steer clear of controversy—though he later expressed regret for some of his early entanglement with political power, particularly his close relationship with Richard Nixon. John R.W. Stott (1921–2011) was, in the estimation of many, the most significant Anglican evangelical of the twentieth century. His commentaries, his books—especially The Cross of Christ (1986)—and his global ministry through Langham Partnership shaped generations of clergy worldwide, particularly in the Global South. He was a tireless advocate for what he called "double listening": attending carefully to both Scripture and the contemporary world. His 1984 book Issues Facing Christians Today tackled everything from nuclear deterrence to global poverty to sexual ethics. His "double listening" echoed his understanding of the "double authorship of Scripture"—one of his most important contributions to evangelical hermeneutics. Stott argued that the Bible is simultaneously and fully the word of God and the word of human authors—not a mixture of divine and human elements, nor human words that merely contain divine truth, but genuinely both at once in every part. In his obituary, David Brooks of the New York Times wrote that if ever American Protestantism were to have had a pope, it would have been Stott. The Roots of the Divide: A Longer History The Graham-Stott tension did not arise in a vacuum. It was the latest chapter in a debate that had convulsed American Protestantism for nearly a century. In the late nineteenth century, the Social Gospel movement—associated with theologians like Walter Rauschenbusch (A Theology for the Social Gospel, 1917)—argued that Christianity's primary task was the redemption of social structures: abolishing poverty, ending child labor, humanizing industrial capitalism. Rauschenbusch was responding to the squalor of Hell's Kitchen in New York City, where he had ministered. His instincts were evangelical; his conclusions were structural. The Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy of the 1920s shattered this synthesis. Conservatives, alarmed by theological liberalism's abandonment of doctrinal essentials, increasingly treated "social concern" as a marker of theological compromise. Soul-winning became the badge of orthodoxy. Social reform became the province of liberals who had surrendered the faith. This cultural memory—that caring about poverty is a step toward apostasy—still haunts American evangelical discourse. The neo-evangelical movement of the 1940s and 50s, led by figures like Carl F.H. Henry and Harold Ockenga, tried to recover social engagement without theological compromise. Henry's The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (1947) was a sharp rebuke to separatist fundamentalists who had, he argued, abandoned whole swaths of human life to secular ideologies. Graham himself was shaped by this neo-evangelical vision—though in practice his campaigns remained focused on personal conversion. The 1960s–80s: Fracture Lines Deepen The civil rights movement forced the question with painful clarity. Martin Luther King Jr.—himself a Baptist minister working from explicitly theological premises—demonstrated that the Gospel had political consequences. Many white evangelicals, particularly in the South, opposed him. Jerry Falwell Sr. preached against the civil rights movement from his Lynchburg pulpit in 1958, and later acknowledged it was among the greatest mistakes of his life. By the late 1970s, the Moral Majority had fused evangelical Christianity with a particular vision of American conservatism—one focused primarily on abortion, sexual morality, and anti-communism, while remaining largely silent on economic inequality and race. Ronald Reagan's election in 1980 cemented this alliance. The Republican Party became, effectively, the political home of white American evangelicalism, and the theological assumptions of that alignment—that government welfare was counterproductive, that poverty was primarily a moral failure, that the market was self-correcting—became ambient evangelical common sense. Meanwhile, the Lausanne movement continued to push back. The 1989 Lausanne II Congress in Manila and the 2010 Third Lausanne Congress in Cape Town both produced documents that gave significant weight to poverty, justice, and creation care alongside evangelism. The Cape Town Commitment, once again largely shaped by the Global South, explicitly named systemic injustice as a gospel concern. American evangelicals largely ignored it. The Social Justice Wars of the 2010s–2020s The election of Barack Obama in 2008 and the intensification of racial justice discourse following the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and George Floyd reopened the Graham-Stott debate with a fury that surprised even those who had watched evangelical politics closely for decades. A generation of younger evangelical leaders—figures like Tim Keller, David Platt, and Thabiti Anyabwile—argued that racial reconciliation and care for the poor were not optional add-ons to the Gospel but integral expressions of it. They drew on Stott, on Abraham Kuyper's sphere sovereignty, on the Reformed tradition's stress on cultural transformation. Keller's Generous Justice (2010) became something of a manifesto for this position. The reaction was swift and fierce. In 2018, a group of conservative Southern Baptist and Reformed leaders, including John MacArthur, Tom Ascol, and Voddie Baucham, produced the "Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel," which declared that contemporary social justice discourse was "incompatible" with the Gospel and amounted to a capitulation to cultural Marxism. The statement attracted thousands of signatories. Baucham's 2021 book Fault Lines accused evangelical racial justice advocates of embracing a "counterfeit Christianity." The Southern Baptist Convention—America's largest Protestant denomination—became the principal battlefield. The 2019 SBC Annual Meeting passed a resolution affirming that "critical race theory and intersectionality" could be used as "analytical tools"—a resolution that enraged the conservative wing. By 2021, the conservatives had won: a new leadership slate pledged to root out "woke" influence from seminaries and mission boards. The purge of the ERLC's Russell Moore—who had spoken forthrightly about racism and poverty—signaled the direction of travel. The Right's Critique: Legitimate and Illegitimate The conservative evangelical critique of social justice has elements that deserve to be taken seriously. It is true that some versions of social justice discourse derive their categories from secular ideologies that are, at their roots, incompatible with Christian anthropology. Critical theory, in some formulations, locates human identity primarily in group membership and power dynamics rather than in the image of God and individual moral agency. When "social justice" means the wholesale adoption of these frameworks, conservative evangelicals are right to resist. It is also true that welfare programs can create dependency, that corruption—both in government and in communities—can undermine the effectiveness of social spending, and that the collapse of family structure has been catastrophic for the poor in ways that no government program can easily address. These are serious empirical claims and they deserve serious engagement. But much of what passes for conservative evangelical social commentary today has little to do with these careful critiques. The alignment of significant portions of American evangelicalism with a political program that has pursued dramatic cuts to Medicaid, food stamps, housing assistance, and disability benefits—while simultaneously advancing tax policy that concentrates wealth at the top of the income distribution—requires theological justification that most of its advocates have not attempted to provide. The Bible's testimony on the treatment of the poor is not ambiguous. From the Mosaic law's gleaning provisions to the prophets' thundering denunciations of those who "sell the poor for a pair of sandals" to Jesus' Sermon on the Mount to James's epistle—the weight of Scripture consistently measures the righteousness of a community by how it treats its most vulnerable members. The Left's Blind Spots The progressive evangelical critique of poverty and injustice is also, at its best, biblical and powerful. But it, too, has characteristic failures. A theology that focuses exclusively on structural sin while refusing to name individual moral responsibility—the collapse of family formation, the normalization of fatherlessness, the epidemic of addiction, the culture of short-term gratification—has amputated half of the biblical diagnosis. The prophets who denounced unjust scales also called individuals to repentance. Jesus who fed the five thousand also told the woman at the well to "go and sin no more." A Gospel that addresses only systems and never souls is as truncated as one that addresses only souls and never systems. There is also a tendency in progressive evangelicalism to treat political programs as self-evidently "biblical" without adequate engagement with their empirical track records. Good intentions do not produce good outcomes. Programs that have perpetuated dependency, incentivized family dissolution, or insulated failing institutions from accountability deserve critique from those who genuinely care about the poor—not reflexive defense. What Stott Actually Said—and What Graham Came to Believe It is worth returning to the original protagonists, because the caricatures of both men have become more influential than the men themselves. Stott did not believe that social action could save anyone. He was quite clear that justification was by grace through faith and that the eternal destiny of souls was the supreme priority of the church. What he resisted was the idea that the church could be indifferent to