Brothers and Sisters in Christ, Grace and peace to you in our Lord Jesus Christ. Tuesday morning at 8:45 a.m., Bishop Edgar submitted a letter to Bishop Julian Dobbs, Dean of the Province, indicating voluntary submission to discipline in the matter of the Porter-Gaud chapel dedication. On Sunday evening, Bishop Edgar was notified that a Presentment had been submitted to the Province charging him with just cause for scandal or offense in violation of the disciplinary canons of the ACNA because of his conduct during the dedication service on August 18. Bishop Edgar confessed to the truth of the charge in the Presentment, stating that he should not have participated in the dedication service in the manner that he did. The College of Bishops will determine the punishment for Bishop Edgar at their meeting in Plano, Texas September 21-25, 2026. This disciplinary notice was posted to the website of the Anglican Church in North America today, and we wanted you to be aware of this fact. We, the Standing Committee of the Anglican Diocese of South Carolina, are in support of Bishop Edgar, and his voluntary submission to discipline is a reminder of our need for the mercy of God through the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We invite the Anglican Diocese of South Carolina to pray for our Bishop, our Diocese, and the College of Bishops during this difficult time. Faithfully, The Standing Committee of the Anglican Diocese of South Carolina Additional comments from Rt. Rev. Julian Dobbs Brothers and Sisters, Last week, I shared a statement with the Province reaffirming our position of principled disengagement from those who promote false teaching. I did so in the context of the participation of the Bishop of the Anglican Diocese of South Carolina, ACNA, with a bishop of The Episcopal Church in a joint dedication of a local school chapel. The seriousness of the situation led a complement of Bishops within our College to submit a Presentment, that is, a formal canonical document that advances a disciplinary case by setting out allegations of canonical misconduct against a bishop. In response, Bishop Chip Edgar, against whom the Presentment has been issued, agreed with the charges against him and has consented to be disciplined by the College of Bishops when it gathers later this month. This act of humble submission means there will be no board of inquiry, nor a trial. You can anticipate additional communication from the College following our September gathering. I share this with heaviness of heart but in obedience to the truth Christ calls us to proclaim. Once again, I call on the faithful in the Church to pray that God would guide and sanctify His Church for the glory of His Name. In Him alone, Rt. Rev. Julian Dobbs, Dean of the Province

COMMENTARY By David W. Virtue, DD www.VirtueOnline.org September 1, 2026 The Global Anglican Council — the conciliar body GAFCON raised up as an alternative to the Anglican Consultative Council, the Instruments of Communion, and the Archbishop of Canterbury — announced this week that the headquarters of the reordered Global Anglican Communion will be established in Abuja, Nigeria. No Sign of Repentance This should surprise no orthodox Anglican, whether of the West or the Global South, who has watched in vain for more than two decades for a single sign of repentance from Western Anglicanism and its pansexual agenda. From Lambeth Resolution 1.10, through the Windsor Report, to the present hour, the West has been running Gadarene-like toward the cliff. It has ordained gay and lesbian bishops in the Episcopal Church and in the Anglican Church of Canada, and it has now enthroned a partnered lesbian, Cherry Vann, as Archbishop of Wales — the first such primate in the history of the Communion. Down the slope they go, hastening to join the swine our Lord sent over the edge two thousand years ago, never to return. Rowan Williams once conceded that on this question the Church felt “out of step with what the rest of the culture take for granted.” The West resolved to close that gap, and it succeeded. Never mind that the more it caught up, the more the pews emptied. The Decision at Recife The decision to plant the Communion’s headquarters in Abuja was taken at the Council’s meeting in Recife, Brazil, on Saturday, August 22, 2026, and announced in a communiqué from its chairman, the Most Rev. Dr. Laurent Mbanda, “to strengthen and support the future life and ministry of the global fellowship.” Abuja was the natural — perhaps the only — choice. It was there, at G26 in March, that the Abuja Affirmation declared the old Instruments of Communion to have failed and proclaimed the Anglican Communion reordered into a truly global Church, with the Jerusalem Declaration as its doctrinal spine and the newly minted Global Anglican Council as its conciliar voice. The city that named the new order should fittingly become the seat from which it is governed. Where the Believers Are There is a deeper fitness still. Abuja is already the administrative home of the Church of Nigeria, the largest and most vigorous province in the Anglican world, numbering some eighteen to twenty-five million souls. The reordered Communion is not planting its flag on neutral ground. It is planting it in the most fertile soil the Communion possesses — among Anglicans who are multiplying while the West buries its dead. That is the whole story of the realignment in a single geographic fact. The center of gravity has not merely shifted from Canterbury to the Global South; it has been relocated, deliberately and with intent, to a city where the faith is growing. Modern technology lets a communion be governed from anywhere. The choice of Abuja says what a Zoom link cannot: that the future of Anglicanism will be written where its people actually are. Canterbury kept the buildings, the history, and the letterhead. Abuja has the believers. And the Church has always, in the end, followed the believers — as it is doing again. David W. Virtue, DD, is founder and managing editor of VirtueOnline. His writings can be found at www.virtueonline.org, where you can subscribe to receive his free biweekly VIEWPOINTS. His Substack on the Middle East is at davidvirtue2.substack.com.