suffering in the present world without thereby distorting its witness to a God who is, in Scripture, consistently described as the defender of the poor and the enemy of oppression. Graham, for his part, was more complex than his reputation suggests. He refused to preach to segregated audiences—a costly stand in the 1950s American South. He visited the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries, generating controversy among cold warriors who saw him as naïve. In his later years he expressed concern about economic inequality and spoke with more nuance about political entanglement. His son Franklin has taken the opposite path, becoming one of the most prominent evangelical voices for a particular brand of political conservatism—a trajectory Billy himself reportedly found troubling. The Global South's Challenge to American Evangelicalism One of the underappreciated dimensions of this debate is the growing weight of the Global South in world evangelicalism. African, Asian, and Latin American evangelicals—who now constitute the numerical majority of the world's evangelical Christians—have generally found the American bifurcation of Gospel and social concern alien to their experience. In sub-Saharan Africa, evangelical churches have been at the forefront of responses to AIDS, poverty, and educational deprivation—not because they abandoned evangelism, but because they could not maintain credibility as proclaimers of a risen Lord while ignoring the dying bodies of their neighbors. In Latin America, the Pentecostal and evangelical surge has been accompanied by significant engagement with community development. The dichotomy that seems so natural to North American evangelicals looks, from Lagos or Lima, like a peculiar artifact of American culture wars. The Evangelical Left: Campolo, Wallis, and the Prophetic Tradition No figure more colorfully embodied the evangelical left than Tony Campolo—an American Baptist and sociology professor at Eastern University who spent decades as the movement's most energetic popularizer. His argument was essentially Stottian but more politically unguarded: the Sermon on the Mount is a social manifesto. Matthew 25—"I was hungry and you fed me"—cannot be spiritualized away into a purely personal transaction. His 2008 book Red Letter Christians, which gave its name to an ongoing movement, was a deliberate provocation: if you claim to follow Jesus, you must reckon with what Jesus actually said about money, power, and the poor. Campolo was a gifted communicator—funny, self-deprecating, and willing to say in public what more cautious evangelicals muttered in private. He packed college auditoriums for three decades. But his legacy became complicated in 2015 when he announced support for same-sex marriage, fracturing his credibility with the audience he had spent a career cultivating. He bundled economic justice with progressive sexual ethics and in doing so alienated the constituency he most needed. You cannot easily hold together "the poor matter" and "the sexual revolution was good" in evangelical America without one position undermining the other.* Jim Wallis of Sojourners magazine and Ron Sider, whose Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger (1977) remains the most theologically rigorous text in this tradition, represented the movement's institutional wing. I knew both men. Both argued from Scripture and from economics that Western Christian affluence in the face of global poverty was not a neutral condition but a moral emergency. Sadly, neither achieved the prominence of Graham or Stott, and neither man was able to shift the center of gravity in American evangelicalism. *I sat on the board of Campolo's organization, the Evangelical Association for the Promotion of Education (EAPE), and was personally saddened by his departure from clear biblical doctrine on sexuality. Is There a Successor? The most credible successor in terms of reach and theological seriousness was Tim Keller—though he resisted the "evangelical left" label with some energy. Keller drew on Stott, on Abraham Kuyper's sphere sovereignty, and on his decades of ministry in Manhattan to argue that genuine Gospel proclamation required both evangelism and justice work as inseparable expressions of the same faith. Crucially, he maintained unambiguous orthodoxy on Scripture and sexual ethics, which gave his social concern arguments a hearing in conservative circles that Campolo and Wallis could not access. His death in 2023 left a vacuum that no single figure has yet filled. What Stott provided in Britain—and what Keller partially replicated in America—was a model of social concern that was unambiguously theologically conservative: orthodox on Scripture, orthodox on the atonement, orthodox on sexual ethics, and therefore impossible to dismiss as a capitulation to secular liberalism. That combination has proven extraordinarily difficult to sustain in the American context, where the culture war sorting mechanism is relentless and where holding two things together is perpetually mistaken for holding neither. Voices from the Global South: The Challenge American Evangelicalism Ignored The most searching challenges to the American evangelical separation of Gospel and social concern came not from theological liberals in Western seminaries but from orthodox evangelicals working in conditions of genuine poverty, political oppression, and post-colonial complexity. Their voices were present at Lausanne in 1974. They have been largely ignored by American evangelicalism ever since. Tokunboh Adeyemo (Nigeria, 1944–2010) Tokunboh Adeyemo was one of the most significant African evangelical leaders of the twentieth century. A former Muslim who came to faith through a dramatic conversion, he became general secretary of the Association of Evangelicals in Africa and one of the most insistent voices for an evangelicalism that took African social realities seriously. His crowning achievement was editing the Africa Bible Commentary (2006)—the first single-volume Bible commentary written entirely by African scholars, for African readers, addressing African contexts. Its genius was its refusal to separate textual exposition from social application: commentary on Amos addressed governmental corruption; notes on the Gospels engaged AIDS, poverty, and tribalism as theological questions, not merely humanitarian ones. Adeyemo argued that African evangelicalism could not afford the Western luxury of relegating social concern to a secondary category. The Gospel he had received had saved his soul; it had also, he insisted, something to say about how African societies organized themselves, treated their poor, and governed their institutions. John Gatu (Kenya, 1925–2017) John Gatu, general secretary of the Presbyterian Church of East Africa, delivered one of the most provocative structural justice arguments of the modern missionary era when he called in the early 1970s for a moratorium on Western missionaries and Western money flowing into African churches. The argument was not anti-Christian—Gatu was a committed evangelical—but structural: the dependency created by Western financial and personnel dominance was stunting African church maturity, distorting African theological priorities, and perpetuating a colonial relationship dressed in ecclesiastical clothing. It was, at its root, a justice argument: that the Global South church had the right to develop its own theological voice, its own leadership, and its own reading of Scripture without being perpetually subordinated to Western frameworks. The moratorium proposal was deeply controversial and was never formally adopted, but it forced a reckoning with the power dynamics embedded in global evangelical mission that has never been fully resolved. René Padilla and Samuel Escobar (Latin America) If Stott challenged Graham from a comfortable London rectory, René Padilla and Samuel Escobar challenged the entire Lausanne Congress from the margins of the global economy. Both theologically orthodox evangelicals formed in Latin American contexts of poverty and political instability, they found the American evangelical separation of Gospel and social concern not merely inadequate but genuinely incomprehensible. Padilla's address at Lausanne 1974 was widely considered the most challenging paper of the entire Congress. He named directly what most participants preferred to leave implicit: that North American evangelicalism had fused the Gospel with American cultural values, equated church growth with numerical success, and constructed a "culture Christianity" that was, in his assessment, a distortion of the New Testament. He coined the term misión integral—integral mission—to describe what the Gospel required: not evangelism plus social action as two separate programs, but a single holistic witness in which proclamation and transformation were inseparable expressions of the same reality. Escobar developed parallel themes with particular attention to imperialism and economic dependency, arguing that a Gospel preached by well-resourced North Americans to impoverished Latin Americans, without any reckoning with the structural relationships between North and South, was evangelism compromised at its roots. Together, Padilla and Escobar represented something the American culture wars have never been able to accommodate: a thoroughly conservative evangelical theology that was simultaneously a thoroughgoing critique of economic and cultural power. I knew and admired both men. The Micah Declaration on Integral Mission (2001) The founding of the Micah Network in 2001 and its accompanying Micah Declaration on Integral Mission drew its name from the prophet's summary—"To act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God." The Declaration set out a theological framework for evangelical development work that refused the standard dichotomies. It stated that integral mission