Dame Sarah Mullally's forte is thermometers not theology The good ship Anglican Communion, going down by the head — women’s ordination the last thing above water. COMMENTARY By David W. Virtue, DD I www.virtueonline.org I August 31, 2026 Just when you thought the Global South might come to the rescue of the Anglican Communion over the ordination of women, it all suddenly collapses. Anglicans are brilliant at muddying the waters. The Hegelian-driven Archbishop Rowan Williams, the thoroughly conflicted Archbishop Justin Welby, and now a former nurse running the Anglican ship of state just as the Church of England slides into hospice care. Dame Sarah Mullally's forte being thermometers not theology. Consider the anomaly. A GAFCON province, Kenya, already seats women in the episcopate — and has done since 2021, when Emily Onyango was made an assistant bishop in Bondo and Rose Okeno was consecrated diocesan of Butere — at the very moment the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) is still agonizing over women priests. The ACNA is firmly against ordaining a woman to the episcopacy, but even ordination to the priesthood is raising talk of internal schism. The Reformed Episcopal Church (REC) is firmly opposed to the ordination of women in any order, and there are rumblings that it might be the first to show ACNA the back door. The ACNA's Anglo-Catholic wing is also opposed to the ordination of women as are some evangelicals. The province's two-tier approach to women's ordination is showing its fragility in the face of Anglo-Catholic and confessional-evangelical resistance. At least two provinces aligned with GAFCON or the GSFA — Kenya and South Sudan — have consecrated women as bishops, and a growing number ordain women to the priesthood. The Jerusalem Declaration treats the ordination of women as a secondary matter, noting that full agreement has not been reached among all signatories and that it is not held to affect one's salvation. Its proponents emphasize that while they maintain a unanimous view on primary matters, the diversity of opinion on women's ordination is acknowledged within their global fellowship. Yet here is the contradiction that will not stay buried. If the matter is genuinely secondary — adiaphora, a thing indifferent — why did the GAFCON primates adopt a moratorium in 2018 on consecrating any further women bishops? A moratorium is the language of discipline, not of liberty. The fellowship wants to call the question secondary while policing it as though it were primary, and that unresolved tension is precisely why the Global South could not, in the end, ride to anyone's rescue. The map bears this out. Kenya and South Sudan permit the ordination of women as both priests and bishops. Nigeria currently limits women to the diaconate. Uganda's canons would allow a woman to be elected and consecrated a bishop — but none ever has, and there are no plans to do so; women there serve as archdeacons, provosts and deans, never as bishops. Tanzania has no province-wide provision, though individual dioceses such as Tabora have lately voted to ordain women. The Church of the Province of Myanmar authorizes women as deacons and priests but not bishops. Even the GAFCON-sponsored Diocese of the Southern Cross in Australia — led by Glenn Davies, the former Archbishop of Sydney who spent decades resisting the priesting of women — has now licensed a woman minister. The ACNA, for its part, leaves the question of women priests to individual dioceses rather than settling it at the provincial level. For Anglo-Catholics and a good number of evangelicals, the ordination of women to any order of ministry is strictly verboten. They are supported theologically by the Roman Catholic Church and, in its own idiom, by the Southern Baptist Convention, which in June voted overwhelmingly to advance a constitutional amendment barring women from the pastorate — a measure introduced by the Rev. Dr. Albert Mohler that still requires a confirming vote in 2027 to take effect. A victory for Mohler, and a signal of where the confessional wind is blowing. How this all plays out is still open to speculation. That it remains a live issue for Anglicans in North America more than fifteen years after the ACNA's founding cannot be swept under the rug of contemporary history. The "no ordination" position has a long historical pedigree that will not simply go away. Nor can one ignore the argument that The Episcopal Church, having admitted women to the priesthood and episcopate, found itself on the slippery slope to ordaining homosexual and lesbian priests and bishops. Cause and correlation are not the same thing, and honest opponents will concede as much — but the sequence is there in the record, and it haunts every ACNA diocese now weighing the question. Righteous rejecters of women's ordination can point to history, to tradition and, depending on how one reads it, to Scripture itself. That the throne of Canterbury is now held by a woman speaks volumes. It is where the Church of England has been drifting for more than twenty-five years. With the denomination in freefall — little more than one percent of the English population to be found in its pews on any given Sunday, and barely four in a hundred under-35s attending any Christian service even monthly — she may well prove to be its last Archbishop of Canterbury. Time will tell. David W. Virtue, DD, is founder and managing editor of VirtueOnline. His writings can be found at www.virtueonline.org, where you can subscribe to receive his free biweekly VIEWPOINTS. His Substack on the Middle East is at davidvirtue2.substack.com.