means proclamation has social consequences just as social involvement has evangelistic consequences. It was a direct descendant of Padilla's Lausanne address and Stott's Lausanne Covenant, now institutionalized in a global coalition of hundreds of evangelical relief and development organizations. The Micah Network's membership is overwhelmingly from the Global South, from precisely the communities that North American evangelicals have historically treated as mission recipients rather than theological interlocutors. Its insistence that the church cannot neglect the transformation of societies was not an import from secular ideology. It was the considered theological judgment of evangelicals who had read the same Bible as their North American counterparts and reached conclusions that the American culture war framework had made almost unthinkable. The honest irony of the whole story is this: the figures who most forcefully challenged the privatization of the Gospel—Adeyemo, Gatu, Padilla, Escobar—were theologically conservative by any serious measure. They were not liberals smuggling secular ideology into the church. They were men formed by Scripture reading in conditions of poverty who found the American evangelical bifurcation of Gospel and justice not a principled theological stand but a failure of imagination—and of nerve. Is There a Way Forward Beyond the Binary? The tragedy of the present moment is that both sides of the evangelical social justice debate have allowed their theological instincts to be captured by secular political tribes. Conservatives have too often become chaplains to a movement that is, by any honest accounting, indifferent to the fate of the poor. Progressives have too often baptized a political program without submitting it to adequate theological and empirical scrutiny. Stott's vision—which he called "two wings of a bird" in describing the relationship between evangelism and social action—was not a splitting of the difference. It was a more demanding synthesis, one that refused to let either imperative cancel the other. Proclaim the Gospel with clarity and urgency. And demonstrate its truth by how you treat the least of these. That is not a liberal position. It is not a conservative position. It is, on the evidence of the whole counsel of Scripture, the Christian position. Whether the evangelical movement—battered, polarized, and deeply entangled with American political identity—has the theological resources and the moral courage to recover it remains, at this writing, an open and urgent question. David W. Virtue, DD is the founder and managing editor of VirtueOnline, an Anglican online news service and commentary website read in more than 100 countries. www.virtueonline.org Virtue’s Substack on Middle East affairs can be viewed here: davidvirtue2.substack.com

"Churches without theological confidence often become churches without people. A Christianity without creeds eventually becomes a Christianity without a congregation." —Loren Richmond "A church unsure of what it believes about Jesus will eventually become unsure of why it exists at all." —J. Gresham Machen "It's easy—far too easy—to treat the gospel like something malleable, something we can tweak at the edges to make it more palatable, more 'reasonable,' more in step with the spirit of the age. But Scripture doesn't give us that luxury. When Paul addresses the Galatians, he doesn't offer a gentle correction or a polite clarification. He reaches for the strongest language available: if anyone proclaims another gospel, let him be accursed (Gal. 1:8–9). That's an apostolic anathema." —J. Neil Daniels "It is only against the dark background of sin and judgment that the gospel shines forth." —John Stott "The greatest miracle that God can do today is to take an unholy man out of an unholy world, and make that man holy and put him back into that unholy world and keep him holy in it." —Leonard Ravenhill "I must say this…there will be no peace in the world until all humanity embraces the One True God and His Son Jesus Christ. Jesus makes it very clear that He is the ONLY way to the Father. If we embrace ideologies that deny Jesus Christ as our only Savior we are not on the path to peace, we are hastening destruction. Countless martyrs have died embracing Philippians 2:10, 'Every knee shall bow, every tongue confess, that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father'... To deny this in pursuit of peace in the world is a betrayal of Our Savior who died for us. Que viva Cristo Rey!" —Bishop Joseph Strickland ____________________________________________________________ Dear Brothers and Sisters | www.virtueonline.org | May 29, 2026 ____________________________________________________________ WHEN CHRISTIANS TURN TO ALGORITHMS FOR ANSWERS A new survey reveals unsettling levels of trust in AI for spiritual guidance — and raises hard questions about where the church has failed There is a disturbing new finding: Christians are turning to Artificial Intelligence for spiritual guidance. A recent survey reveals that a significant portion of practicing Christians are open to trusting AI for guidance on life's most important questions — including spiritual growth and purpose — and some rank its advice as comparable to God's Word for wisdom and truth. The new research from Barna Group, in partnership with Gloo, found that 54 percent of practicing Christians say they would completely or somewhat trust AI's advice for "having a sense of meaning or purpose in life," while 48 percent would trust it for advice on growing spiritually. Practicing Christians express high levels of trust in AI across other domains as well. More than six in ten (62 percent) say they would trust AI with advice on achieving financial stability. Just over half would trust it for mental and physical wellbeing (56 percent), feeling happy and content with life (56 percent), understanding and expressing one's true self (54 percent), and building meaningful relationships with others (53 percent). "What we're seeing is that Christians are genuinely open to AI as a support for the domains that matter most to them — wellbeing, purpose, even spiritual growth," said Daniel Copeland, Barna's vice president of research. "That level of openness is higher than we might have expected, and it holds across multiple areas of flourishing." But Christians have fears about AI, too. An overwhelming majority — 83 percent — say they're concerned about AI misrepresenting Scripture. Seventy-two percent worry about AI beginning to replace God. And 73 percent fear people will lose their faith because of it. About one-third of practicing Christians (34 percent) believe spiritual advice from AI is just as trustworthy as advice from a pastor — a figure higher than that of the general population (30 percent). Among Gen Z, nearly two in five (39 percent) agree. Among Millennials, it climbs to 44 percent. "This is where the data gets genuinely confounding," Copeland said. "Christians say they trust AI with spiritual growth, and a meaningful share say its spiritual guidance is as trustworthy as a pastor's — yet large majorities are simultaneously concerned about AI misinterpreting Scripture, replacing God, or undermining the role of spiritual leaders. The use case and the underlying fear are both present, and they're pointing in different directions." The contradiction is not as puzzling as Copeland suggests. When pastors stop feeding their flocks, the sheep find other pasture. That AI is filling the void is not a technology problem. It is a pastoral failure. Read more: https://www.crosswalk.com/headlines/contributors/michael-foust/christians-are-turning-to-artificial-intelligence-for-spiritual-guidance-survey-finds.html ____________________________________________________________ THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND FOLLOWS TEC DOWN THE SAME RABBIT HOLE The homosexuality debate was supposedly settled. It wasn't. It never is. Revisionists in the Church of England are once again pushing their homosexual agenda, despite the General Synod's failure to approve the prayers in the Living in Love and Faith report. The issue was supposed to be settled. It wasn't. Professor King, a lay member of Synod for Oxford Diocese and vice-chair of its Gender and Sexuality Group, has brought a motion reading: "That this Synod affirm that there are no fundamental objections to being in a committed, faithful, intimate same-sex relationship, and that such a relationship can be entirely compatible with Christian discipleship." We have seen this before. The TEC playbook is recognizable in every line. TEC also began not with marriage but with affirmation — affirming the dignity of gay persons, affirming their place in the life of the church, affirming that their relationships deserved pastoral recognition. Each affirmation was carefully worded to stop short of doctrinal revision while making the next step feel not only natural but obligatory. If there are "no fundamental objections" to a same-sex relationship, on what grounds does the Church subsequently refuse to bless it? Marry it? Ordain those in one? The King motion is not an endpoint. It is a ratchet. Read more: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/down-the-same-rabbit-hole-the-church-of-england-follows-tec-into-the-abyss ____________________________________________________________ CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM: VIRTUE OR VICE? Evangelical scholar John Stackhouse tries to chart a faithful path between patriotism and idolatry How should Christians think about Christian nationalism? Evangelical scholar John Stackhouse believes he has the answer. His new book, Christian Nationalism: A Christian Guide to Loyalty, Idolatry, and Priority, takes up the question directly. The core issue Stackhouse addresses is whether love of country is a virtue or a danger. He steers between two