COMMENTARY By David W. Virtue, DD I www.virtueonline.org I August 28, 2026 It is now apparent to the world’s roughly 85 million Anglicans that the Anglican Communion is irretrievably broken, and that short of repentance it will never be repaired. There is no glossing over it, no parsing it, no pretending otherwise, no hope that if we talk long enough and lovingly enough about unity, we will somehow arrive at a different conclusion. We will not. The Fault Line and the Point of No Return Lambeth Resolution 1.10, passed in 1998, was the starting point of the schism. GAFCON and the Jerusalem Declaration of 2008 were its ending point — the moment the orthodox declared, decisively and without apology, that there is no third way, no place at which anyone may say we have reached consensus and can now move forward together. There is no consensus to be had. There never was. Every Remedy Has Failed Consider what has been tried, and what has come of it. Neither the coercive maneuvering of the late Frank Griswold, nor the bullying of the late John Shelby Spong, nor the unctuous self-regard of Gene Robinson, nor the mailed fist of the LGBTQ lobby has moved the needle a single inch toward reconciliation. Just the opposite. Each hardened the divide while The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada raced headlong toward their own demographic extinction. Rainbow flags draped over every available surface, endless invocations of God’s indiscriminate love for absolutely everybody, and the ready cry of “homophobe” for anyone who dared question the new sexual theologians made one thing abundantly clear: compromise was never on the table. Never. Conform, or be gone. The remedies offered by successive Archbishops of Canterbury resolved nothing. The Windsor Report, alternative episcopal oversight, the Communion Partners bishops — each was a bridge thrown across a chasm that could not be spanned. Rowan Williams, for all his genuine brilliance, could not resolve the impasse, because he was himself conflicted. The obscurantist theology of his “The Body’s Grace” — an essay that labored to baptize what Scripture plainly forbids — could neither persuade the global bishops nor kindle the faithful in the pews. One cannot, in the end, synthesize sin. God has not changed His mind. Two Narratives, Two Religions Here is the heart of it, the thing no committee can paper over and no communiqué can disguise. Two narratives now govern the Anglican Communion, and they do not merely disagree. They cannot be reconciled, because they do not share a common authority. The first narrative receives. It holds that God has spoken — in creation, in Scripture, in the person of His Son — and that the church’s whole task is glad obedience to a word already given. The second narrative revises. It holds that God is still speaking, and that He speaks most clearly through human experience, through the felt truth of the self, through the shifting spirit of the age. The first asks, “What has God said?” The second asks, “What have we come to feel?” These are not two points on a single spectrum. They are two different religions wearing the same vestments. You cannot average revelation against its denial. You cannot split the difference between “Thus saith the Lord” and “the Lord could not possibly have meant that.” No synod can legislate the gap away. No listening process can listen it into agreement. No carefully worded statement can make Scripture and the zeitgeist say the same thing. The revisionist has never wanted a seat at the orthodox table. He wants the table torn down and rebuilt to his own design. Conform or Be Cast Out The pansexualists grasp this more honestly than the institutionalists forever pleading for more time. They have made sex their identity and their identity their god, and before that god they will brook no rival and no dissent. Conform, or face ecclesiastical punishment. Ask Bishop Bill Love of Albany, hauled up under Title IV for the “crime” of holding the very line Scripture drew. Ask Charlie Holt, twice elected in Florida and twice denied his see, what it is to be cast into episcopal outer darkness for the offense of believing what every Anglican believed five minutes ago. It would be screamingly Monty Python funny if it were not so tragic. It has cost hundreds of priests their livelihoods, their futures, and their pensions. It has broken congregations, split dioceses, and ended lifelong friendships. What Becket Would See One can only imagine what Thomas Becket would make of it — told, on his way to martyrdom in his own cathedral, that five centuries on a practicing homosexual would stand at that very altar in open defiance of Scripture and the holiness of God; that the nave which drank his blood would host a rave, a post-coital revel in the wake of Holy Eucharist. He might be vomiting still. A Church That Would Sooner Die So, the Communion is left with two irreconcilable stories. The Western version — culturally captive, theologically spent, and demographically on its last legs — will not repent. It would sooner die in its sin than change its mind. For this church, hell is evidently preferable to heaven, provided one may enter it unrebuked. Obedience to God’s word is not on offer. Scripture, we are informed, must yield to experience. We will not be told what to do, or with whom to do it. God — or perhaps she — has opened new eyes to a new age. The Gospel Comes Home But the Global South has risen from the ashes of colonialism, shrugged off its former paymasters, and declared open season on the West. We gave them the gospel; they received it, believed it, and are now handing it back to the senders who no longer want it. The missionary tide has turned and runs the other way. What Canterbury shipped out in the age of empire, Africa and Asia now ship home to a continent that has forgotten its own name. And so we in the West wait — for a new resurrection, a revival ahead of the great and final coming of the Lord. It is long overdue. Even so, come, Lord Jesus. David W. Virtue, DD, is founder and managing editor of VirtueOnline. His writings can be found at www.virtueonline.org, where you can subscribe to receive his free biweekly VIEWPOINTS. His Substack on the Middle East is at davidvirtue2.substack.com.

A response to Dale Coulter's "The Great Seminary Sorting" By Bryan Hollon I Trinity Anglican Seminary I August 27, 2026 Although I’m a little late to the game, I’d like to make a few comments about Dale M. Coulter’s recent essay for “The Protestant Mind,” a project of First Things magazine. The essay is titled, “The Great Seminary Sorting,” and describes recent trends in theological education that none of us can ignore. After going through a list of institutions which have either shut down or seen dramatic decline (and the list is substantial), Coulter identifies three major shifts defining the present and future of theological education: A generational shift – major scholars who defined theological education in the late 20th century have largely retired or died. An ecclesial shift – away from mainline and “magisterial” Protestant traditions toward non-conformist churches. Educational shift – toward distance learning, which now accounts for more than 50% of all seminary enrollment. Coulter provides an analysis of these trends and explains well why they have taken hold so rapidly, and in a summary of the argument at the end of the essay, he asks and then answers his own question: “what do these three shifts tell us about the future? First, the “traditional freestanding seminary with an on-campus population is over.” Interestingly, he suggests that “niche programs” like Nashotah House will remain, but most will not. He obviously knows nothing about Trinity Anglican Seminary, the far larger niche seminary of the ACNA. Second, “seminaries that remain flexible and entrepreneurial will grow” Third, “seminaries that effectively use the new media landscape will grow” Coulter seems to be suggesting that those of us leading theological education