extremes: those who insist Christians should embrace nationalist rhetoric wholesale, and those who condemn any patriotism as idolatry. Through a study of biblical identity, he argues that earthly loyalties are real, meaningful, and good — but always secondary to one's identity in Christ. The key danger arises when political identity begins competing with Christian identity. Stackhouse calls that idolatry. On that point, he is right. Read my full review: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/christian-nationalism-a-christian-guide-to-loyalty-idolatry-and-priority ____________________________________________________________ ACNA: PRIDE GOETH BEFORE A FALL Internal fractures, legal threats, governance battles, and a pending archbishop's trial — the Anglican Church in North America is at a crossroads ACNA is in the news with full force, facing internal diocesan struggles, legal threats, and much more. I argue that the real sin of ACNA is pride — not just its collective sins, but its institutional self-congratulation. Proud that we are not like TEC. Proud that we have not embraced pansexuality. Proud that ACNA is growing and TEC is not. Proud that we are orthodox and TEC is heterodox. Proud, in short, that we are not like them. The irony is almost too rich to ignore. ACNA was born out of a righteous rejection of The Episcopal Church's apostasy — and that origin story, noble as it was, has become something of a golden calf. We tell the story of our founding so often, and with such satisfaction, that we have begun to confuse the act of leaving with the act of arriving. Separation from error is not the same as arrival at truth. It is merely the beginning of the journey. Meanwhile, ACNA is trying desperately not to break apart over women's ordination while simultaneously trying to define itself: are we conciliar or confessional? The women's ordination question is Exhibit A. ACNA has managed to hold together Anglo-Catholics who regard female ordination as an ontological impossibility and evangelicals who regard opposition to it as mere tradition dressed up as theology. That is not a settlement. It is a ceasefire. And ceasefires, as history teaches, have a way of breaking down at the worst possible moment — usually when the combatants are already exhausted from fighting on other fronts. Read more: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/acna-pride-goeth-before-a-fall Duncan Steps In. The latest development in the troubled Diocese of Western Gulf Coast — which has been unable to elect a new bishop — is that former Archbishop Bob Duncan has been asked to serve as interim bishop for a year, or until a new bishop is found. Read Bishop Lowenfield's letter: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/archbishop-duncan-to-interim-as-bishop-of-western-gulf-coast South Carolina Demands Transparency. The Anglican Diocese of South Carolina has proposed resolutions ahead of ACNA's Provincial Council meeting in Tulsa (June 17–19), demanding public release of the transcript from Bishop Stewart Ruch's ecclesiastical trial and the findings of a third-party procedural review. The Ruch trial ended in acquittal but was marred by prosecutorial resignations over alleged judicial misconduct. South Carolina is seeking coalition support among other dioceses, though the province maintains the Council lacks authority to compel the court to release documents — a tension that may ultimately require adjudication by the Provincial Tribunal, several members of which have conflicts of interest tied to the Ruch proceedings. The broader June gathering will also take up a sweeping Title IV disciplinary canon revision that restructures the church's misconduct adjudication bodies entirely. The College of Bishops and Executive Committee have moved to prohibit floor amendments to the reform package — drawing pushback from delegates who argue the Council should exercise genuine legislative agency rather than rubber-stamp leadership's work. These governance battles unfold against the backdrop of Archbishop Steve Wood's pending trial on personal and sexual misconduct charges, scheduled to begin July 20, making the competing visions of ecclesiastical authority and transparency anything but abstract. ACNA by the Numbers — Such as They Are. ACNA is handling its statistics the same way TEC did last year — embedding them in a feel-good annual report rather than releasing full diocesan data. ACNA's Annual Impact Report is linked here: https://anglicanchurch.net/impact/ The report lists 1,005 parishes — down from 1,027 last year, a loss of 22 congregations. Average Sunday Attendance stands at approximately 98,000, up roughly 2,000 from last year's 96,148. There were 3,445 baptisms, and 118,000 are engaged in children's and youth ministries. Notably absent: membership figures and confirmation numbers. ACNA lists 58 bishops, including five newly consecrated. The College of Bishops shows 50 active bishops, 42 retired, 15 deceased, and 8 former ACNA bishops who have left for another jurisdiction or been deposed. There are 618 deacons. Full statistics — or what passes for full statistics in ACNA — remain embargoed until the Provincial Assembly meets in mid-June. ____________________________________________________________ NICKY GUMBEL, SOCIAL JUSTICE, AND THE MAGA BACKLASH The Alpha pioneer called Christians to fight inequality. The response revealed more about his critics than about him. Nicky Gumbel, the Alpha course pioneer and former leader of HTB, has been accused of promoting communism and unbiblical ideas after he called Spirit-filled Christians to fight inequality. When Gumbel posted on Instagram — "Those indwelt by the Holy Spirit should be at the forefront of the fight for gender, racial, and social equality" — it hardly seemed controversial. He followed it by noting the epidemic of violence against women and girls, the surge in racially and religiously motivated hate crimes, and the astonishing growth in wealth among the ultra-rich, and asked: shouldn't Christians be making a stand? The responses, he said, horrified him. On this side of the pond, we are experiencing much the same thing. If you are not on board with Trumpism and MAGA, and you believe the Bible speaks to social justice, you will be labeled a communist, Marxist, or Socialist — and cancelled. This is a confusion with a long history. The 1974 Lausanne Congress hammered out the relationship between the gospel and social action. John Stott led the charge alongside a number of Global South Christian leaders. Billy Graham had to concede the point. The gospel has a social dimension that cannot be ignored. Stott later wrote Issues Facing Christians Today — a book that has apparently been forgotten by those now calling Gumbel a communist. Tony Campolo, never accused of soft preaching, demanded that those who came forward at his crusades align with a local church and begin practical ministry. That is not Marxism. That is Matthew 25. ____________________________________________________________ SPIRITUAL COWARDICE FROM THE PULPIT Most pastors won't name sin. They won't say why, either. Most pastors and priests are cowards. They will speak of sin in the abstract, in safe generalities — but they will not name it. When did you last hear a priest rail against materialism? You won't — because his biggest financial supporters are wealthy parishioners whose money keeps the lights on. Rail against pride? Never — not when personal success is the American sacrament. Mention homosexuality? Expect to be denounced as homophobic, uninclusive, and bigoted until you repent of your supposed prejudice — or your congregation walks. Address women's ordination? You'll be told you're excluding half of God's creation, never mind that the Church declined to embrace it for two thousand years. We have progressed, after all. It's the enlightened 21st century. And always remember: when people leave, the plate empties — and possibly your salary with it. Adultery is the safe target. Easy applause. But when did you last hear a preacher take on what Jesus actually said about lust in the heart? Not a word from the pulpit. Philip Yancey wrote about it. Your pastor won't. I call this spiritual cowardice. The question every pastor and priest must eventually answer is this: What am I willing to lose for the sake of Christ? Read my full column: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/to-die-or-not-to-die-that-is-the-question ____________________________________________________________ EBOLA RETURNS — AND MILLIONS OF ANGLICANS ARE IN ITS PATH Ten African nations face a new outbreak. Anglican bishops are responding with prayer and public health measures. Ten countries — Rwanda, Kenya, Tanzania, Angola, Burundi, the Central African Republic, the Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, South Sudan, and Zambia — now face the Ebola epidemic. All contain millions of Anglican believers, many of whom have already been affected. Anglican bishops are combining prayer with practical public health measures in response to the World Health Organization's emergency declaration for the outbreak centered in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda. Archbishop Georges Titre Ande (Congo and Bishop of Aru) has strongly urged communities to pair prayer with practical action. The Anglican church is actively sharing accurate health information and combating misinformation in local communities. Bishop Martin Gordon (Diocese of Goma, DRC) notes that while his people are experienced in dealing with Ebola, this outbreak features the rare Bundibugyo strain, for which there is no vaccine. He has requested prayers for health workers, resources, and containment. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOC_X7OZ9Cc) Bishop Brian Marajh (Diocese of Kimberley & Kuruman) has issued a letter to his clergy and parishioners urging earnest prayer for the eradication of the virus and expressing solidarity with affected communities. Across the affected regions, Anglican and partner churches have implemented mandatory preventive measures — frequent handwashing, avoiding physical contact, and limiting outside visitors. The World Health Organization officially declared the current epidemic a public health emergency of international concern on May 16. ____________________________________________________________ SUPPORT VOL If you value what VOL writes, please consider a tax-deductible donation. This work is a labor of love, but we have bills to pay. There are no salaries — but daily writing continues, and a webmaster, researcher, and overseas journalists must be supported. VOL has brought on new writers with clear insights into Scripture and culture. 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COMMENTARY By David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueonline.org | May 29, 2026 Most pastors and priests are cowards. They will speak of sin in the abstract, in safe generalities, but never name it. When did you last hear a priest rail against materialism? You won't — because his biggest financial supporters are wealthy parishioners whose money keeps the lights on. Rail against pride? Never — not when personal success is the American sacrament. Mention homosexuality? Expect to be denounced as homophobic, uninclusive, and bigoted until you repent of your supposed prejudice — or your congregation walks. Address women's ordination? You'll be told you're excluding half of God's creation, never mind that the Church declined to embrace it for two thousand years. We have progressed, after all. It's the enlightened 21st century. And always remember: when people leave, the plate empties — and possibly your salary with it. Adultery is the safe target. Easy applause. But when did you last hear a preacher take on what Jesus actually said about lust in the heart? Not a word from the pulpit. Philip Yancey wrote about it. Your pastor won't. I call this spiritual cowardice. What is truth worth? Is it worth compromise? Scorn? Unemployment? God has promised to make a way for those who stand for truth — even when you can't see one. You've preached dozens of sermons about trusting Jesus with your soul, your salvation, your future, your daily bread. Now you're being tested. Do you answer with silence? C. S. Lewis saw it clearly in The Screwtape Letters: "The safest road to Hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts." No one ever said dying on a hill was pleasant. Jesus didn't. He that would lose his life for my sake and the gospel will find it. Churches that refuse to die on hills will die anyway. The liberal American church, in all its manifestations, is dying precisely because it compromised on human sexuality. Inclusivity, false compassion, and therapeutic affirmation were deemed more important than the plain scriptural truth that God created human sexuality as a male-female binary. That bargain is now on full display. One day you will stand before the Creator of the universe and give an account of your stewardship. The only question is whether your answer will survive His scrutiny. END

By Bryan Hollon May 28, 2026 For sixteen years, I taught theology at a university in Ohio and was privileged to work with many sharp, disciplined, and ambitious students. Occasionally, I’d recognize someone with a genuine instinct for theology: a student who already knew Scripture well, could trace an argument, and understood why theological error is harmful. When that happened, I’d try to move the conversation beyond grades and careers and towards vocation. I once asked a college senior what he wanted to do after graduation. He was a Business major headed for a career in Finance. When I pressed further and asked what he really loved, he said he loved Scripture, but that was obvious from his engagement in my class. He also loved people and described a rich church life growing up, so I asked: “Have you ever thought about ordained ministry?” You’d have thought I’d proposed he join a traveling circus. He wasn’t hostile but genuinely baffled. Ordination simply didn’t register as a real option in his mind. It didn’t offer the right money or the right prestige, and most importantly, it didn’t seem like it would matter enough. It seemed small and diminished compared to his own ambitions. This young man was not an outlier, since too few people are seeking ordination to meet the church’s current and future needs. In the Anglican Church in North America, as in other traditions, we have far more clergy retiring than being ordained, and the median age of the clergy is fifty-seven. For most capable young Christians, Holy Orders does not even appear on the horizon of vocational imagination. And this is a problem that should trouble us all deeply. Notably, the problem is not so much indifference as misdirected desire. The Church has a growing number of young men with genuine spiritual hunger, but what it lacks are young men willing to submit that hunger to the long, unglamorous formation that Holy Orders has always required. Rod Dreher published a Substack essay last week describing the recent influx of young, conservative men into Eastern Orthodoxy. These are men drawn to what they describe as “a more demanding, even difficult, practice of Christianity.” Dreher affirms their hunger for a deeper faith as a good thing, but the essay’s primary concern is with how that passion plays out online in sometimes appalling ways. In one recent example, Dreher tells the story of an Orthodox woman who wrote about dating culture in her parish community and then found herself under attack by an online mob. As things escalated, intimate photos were leaked, so the young woman removed herself from social media while the men involved remained unapologetic and sought to justify their actions. Something similar happened in 2020 when a Presbyterian writer named Aimee Byrd became the target of a Facebook group, made up entirely of Christian men who, rather than engaging her writing, mocked her appearance, her marriage, and worse. What elevated both episodes beyond the category of “men behaving badly online” is that some of those involved were ordained ministers. In other words, they were men who had vowed to guard and serve the Church and its many members.¹ And these are not isolated episodes. According to recent polling, young men in America are becoming more conservative, more religious, and more vocal about their convictions in online groups. They also attend religious services at higher rates than young women their age, which is a surprising reversal of a long-standing pattern.² In other words, a generation of young men are increasingly rejecting progressive cultural trends while simultaneously hungering for a life that is demanding and real and costly. This obviously comes with its dangers, as the two episodes I’ve recounted suggest, but it also has the potential to be a gift, so the church should pay attention. Regarding the dangers, both episodes show us what can happen when young men hungering for a more meaningful and consequential life remain largely unconverted and unformed. Namely, their passion is misdirected because they’ve missed the difficult, formative work of having their hunger properly ordered by the faith they claimed to be seeking. And here is the point. The desire for a serious faith is not the same thing as possessing one, and closing the distance between the two is the truly serious and costly work these men claim to desire.³ The irony in all of this is hard to miss. The young men hungering for a faith that is demanding, serious, and costly are exactly the men the Church needs in its leadership pipeline, and Holy Orders is exactly the kind of vocation they claim to be looking for. They are, in a real sense, already oriented toward the right thing, even if they have not yet found the right form for it. The problem is that neither the Church nor these young men have made the connection between what they are hungry for and what Holy Orders is and requires. Holy Orders is not a consolation-prize vocation for men who weren't ambitious enough for something else. It is a good, honorable, feasible, and absolutely necessary vocational path for those willing to be formed by something greater than themselves, in service of something that will outlast them. That is a serious and costly thing, which is precisely what these men say they want. So what are holy orders, and why should we be mindful of their weight?⁴ The Oldest Calling Genesis 2:15 tells us that God placed Adam in the garden “to work it (abad) and to guard it (shamar).” Our English translations make Adam sound like a farmer, but the Hebrew verbs portray him as a priest since “to serve” and “to guard” refer to the work of priests. When they appear together elsewhere in the Old Testament, they consistently describe priestly service in the sanctuary, so their appearance in Genesis 2 is noteworthy. It suggests that the Garden of Eden was the first temple, and Adam was the first priest. Or better yet, that the priestly vocation is inherent to human nature, of which Adam is the first type and Christ the prototype.⁵ Adam’s task as image-bearer and priest was to maintain God’s sanctuary, to guard it from chaos and uncleanness, and to extend its ordered boundaries outward until the whole earth became God’s dwelling place. This means that, from the very beginning, human vocation is priestly vocation. In other words, the priesthood is not an emergency measure invented in response to sin. It is woven into the fabric of what it means to be human. It might be appropriate to say that man was not made for the priesthood but the priesthood for man; it is ordered to the fulfillment of man’s true nature found only in Christ. But Adam failed, and the way he failed reveals a great deal about the nature of priesthood in general, since the story of the fall is also a story of Adam’s inability to fulfill his priestly vocation. How so? Well consider that the serpent entered the garden as unclean, chaotic, and hostile to God’s order. Adam, who was charged with guarding the sanctuary, simply stood by and allowed it all to happen. He neither guarded nor served but accompanied Eve in eating the forbidden fruit. And the disorder that followed is still with us as the ongoing stain of original sin.