should really get with the current trends or face a bleak future. In some ways, he is right, and one of the frustrations of leading in theological education today is that we cannot bend the world to our needs. We must live and work and do our best in the world as it is, and the world that Coulter describes is here whether we like it or not. No doubt, we must be flexible and entrepreneurial, and we must come to terms with the digital landscape and figure out how to flourish within it. But what I found most interesting about Coulter’s essay is what he did not say. And that is, he offered no qualitative judgment on these trends whatsoever—no account of what is lost when residential theological education is abandoned, no reckoning with what these shifts mean for the ecclesial traditions that these seminaries exist to serve (if they serve an ecclesial tradition). In other words, what do these trends mean for theological and ecclesial formation? Worship at Trinity Anglican Seminary’s Trophimus Center. For Anglicans, a near-total reliance on distance education feeds a tribalism that is taking hold in our culture and across the wider church and certainly in the ACNA. Formation that is dispersed entirely into various “satellite campuses,” “Anglican tracks” and distance programs—and one that fails to unite students from different geographical locations the varieties of churchmanship in the common pursuit of theological formation—is a serious threat to “catholicity.” How can we form our aspirants to proclaim the “faith once and for all delivered” in service to the “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic” church when we have no institutions bringing the various parts of the church together in common cause? How do we maintain cohesion and good-will without the friendships forged during three years of intense classroom study, communal living, and common worship—with people not presorted according to region, churchmanship, and other cultural identity markers? At Trinity, we continue to believe that a vibrant residential seminary must be among the key factors ensuring catholicity and uniting a diverse province across differences but within the bounds of biblical orthodoxy. Though not distinctively Christian, the work of Yuval Levin and others would suggest that institutions like residential seminaries are absolutely essential for the vitality and resiliency of religious communities. Coulter also fails to mention artificial intelligence, which is arguably the most important feature of the “new media landscape,” and the one that will shape the future of educational institutions more profoundly than any other. For reasons that I won’t go into in great depth here, AI could render asynchronous, computer-based education essentially meaningless. AI agents can already enroll in a class and complete all assignments as though they were human, and some distance programs have little defense against this sort of thing. There are many seminary programs that have invested heavily in the “new media landscape” and are now highly vulnerable to the emerging ubiquity of artificial intelligence. These issues are very much on my radar as a seminary leader. So… while I agree with Coulter that seminaries need to be flexible, creative, and entrepreneurial, the most important factor moving forward is that formation must be increasingly personal. It requires more personal mentoring, more classroom instruction, more oral examinations, more hand-written assessments, and more apprenticeships. A totally digital, online education is woefully insufficient in the age of AI. At Trinity, we want our students to be well established within a community of learning where they can be personally observed and known deeply by those helping them to discern their future in Christian ministry. We want to hear and see their learning as they ask questions, engage in dialogue, exposit the Word of God, eat and drink with people they would not have chosen as friends, and much more. With our residential students, this human assessment happens naturally, though it is also programmatic as we meet regularly as a faculty to discuss the progress of the students that we work with. For our distance students, this means that we are working hard to ensure that their formation takes place in a church-based community and that they are paired with competent and caring mentors (in the context of a faithful church) who can provide ongoing, human assessment. Several years ago, we developed a “church-based pathway” to ensure that our distance students receive the hands-on personal and communal formation that ministry preparation absolutely requires. As we move forward, we aren’t focused on “surviving” the great seminary sorting. Our clear goal is to remain faithful in the midst of it and to subvert its most destructive tendencies. We want to be the sort of institution worth saving, so as we adapt to meet the many challenges of this time, it is always to pursue that calling more faithfully. The challenges before us will require flexibility, creativity, and courage, but they do not alter our mission or justify losing sight of it. Trinity exists to form leaders for Christian ministry and mission who are deeply known, personally formed, theologically grounded, and prepared to serve the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. In the age of AI, pastoral ministry will remain one vocation where “knowledge work” continues to matter as much or more than ever because it employs knowledge not as a utilitarian tool but as a key dimension of human formation for the very personal “cure of souls.” May God bless all who labor in and benefit from this important work. A Mere Christian On the Anglican Way is free today. But if you enjoyed this post, you can make a pledge for a future subscription. When subscriptions become available, 100% of the funds raised will go to the Trinity Fund, which supports operations at Trinity Anglican Seminary. You won't be charged until we enable payments. The Great Seminary Sorting can be read here: https://protestantmind.com/p/the-great-seminary-sorting?utm_source=LinkedIn&utm_medium=&utm_campaign=Newsletter&utm_term=Seminary

COMMENTARY By David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueonline.org | August 27, 2026 On multiple fronts, the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) finds itself embroiled in one ecclesiastical fight after another, with no apparent end in sight. Even as it heads toward the September 7 trial of its archbishop, Steve Wood, in Charleston — on charges of sexual harassment, bullying of staff, and plagiarism — another fire has broken out in the usually bucolic Low Country of South Carolina. This one is over the dedication of a school chapel, a shared altar, and the question of who may stand at it. At the center are two bishops: one of them orthodox in faith and morals, the other described by her critics as heretical and apostate, a woman whose theology her detractors say has already booked her passage to a warmer climate. The optics were dreadful, and within hours the story was everywhere — including here at VirtueOnline, this reporter not being known for restraint at such moments. Like a game of Whac-A-Mole, it popped up where no one was looking. The Anglican Bishop of South Carolina, Charles F. “Chip” Edgar III, was photographed standing shoulder to shoulder with the Episcopal Bishop of South Carolina, Ruth Woodliff-Stanley — the two of them smiling in the narthex like a pair of Cheshire cats caught making nice. The occasion was the August 18 dedication of the new St. Timothy’s Chapel, a 600-seat church on the campus of Porter-Gaud School in Charleston. The photographs — the two bishops processing together, draping a hanging over the altar, laughing, embracing — raced across social media. An ecclesiastical storm erupted, with charges flying that could yet end in a defrocking. Into the breach stepped Bishop Julian Dobbs, Dean of the Province and, since Wood’s inhibition last November, the acting Archbishop of the ACNA. It is Dobbs and his fellow bishops who will weigh what, if anything, is to be done. Edgar Explains Himself Reacting to the exposure, Edgar — genuinely orthodox and no man’s pushover — first got testy, lambasting the media for what he took to be overblown publicity. Then he sat down and wrote. “I write to apologize for the hurt feelings and re-opened wounds that the photographs of my participation in the dedication of the new St. Timothy’s Chapel at Porter-Gaud School may have caused,” he began. He had heard from many — in his diocese, in the Province, and in the wider communion — that the images had caused pain and confusion. “I regret that very much.” Edgar then laid out the history. Porter-Gaud is an Episcopal school; when his diocese left TEC, the board resolved that, to serve both ACNA and TEC families, both bishops would sit on it. “There is, of course, an inherent awkwardness in that arrangement,” he wrote. “We in the ACNA are in broken communion with TEC. Our disagreements are real and substantial. I know that. I’ve lived that. In no way do I intend to diminish that hard reality.” As a bishop and a board member, Edgar said, he was asked to take part in the dedication, and he weighed the cost. “I worried that it could cause consternation. I also knew that my refusal to participate would be dispiriting to our diocesan clergy and lay people who serve there, and the many diocesan families who send their children there.” The gospel, he argued, is bearing fruit at Porter-Gaud, and the diocese ought to press into that work, not retreat from it. The liturgy, he insisted, had been planned so that neither bishop would preach or celebrate the Eucharist; one of his own priests, the chaplain, preached and proclaimed the gospel. But — and here is the rub that no amount of planning could smooth — “such services inevitably involve difficult choices and produce awkward moments.” Both bishops dedicated each piece of the new furnishings rather than dividing them up. Who would get the pulpit? The Table? Had he consulted his more seasoned brother bishops beforehand, he conceded, “some of this confusion could have been avoided; that’s on me.” Then he addressed the two photographs that have done the most damage. The first showed both bishops at the Table. Before the service, Edgar explained, they had been asked to help vest the newly consecrated altar. “Some who saw these photos online understood them to show that we celebrated at the Table together. We did not.” The second — and the one that drew the loudest outcry — showed Edgar’s crozier in his hand and the Episcopal bishop’s hand resting on it. “I wish I could go back and change that,” he wrote. Neither bishop was to carry a crozier, the chapel being independent of both dioceses; at the last minute Edgar was asked to use his only to trace the sign of the cross on the threshold, after which he put it away. “Clearly, both of our hands should not have been on it, even if only momentarily. In hindsight, I wish I had insisted on using the processional cross.” He understood, he said, how the image “suggests more than it was, and has become for some a source of anger and pain.” “Brothers and sisters, where my actions have offended, forgive me,” he closed. “At the same time, please pray for the good work that many in our diocese are engaged in at Porter-Gaud School.” The Communion Question Here is where the accounts part company — and where the fight will finally be settled. Edgar’s careful line is that neither bishop celebrated the Eucharist, and that is true as far as it goes. But independent accounts of the service, including this one’s earlier reporting, describe Holy Communion distributed at two stations, with both bishops taking part in administering the Sacrament. Neither presided; both, it appears, distributed. That distinction is the whole quarrel in miniature. To Edgar’s defenders it is exculpatory: no concelebration, no joint consecration, nothing that formally breaches the broken communion between the two churches. To his critics it is beside the point. Sharing in the distribution of the Body and Blood alongside a bishop one holds to be apostate is, they say, precisely the scandal — celebrant or no. A remnant that bled for a decade and forfeited its buildings to walk away from that altar does not much care who held the paten. Edgar has asked the College of Bishops to spend a season of prayer and reflection and to give guidance on how ACNA bishops should conduct themselves in these shared settings. “As a bishop in the church, I will follow the College’s conclusion,” he said. That conclusion will come sooner rather than later. Dobbs Draws the Line It did not take long. Within hours of the diocese releasing Edgar’s letter, Dobbs issued his own — and it carried the unmistakable chill of a man who has already made up his mind. “A situation has arisen in our Province that has given great offense to many who worship in our churches,” Dobbs wrote. “I want to address this and be plain about the position of the Anglican Church in North America.” Many in the Province, he said, had been shocked by “what appears to be renewed communion with The Episcopal Church.” Then the history, delivered in the cadence of a man reading out a verdict. “It is now nearly two decades since many of us separated from The Episcopal Church, whose leadership abandoned the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints. Departing from those with whom we worshiped and served was costly to our parishes and to our souls. It remains painful for many of us. It was, however, the right thing to do.” Dobbs invoked the Global Anglican Council, which last March called Anglican leaders to a “principled disengagement” from those who remain in communion with churches that have abandoned biblical teaching. That same principle, he said, governs the ACNA’s dealings closer to home. “Those who hold ecclesiastical authority in our Province bear a solemn responsibility to uphold this position.” “Disengagement does not mean indifference,” he added. The ACNA prays for those who have departed the faith and pleads with the Lord to restore them. “Until it comes, however, we cannot be in communion with those who have distorted God’s Word.” And then the sentence Edgar surely read twice: “Next month, as part of the scheduled College of Bishops meeting, I will lay the seriousness of this situation before the bishops and ask them to consider with me what faithfulness to our Lord and the faith we have received requires of those who have been entrusted with ecclesiastical authority.” Cui Bono? There is a veiled threat in that language, and no one in the ACNA will have missed it. Edgar is on the hot seat. The man putting him there is the acting head of a province already convulsed by the inhibition and looming trial of its archbishop, and by a run of lawsuits among its own bishops — hardly a house at peace with itself, and hardly the setting for a caretaker to be sitting in judgment on a diocesan. It should be said that Edgar did not act from weakness. When he stood beside Woodliff-Stanley he did so not as the grateful leader of a remnant but as the shepherd of a diocese nearly three times the size of hers — a man with standing, not a supplicant. That makes the miscalculation more puzzling, and the response to it more revealing. Read one way, this is a straightforward matter of a line that must hold: the ACNA is not in communion with TEC, and a bishop who blurs that line invites correction. Read another way, it is something older and more human. Whatever else it accomplishes, this episode retires any notion that Edgar — able, orthodox, and widely respected — might one day succeed Wood. That would leave the top slot open to the man now holding it. We shall see. David W. Virtue, DD, is founder and managing editor of VirtueOnline. His writings can be found at www.virtueonline.org, where you can subscribe to receive his free biweekly VIEWPOINTS. His Substack on the Middle East is at davidvirtue2.substack.com.