⁶ The controversies mentioned at the start of this letter are not native to the age of social media; they are the age-old failures of men, charged with guarding what is holy, either standing idly by or joining in the destruction. The True Priest The rest of Scripture is the story of God reconstituting the priestly order that Adam failed to keep. As with other major biblical motifs, the theme of priesthood runs through the whole biblical story from Genesis 3 through Leviticus and the prophets, through the Psalms and the wisdom literature, until it is finally gathered up and fulfilled in Jesus Christ—the Last Adam and the one true High Priest.⁷ Where the first Adam remained passive while the serpent corrupted the garden-temple, Christ enters the wilderness and meets the devil directly. Where Adam was undone by disordered desire, the Last Adam trusts the Word of God and prevails. He accomplishes what Adam forfeited and, as the Letter to the Hebrews tells us, holds his priesthood permanently (Hebrews 7:24). Having accomplished redemption, Christ shares his priesthood with his Church. All the baptized participate in his royal priesthood (1 Peter 2:9) as the restoration of what Adam forfeited. From within that larger priesthood, God calls some to Holy Orders – deacons, priests (presbyters), and bishops – ordained ministries that arise from within the common priesthood and remain proximate to Christ’s own. The diaconate is a commissioned ministry of service in his name, the presbyterate and episcopate are representative ministries of his Word and Sacraments in the midst of the Church. Ordained ministry is the continuation, borrowed and delegated, of the vocation that began in Eden. It entails guarding the good deposit and gathering a disordered people around the Word and Sacraments of Jesus Christ. Word, Sacrament, and the Ordering of a People The ministerial acts by which Christ gathers, protects, and preserves his Church are, as the theologian John Webster argues, his own—incommunicable and non-representable. Christ does not hand off his priestly work to human agents as though passing a torch. And yet Christ himself, freely and sovereignly, chooses to represent himself through human ministry, not, Webster writes, “by transferring to them his right and honour, but only that through their mouths he may do his own work.”⁸ The priest’s authority is real, but always derivative and participatory, and never independent. A priest does not generate spiritual life but attests to it, administers it, and guards it. But this is not to suggest that the vocational priesthood is unimportant or less important than we may have otherwise imagined. On the contrary, without the “ordering ministry” of clergy, Christian communities lose their bearings and find themselves conformed to the prevailing culture. The Church becomes therapeutic or activist or something worse, rather than formative in the sense of Galatians 4:19. The work of the priest is to resist this drift through the steady, ordinary practices of proclamation of the Word, administration of the sacraments, and otherwise equipping the saints for prayer and service. It’s through these ministries above all that disordered loves are slowly set right and a people are restored to God. The ordination rite of the Book of Common Prayer is infused with this deeply formative and Christocentric theology. Just before the bishop lays hands on the ordinand, he places a Bible in his one hand and a chalice in the other. Then the bishop says: Take authority to preach the Word of God and to administer the Holy Sacraments. Do not forget the trust committed to you as a Priest in the Church of God. The ministry of Word and Sacrament is thus entrusted to a servant called to keep the Church resting on its one foundation and tethered to the one saviour and Lord who can build it. The Shape of Life For this reason, the bishop lays his hands on the ordinand and asks: “Will you be diligent in prayer and in the reading of Holy Scripture? Will you frame and fashion your own life according to the doctrine of Christ?” And each time, the ordinand answers: “I will, the Lord being my helper.” The order a priest commends to others must first be visible in his own personal, social, and familial life. His is not a private virtue but a way of being in the world that witnesses to the peace and order of Jesus Christ and his coming kingdom. This is why the controversies described at the beginning of this letter are so serious. Some of the men involved had taken vows like these. What they lacked was not intelligence or theological education but the discipline of a formed, ordered life which the office requires. The Anglican Church in North America is not exempt from the challenge these controversies represent. Some of our aspirants, ordinands, and clergy have been among the loudest voices in our own online controversies, and not all of that engagement has been constructive. Young men in this extremely online era are being formed by an internet engineered for maximum assertion and tribal loyalty, which knows nothing of patience or any other virtue. This “platform culture” rewards the loudest voice, but not the most faithful one. Yet, to lead the Church, and serve Christ in building something that will endure, requires a different kind of formation altogether. The call to Holy Orders is an invitation into exactly that kind of formation. It is not a destination but a direction– an “ordering.” Ordination is entry into a sacred order and constitutes a long becoming through prayer and preaching and pastoral work. Paul writes to Timothy: “Share in suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus” (2 Timothy 2:3). Paul then suggests that the soldier is also an “athlete” and a “hard-working farmer,” so images of discipline, patience, and labor toward a harvest are entirely fitting (2 Timothy 4-7). The point of all of this is that the ordained minister must play the long game. The weapons are not political power or platform reach but truth, righteousness, and the Word of God. And the stakes are eternal.⁹ The More Excellent Way The desire of so many young men for a serious, costly faith is not misplaced, but there is something more demanding at the heart of the Christian life than most of us have yet attempted. G.K. Chesterton wrote that “the Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.” That is most true, not of doctrinal precision or moralistic rigor, but of love. Patient, attentive, costly love, which by definition desires the good of our theological opponents, is the hardest thing in Christianity. And it is what the ordered life is ordered toward. “Love, and do what you will: if you are silent, be silent in love; if you shout, shout in love; if you correct, correct in love; if you spare, spare in love: let the root of love be within, and nothing but good can spring from this root.” Augustine is not arguing for indifference to truth but insisting that the root determines the fruit. Ministry that grows from a root of love will build up the body of Christ. Ministry that grows from pride or resentment, however doctrinally correct, will always wound the Church. The ordered life is one in which love is slowly becoming the root from which everything else grows. I am not at all suggesting that we should be indifferent or shy away from the hard questions our church faces. Love is not a path around those questions but the only condition under which they can be finally answered. A well-ordered ministry places the Church’s most difficult questions in the hands of Jesus Christ, who is more than capable of leading his people into truth. And hasn’t he promised that, “when the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide [us] into all the truth” (John 16:13)? Consider the ordained minister who labors faithfully in Word and Sacrament, approaches controversy as an act of creaturely service rather than a campaign of conquest, and desires the good of those with whom he disagrees. He does not need to defer hard questions, but he’ll learn to engage in a way that builds up the church in love. This is the only posture that will bring resolution because it entails faithfulness to Jesus Christ and trust in his gospel truth. I write all of this as a reminder that Christ is, in fact, calling us to this and only this form of ministry. The hunger for something real and demanding and capable of outlasting the latest online controversy is not a disordered instinct. This is the grace of God stirring in restless hearts because God wants to draw us to himself. My hope is that those hungering for a more costly and consequential faith will find it in a life of true Christian faith, perhaps focused on preaching the Word, administering the Sacraments, and caring for the people of God. This is what the Church needs, and this is what the call to Holy Orders is a call toward and into. The work is demanding, and Chesterton was right that real faith has been found difficult and too often left untried. But we are called to try it and to trust that the one who promised to build his Church will keep his promise.¹⁰ The Very Rev. Cn. Bryan C. Hollon, Ph.D. is the Dean and President of Trinity Anglican Seminary in Ambridge, Pennsylvania, and a prominent theologian in the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA). He writes a blog; A Mere Christian On the Anglican Way! You can subscribe for free to receive new posts and engage his work. Footnotes to this piece can be seen at his Substack. https://bryanhollon.substack.com/