COMMENTARY By David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueonline.org | August 25, 2026 They never met, and there was never any intention that they should. The country was Brazil. Spiritually and theologically, the two gatherings might as well have convened ten thousand miles apart. Two bodies of Anglican leaders — with different gods, different gospels, and different destinations — passed each other like ships in the night. Sunni and Shia without the bullets and the guns, a communion in unambiguous schism. All talk of unity — that perennial incantation of archbishops, and never more so than from the present occupant of Lambeth Palace — has long since evaporated. It survives now only as liturgy, recited over a body that has already died. Dame Sarah Mullally spent her first African pilgrimage this summer at Cape Coast Castle in Ghana, defending the Church of England's £100 million reparations fund from the very dungeons of the transatlantic trade, praying in lament and calling for healing. Even sympathizers noticed what was missing. The historian Bijan Omrani asked aloud why she prayed only in penance and never in thanks — never for the British clergy, sailors, and abolitionists who spent their lives, and in many cases their blood, to bring the trade to an end. The Church of England now knows how to apologize for its past. It has forgotten how to preach. Why Brazil? Why Brazil, one might ask? It has indigenous peoples, a rainforest of international note, and a burgeoning Pentecostalism that is slowly but surely overtaking several centuries of moribund Roman Catholicism. The people will no longer be intimidated into believing that the Roman Church is the one true church that alone dispenses salvation. God, it turns out, is bigger than the Vatican. Anglicanism has had a footing in Brazil far longer than most realize. It arrived in 1810, when the Treaty of Commerce and Navigation between Portugal and the United Kingdom permitted the Church of England to build chaplaincies for British expatriates in what was still a Portuguese colony — making Anglicanism the oldest non-Roman church in the country. A genuinely Brazilian, Portuguese-speaking church came later, in 1889-90, carried by young missionaries from the Theological Seminary of Virginia — Lucien Lee Kinsolving and James Watson Morris among them — who came not to serve homesick Englishmen but to plant a national church. From a missionary district of the American Episcopal Church, it grew into an autonomous province of the Anglican Communion in 1965: the Igreja Episcopal Anglicana do Brasil, the IEAB. And, like the Episcopal Church it sprang from, it eventually tore in two. The Recife Story The fracture came in 2005, over the issue that has broken Anglicanism on every continent: human sexuality. After the Episcopal Church consecrated the openly partnered Gene Robinson in 2003 in open defiance of Lambeth Resolution 1.10, the Diocese of Recife, under its bishop Robinson Cavalcanti, refused to bend. For that refusal he was deposed and expelled from the IEAB. He did not go quietly, and he did not go alone. He took with him roughly two-thirds of the diocese’s clergy and the overwhelming majority of its laity, and placed himself under the primatial oversight of Archbishop Gregory Venables of the Southern Cone. The province kept the buildings; Cavalcanti kept the people. Then came the tragedy that still shadows the diocese — and shadows me. On the night of February 26, 2012, Robinson Cavalcanti and his wife, Miriam, were stabbed to death in their home in Olinda by their adopted son, a young man with a long history of drug abuse. The bishop was sixty-eight; Miriam was sixty-four. Robinson was my friend, and I miss him still. A confessor who had faced down an entire province lost his life not to persecution but to private anguish under his own roof. GAFCON mourned him as one of its steadfast heroes; I mourned a man I had known and admired. Into that breach stepped Miguel Uchôa Cavalcanti. He had planted the Church of the Holy Spirit in Greater Recife in 1996 with just thirty souls — a congregation that would become the largest Anglican parish in Latin America. This writer recalls the early days of that work quite vividly. Elected to succeed the martyred bishop later in 2012 and consecrated that December, Uchôa did not merely hold the line; he multiplied it. By 2018 the single embattled diocese had become a province — the Anglican Church in Brazil, the IAB — with Uchôa as its first Archbishop and Primate, recognized by GAFCON and the Global South. Today he sits as Vice-Chairman of the Global Anglican Council, the new governing body of the reordered Global Anglican Communion. The man who buried his predecessor now helps lead a communion. That is the ground on which the two gatherings met. One tribe would remember none of it. The other had lived every word. Gathering One: São Paulo The first group convened in São Paulo from August 10 to 12 — the Anglican primates of the Americas, seven of them, gathered under the aegis of the IEAB and the Canterbury-aligned Communion. They were Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe of the Episcopal Church; Marinez Rosa dos Santos Bassotto of Brazil, the first woman to lead an Anglican province in Latin America; Shane Parker of Canada; Alba Sally Sue Hernández García of Mexico; Juan David Alvarado Melgar of Central America; Brian Williams of South America; and Philip Wright of the West Indies. They pledged to labor together on the great global questions of the age. They issued a statement. They affirmed the dignity and rights of indigenous peoples. They deplored colonialism, secularism, polarization, migration, corruption, and climate change. They revitalized a committee on migration. What they did not do — what they dared not do — was look out the window at their own emptying pews. It is tempting to file all seven under the banner of the progressive left, and the truth is more revealing than that. But the statement they signed named every crisis in the world except the one consuming their own provinces. Not a word about the collapse of attendance across the Anglican West. Not a word about the doctrinal earthquakes that have shattered the Communion they represent. It is more congenial to pronounce upon the state of the planet in righteous indignation than to stare the state of one’s own church in the face. Picture, if you can bear it, the logical terminus of this trajectory: a gay dean preaching to an empty cathedral, announcing that God has now blessed every arrangement the age approves, and inviting the faithful — all four of them — to a rave in the nave afterward, gin and tonics provided. It is satire only until you notice how little distance remains between the joke and the trend line. Gathering Two: Recife Under the banner of God’s faithfulness, a very different assembly met in Recife under GAFCON, now the Global Anglican Communion. Its purpose was to install the Very Rev. Gabriel Moreira Uchôa Cavalcanti as Dean of the Catedral Anglicana do Espírito Santo. By the movement’s own account, the service overflowed with joy and hope as Archbishop Miguel Uchôa passed the mantle of the cathedral’s leadership to his son, Gabriel. Ecclesiastical nepotism is not new, and where genuine generational faith is concerned it can be a mercy rather than a machination — the handing of a torch, not the hoarding of a throne. The celebration marked thirty years since Archbishop Miguel planted that church in 1996 with thirty people. Yet even amid the celebration there was no forgetting the cost. Those thirty years told a story of hope purchased through severe trial. Faithfulness to the authority of Scripture had come at a punishing price for the brothers and sisters in Brazil — the loss of their former institutional home, their buildings, their standing in the province that raised them. That is the price of faithfulness, and the Lord did not abandon his people. Note well: the São Paulo primates, meeting in the same country the same month, made no mention of this schism, these losses, this exile. One cannot lament what one has caused. When faithful Anglicans in Brazil found themselves cast out of their provincial home, GAFCON stood with them, offering recognition, encouragement, and a place within the global Anglican family. The Diocese of Recife became an extra-provincial diocese; then, through what the movement calls gospel growth, it multiplied into the Anglican Church in Brazil in 2018. Suffering and sacrifice, it turned out, had not been in vain. The gathering was careful to locate its hope where hope belongs — not in institutions, buildings, or human strength, but in the risen Christ. During their days in Recife, members of the Global Anglican Council also met to continue the work of building out the new Communion, and announced that the G27 Prayer Conference will be held in Recife from April 20 to 23, 2027. The Most Rev. Dr. Laurent Mbanda, Chairman of the Global Anglican Council, reminded the faithful that thirty years after a small band stepped out in faith, they were being shown again that God is able to do immeasurably more than they could ask or imagine. Two Gatherings, Two Gospels Two gatherings. Two worldviews. Two gospels. One stood in the sunlight of its own self-congratulation, imagining itself a chamber of globalists, deploring the condition of the world and hoping the governments of men might deign to listen. The other gave thanks to God for His faithfulness in bringing dead souls to living faith in Christ — even as the world staggers toward apocalypse. One counted its causes. The other counted its converts. And only one of them was growing. David W. Virtue, DD, is founder and managing editor of VirtueOnline. His writings can be found at www.virtueonline.org, where you can subscribe to receive his free biweekly VIEWPOINTS. His Substack on the Middle East is at davidvirtue2.substack.com.

Twenty-five years after the towers fell, the theologian who was there still cannot tell revenge from justice — or good from evil. By David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueonline.org I August 24, 2026 On the morning of September 11, 2001, Rowan Williams was a hundred yards from the World Trade Center, in a studio at Trinity Wall Street, preparing to record a program on the spiritual life. Then the towers came down and the dust rolled in under the doors. To his credit — and one should always credit a man’s courage before weighing his ideas — Williams did not retreat into himself. He prayed with the frightened, comforted the trapped, and stayed. He is, whatever else follows, a man of genuine learning and real pastoral instinct. That is precisely what makes the wreckage of his thinking so instructive. For out of that morning came a small book, Writing in the Dust, and out of the book came a posture that has governed the Anglican mind for a quarter century — a posture on open display again this month, as the retired archbishop, now Lord Williams of Oystermouth, rose from his ermine to accuse Nigel Farage of “channeling anti-Muslim feeling.” This is the same Williams who, of the men who murdered nearly three thousand people, could bring himself to say they had “serious moral goals.” Severe toward the politician who names the threat; tender toward the ideology that embodied it. Hold that inversion in your mind. It is the whole man. The Breathing Space Writing in the Dust is seventy-eight pages of deliberate irresolution. Williams offers no just-war reckoning, no verdict, no program — only what he calls a “breathing space,” a pause in which the West might decline to answer violence with violence. He is eloquent on the dense religious language the killers used to sanctify slaughter, and eloquent again on the danger that we might dehumanize them in return. Retaliation, he warns, merely ensures “how the conversation will continue.” He will, grudgingly, call the attack a crime. What he will not do is call it evil and draw the one conclusion evil demands — that it must be stopped. The Woman in the Dust The title is the confession. It comes from the eighth chapter of John — the woman dragged before Jesus, caught in adultery, the mob already fingering their stones. He stoops and writes in the dust, and in that silence the accusers melt away. Williams takes the bent, silent figure as his model: do not react, make a space, let the fury spend itself. But look again at who stands where. In John 8 the one who is spared is the guilty party. The crowd she is saved from are self-appointed executioners. Mercy runs from the innocent Christ to the guilty woman. Williams inverts every role and never notices. On September 11 the “adulteress” was not the sinner awaiting sentence — it was three thousand innocents already dead. The stones were not poised in the hands of a mob; they had already been thrown, out of the sky, into the sides of buildings. To lift Christ’s mercy off the guilty and lay it over the aggressors, while recasting the grieving West as the bloodthirsty crowd, is not exegesis. It is eisegesis. It is a category error wearing a halo. Jesus wrote in the dust to stop an unjust killing. Williams wrote in the dust to stop a just defense. The Wrong Villain No one saw the pattern earlier or named it better than Melanie Phillips. Reviewing Williams’s remarks on the