May 27, 2026 Dear Beloved in our Lord Jesus of the Diocese . . . The Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the Fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with us all evermore! 2 Corinthians 13:14 A week ago, yesterday, I woke up extra early to pray, as I knew I would be spending time that morning with the Dean of the Province, Bishop Julian, to discuss the results of our Electing Synod. As I prayed, the most profound sense of peace came over me. I had known the peace that passes understanding during the two days following the lack of an election, but this was a different kind of peace. This was the peace that one feels when they are experiencing the “release” from an assignment they had been given by the Lord. I knew I had only experienced it a couple of times before in my 50 years of walking with Him. In this case, I was being released from my assignment as your Bishop. When I met with Bishop Julian, he began by saying he had a hard question to ask me. I told him not to worry, that the Holy Spirit had gone ahead of our conversation. When I shared what I had experienced early in the morning, he said he had indeed planned to ask me whether I was prepared to carry out my assignment if it were extended beyond my announced retirement date of August 15th. I shared the only fleece I had before the Lord was His appointment of a pastoral-gifted bishop to serve as Interim Bishop. His provision would ensure I would not abandon the sheep but instead entrust them to a faithful pastor. Here is a resolution passed by the College of Bishops at a meeting on Thursday, May 21st and accepted by our Diocesan Council earlier today. In the resolution, the College accepts my resignation as Bishop Ordinary of the Anglican Diocese of the Western Gulf Coast, effective on the previously announced August 15th, 2026. It also states that the College chooses not to elect a Bishop Ordinary at this time, but names Archbishop Bob Duncan as Interim Bishop for not more than a year, and hopefully much less, permitting the Diocese the opportunity and space to “take a breath” and seek the Lord’s will for her future in healthy mission and vitality. Please read the resolution. In the coming weeks, I will serve Archbishop Bob in any way I can to help him prepare for his new assignment. With more love for each of you than you will ever know, and in His peace, +Clark WP Lowenfield Bishop The Anglican Diocese of the Western Gulf Coast

By Dr Campbell Campbell-Jack THE CONSERVATIVE WOMAN May 25, 2026 WATCHING or reading the news in recent days unavoidably fills one with at least a sense of gloom, more likely one of foreboding. It is in the interest of the vast multi-billion pound news media we allow into our homes to create this sense of unease: the worse the headline, the more likelihood that we will come back to check up on the next update – and the next. But there is a growing sense that this time they might have it right. The slow-motion psychodrama of the Labour Party leadership competition, and thus the leadership of the country, is only the visible tip of the iceberg. We just need to look at the latest local and national election results, which have seen a swathe of untried, untested and perhaps unsuitable candidates achieve office. Throughout much of this century, we have seen the infrastructure of the country decline; with housing, transport, health and defence all facing massive problems. Meanwhile British citizens have witnessed what seems like a concentrated and successful effort to reconstruct the nation’s cultural viewpoint. Going, if not gone entirely, in our educational institutions are the standards of literature and history which gave us an idea of who we were as a people. Different yes, depending on our locality within Britain and our own interests and education, but still owing allegiance to a core concept of life together in Britain. Meanwhile our elites in Parliament, universities and the media have been busy promoting ideologies that are alien to the British character and people. The concept of an identifiable Britain, however nebulous, has gone. ‘Diversity, equality and inclusion’ has been employed as a steamroller to grind any opposition into the ground, and especially if that opposition is Christian or Christian-based. As historian Tom Holland has pointed out, we in the West are goldfish swimming in Christian waters, and most of us, whether Christians or not, still cling instinctively to the norms instilled by centuries of Christian morality. As the culture which is being replaced was consciously based upon Christian principles, conflict for the Christian is inevitable. Alongside this, and part of it, is the fact that we have witnessed a horrifying and unrealistic, not to say illusory, support for the spread of Islam. We have seen in too many areas, such as parts of London, the Midlands and North of England, that where the Muslim population grows, any hope of integration disappears. Islam does not seek to integrate but to dominate, yet our cultural and political elites still remain blinded by the forlorn chimera of multiculturalism. As a result of soft-pedalling on Islam, we have the shocking reality of a schoolteacher from West Yorkshire who has been in hiding since 2021 because he offended Muslims by daring to show cartoons of the prophet Muhammad during a lesson on blasphemy. Streets can be blocked by Muslims at prayer, despite there being around 2,000 mosques in the UK. An MP has been stabbed to death by a deranged Muslim. A soldier was beheaded on the street. Young people were murdered at a concert. Tens of thousands of white (and Sikh) girls have been gang-raped. Muslims can drive cars through Jewish neighbourhoods shouting that they will rape their wives and daughters. Synagogues have been attacked, ambulances burned, and Jews murdered. We have seen an exponential increase in anti-Semitism – most of it spawning from Islam. In response, the police, like beggars pleading for a handout, attend mosques and timorously request that Muslims obey the law. Armed Muslim gangs are told no action will be taken against them if they store their weapons in the nearby mosque. Eighty-plus Sharia courts operate in the UK. Pakistani Muslim clan networks decide by-election results. Seventy-five per cent of MI5’s terrorist caseload are Islamic. More than 40,000 Muslims are on terror watch-lists. And what is the result of all this deeply disturbing activity? Our Government drafts laws to make criticism of Islam a crime. You couldn’t make it up. If, as recent election results would indicate, the two-party system is dead, there is a straightforward reason for its demise: the simple fact that both Labour and Conservative have failed the British people. They have been too busy protecting and serving their own interests and as a result have neglected those of the ordinary British public. Political power is there to be used for the good of the people, not for its own sake as a prize for election winners. If the British public has had enough, that is entirely understandable. Ordinary citizens are looking around for leaders who will steer a course towards a vision of what our country should be like. The rise of populist parties – notably the Greens – with their rather radical and entirely unworkable visions of the future of Britain promise further turmoil. We are in a battle for the soul of our nation. Our national churches, meanwhile, are emasculated by adherence to the delusion that aping the world in all its folly, and some of its wickedness, will bring about peaceful co-existence with that which should be shunned (I John 2:15-17). As a result, they have done all they can to bring Christianity into disrepute. The old adage is forever true: ‘Hard men create good times. Good times create weak men. Weak men create hard times.’ We live towards the end of that process. Yet we should not shrink from what we’re faced with, but, rather, remember the words of Mordecai to Queen Esther, ‘For if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place, but you and your father’s family will perish. And who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this?’ (Esther 4:14). We who are Christ’s can no longer retreat into the atheist-inspired ghetto that the Christian faith is something to be confined to church buildings or private conviction. Instead, like Abraham Kuyper, we should recognize that Christianity speaks into every area of human life and culture. There is not an inch of creation of which God does not say, ‘Mine’. There is no area of human endeavor, individually or for a nation or a community, that God doesn’t care about. It is possible that some Christians hesitate to engage publicly on moral or social and political issues on the grounds that it distracts from evangelism and makes believers appear judgmental. Yet believers are called not only to preach salvation through Jesus Christ, but also to demonstrate what they believe is good, just and true. There are times when it really is necessary to speak out. We live in a narcissistic society that is awash with pornography, in which babies can be killed in the womb until birth, where divorce is simplified and marriage redefined, where assisted suicide is coming, and where religious liberty and freedom of speech is under serious threat. All this is an inevitable result of the rejection of our Christian roots. As Dostoevsky warned us in The Brothers Karamazov, ‘If there is no God, all things are permitted.’ We live in a society which is under God’s judgement. This deeply onerous situation behooves us, as children of God, to understand the times in which we live, to turn to Him, and hear from Him, that we might know how we should live and what we should do. This article appeared in Prophecy Today on May 20, 2026, and is republished by kind permission.

By Tommy Sharpe I Premier Christianity I 21 May 2026 The Alpha course pioneer and former leader of HTB has been accused of promoting communism and unbiblical ideas after he called Spirit-filled Christians to fight inequality. Tommy Sharpe says he’s shocked at the comments. Confronting injustice is a deeply biblical mandate, he says. When Nicky Gumbel posted on his Instagram: “Those indwelt by the Holy Spirit should be at the forefront of the fight for gender, racial, and social equality”, it hardly seemed like a controversial statement for a Christian leader to make. We find ourselves living in the midst of an epidemic of violence against women and girls, surges in racially and religiously motivated hate crime, and astonishing growth in the wealth of the ultra-rich. Surely Christians should be making a stand against this sort of inequality and injustice? Yet, as I scrolled through the comments, I was horrified by some of the responses: “What intern posted this nonsense. Do you know what is meant by these terms? The current definitions? This is asinine nonsense.” “Stop conflating Christians with Communists - This is sly guilt-tripping of Christians to work toward Communist goals thinking they work for Jesus.” END

David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueOnline | May 23, 2026 Those of us who have watched the Episcopal Church’s long, self-inflicted decline have seen this film before. We know how it ends. And now, with Professor Helen King’s Private Members’ Motion heading to the Church of England’s General Synod in July, we are watching the Church of England queue up to buy a ticket to the same screening. The parallels are not incidental. They are structural. The Episcopal Church did not wake up one morning and decide to abandon orthodox Christian sexual ethics wholesale. It moved by increments, each step described as modest, pastoral, and theologically careful. Each step made the next one inevitable. In 2003, TEC consecrated Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire — the first openly partnered, non-celibate gay man to become a bishop in the Anglican world. The reaction was immediate: nine provinces declared impaired or broken communion, the Windsor Report was commissioned, and scores of orthodox congregations began the painful process of leaving. But TEC pressed on. In 2009 it formally affirmed the right of gay and lesbian persons to be ordained. In 2012 it approved a same-sex blessing liturgy. In 2015, just five days after the Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples had the legal right to marry, General Convention voted to amend the canons of the Episcopal Church to permit any couple the rite of Holy Matrimony. Twelve years from gay bishop to gay marriage. The progressives called it progress. The pews called it something else — and left. Average Sunday attendance in TEC stood at 856,579 in the year 2000. By 2015 it had fallen to 579,780. By 2019 it was 518,411. Marriages conducted in the Episcopal Church totaled 19,017 in 2003 — the year of Gene Robinson’s consecration. By 2019 that figure had collapsed to 6,484, a decline of 66 percent. By the late 2010s TEC had fallen to 1.7 million members, down from 3.4 million in 1992. This is not a church experiencing the general cultural drift away from religion. This is a church that traded its theological birthright for cultural approval and got neither in sufficient quantity to survive. Now look at the Church of England and the King motion. Professor King, a lay member of Synod for Oxford Diocese and vice-chair of its Gender and Sexuality Group, has brought a motion that reads: “That this Synod affirm that there are no fundamental objections to being in a committed, faithful, intimate same-sex relationship, and that such a relationship can be entirely compatible with Christian discipleship.” The TEC playbook is recognizable in every line. TEC also began not with marriage but with affirmation — affirming the dignity of gay persons, affirming their place in the life of the church, affirming that their relationships deserved pastoral recognition. Each affirmation was carefully worded to stop short of doctrinal revision while making the next step feel not only natural but obligatory. If there are “no fundamental objections” to a same-sex relationship, on what grounds does the Church subsequently refuse to bless it? Marry it? Ordain those in one? The King motion is not an endpoint. It is a ratchet. The differences between the two churches are real but they are differences of pace and procedure, not of trajectory. TEC moved through its General Convention by majority vote; the Church of England’s canons require a more complex process involving the Houses of Bishops, Clergy and Laity. The CofE has the additional anchor — or dead weight, depending on one’s view — of its established status and the involvement of Parliament in doctrinal change. These are genuine speed bumps. But TEC had its own procedural obstacles and navigated around every one of them. The revisionists are patient. They have demonstrated, across decades and across denominations, that they are willing to wait, regroup, and try again with cleverer wording. John Dunnett of the Church of England Evangelical Council has put his finger on the strategy precisely: the King motion “shows that the revisionists will find new and different ways to continually push their agenda — away from Scripture, away from our Church’s doctrine and towards liberal change — even when the House of Bishops is not doing so.” That is exactly what TEC’s revisionists did for thirty years. They worked around resistant bishops, around procedural obstacles, around every orthodox countermotion, until the institution itself was reshaped in their image. The tragedy is that the Church of England has the evidence of TEC’s experience directly before it. It has watched a once-great church hemorrhage members, close parishes, and lose its theological coherence in real time. It has received refugees from that wreckage into ACNA and other orthodox bodies. It has debated, studied, and produced the vast LLF process, which after years of costly work concluded that consensus cannot be reached — meaning the orthodox position cannot simply be voted away. And yet here comes Professor King’s motion, and here comes General Synod preparing to debate it in July as though the last twenty years of Anglican history had not happened. The July General Synod vote on the King motion is not a procedural footnote. It is a kairos moment — a point of decision that will reveal whether the Church of England has learned anything from watching its American cousins dismantle orthodoxy one carefully worded resolution at a time. A Synod that votes to affirm Professor King’s motion will have placed itself, whatever legal fictions it maintains about doctrine, on the same road TEC traveled — and will deserve the same destination. The bishops, clergy, and laity who will cast those votes should understand what is at stake: not a gesture of pastoral warmth, not a mild expression of synodical opinion, but a repudiation of Scripture, of the Church’s historic teaching, and of the Global South Anglicans who have staked their communion on the conviction that the Word of God is not subject to revision by committee. If the Church of England will not learn from TEC’s catastrophe theological and moral error, it has chosen, with open eyes, to repeat it. And those who engineered that choice — with their clever wording, their strategic ambiguity, their patient incrementalism — will own the consequences. History will not be kind to them. More importantly, neither will God. As the apostle Paul reminds us in Galatians 6:7, "God is not mocked; for whatever a person sows, this he will also reap.” The same goes for the church. David W. Virtue, DD is the founder and managing editor of VirtueOnline, a global orthodox Anglican online news service.