third anniversary of the atrocity, she pronounced him “on his knees before terror.” The verdict was merciless and exact. Here was the leader of a global communion whose people were being burned and butchered in Nigeria, Sudan and Pakistan, who managed, on the very anniversary of the greatest Islamist strike in history, to travel to Al-Azhar in Cairo and dwell on the common inheritance of the children of Abraham. Again and again, Phillips observed, Williams located the true villain not in the jihad but in the West itself — its modernity, its arrogance, its wall in the Holy Land, its wars. The persecuted Christian, of which there are millions, was invisible; the wounded Muslim sensibility filled the whole frame. He had a boundless capacity to understand everyone except his own. The Fourth Plane Set beside all this the passengers of United Flight 93. They did the one thing the book forbids. Somewhere over Pennsylvania they took a vote, said the Lord’s Prayer, and stormed the cockpit — and in answering force with force they spared the Capitol the fate of the towers. Would the archbishop have had them keep their seats and turn the other cheek as the plane banked toward Washington, and offer a thirty-second homily on non-resistance as the ground rushed up? Their “vengeance” was the salvation of hundreds of strangers who never learned their names. That is the line Williams cannot draw — the line between revenge, which feeds itself, and justice, which shields the innocent. Not to take up the sword, in that cockpit, was to hand the murderers their victory. What sort of justice is that, Mr. Williams? The Synthesis of Sin The root goes deeper than nerve. Williams is a dialectician to his marrow — an heir of Hegel, for whom every thesis meets its opposite and both are gathered up, sublated, reconciled into some higher synthesis that cancels neither. Turn that habit of mind upon morality and it becomes acid. Evil ceases to be a thing you name and resist; it becomes a moment in a larger process, a partial truth awaiting its reconciliation, a rage to be understood rather than a wickedness to be opposed. Hence “serious moral goals.” Hence the breathing space in place of the sword. In the dialectic there are no final enemies — only unfinished conversations. Call it the synthesis of sin. But the Bible knows no such synthesis. Its moral world is stubbornly two-fold — light and darkness, the two ways, wheat and tares, Christ and Belial with no treaty between them. Evil there is not a stage to be transcended but a power to be renounced and, at the last, judged. The cross is not the reconciliation of good and evil; it is the defeat of the one by the endurance of the other. Williams’s dialectic quietly dissolves that antithesis, and with it the whole architecture of Christian moral seriousness. If evil is merely misunderstood good, then Gethsemane was a negotiation and Calvary a breakdown in dialogue. The learned will object that Williams draws as much from Augustine and the Orthodox Lossky — evil as the mere privation of the good — as from Hegel. Grant it, and the door still opens on the same empty room: an evil with no substance of its own to be resisted, only a lack to be pitied. The Stones Had Already Been Thrown Twenty-five years on, the towers are rebuilt and the doctrine is not. Rowan Williams was handed a front-row seat to the clearest manifestation of evil in our lifetime — close enough to choke on its dust — and he spent the rest of his life reasoning it away. He could pray with the dying and would not defend the living. He could call it a crime and would not call it evil. He could weep over New York and still choose its bloodiest anniversary to preach common ground in Cairo. That is not gentleness; it is abdication with a miter on. A man who will not say no to the jihad soon finds he can say no to nothing — which is why the shepherd who could not name the wolf watched his flock scattered from Nigeria to Pakistan and christened the scattering dialogue. The stones, Your Grace, had already been thrown. The hour did not call for another man to understand the men who threw them; it called for one with the nerve to stand in their way. He knelt in the dust instead. David W. Virtue, DD, is founder and managing editor of VirtueOnline. His writings can be found here: www.virtueonline.org and at his Substack on the Middle East here: davidvirtue2.substack.com If you like his scribblings please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Sentencing deferred to the College of Bishops until the appeal period closes; civil litigation continues. By David W. Virtue, DD I www.virtueonline.org I August 22, 2026 The Anglican Church in North America's Court for the Trial of a Bishop has unanimously found Bishop Derek Jones guilty on all four canonical charges brought against him, formally condemning the founder of a breakaway chaplaincy body while leaving his punishment for a later day. The court released its opinion on Wednesday, August 19. As of the judgment, Jones had not been released from the governance or discipline of the ACNA. Any sentence will be set by the province's College of Bishops only after the appellate period has run, and separate civil litigation in federal court in South Carolina remains pending. The Four Charges Jones, who has led the Jurisdiction of the Armed Forces and Chaplaincy since 2014, was convicted on each count referred to trial: willful refusal to follow a Godly Admonition; disobedience to, or willful contravention of, the canons of the church; conduct giving cause for scandal or offense, including the abuse of ecclesiastical power; and having promoted and caused schism within the church. The charges fall under Title IV of the ACNA canons. On the abuse-of-power count, the court set out a pattern that included the use of Title IV processes against clergy both under and outside Jones's authority, the tying of mandatory financial contributions to a chaplain's endorsement and career security, the improper withholding of transfers, harassment, retaliation against those who raised concerns, and the backdating of at least one official document. The court affirmed tithing as a legitimate spiritual discipline but held that binding a required payment so tightly to a person's livelihood amounted to an abuse of office. On the schism count, the court concluded that Jones's formation of the Anglican Reformed Catholic Church, his targeting of ACNA chaplains, his attempt to sever the chaplaincy jurisdiction from the province, and an unauthorized consecration had together advanced schism. The episcopal office, the court observed, is fundamentally pastoral, and a bishop is called to exercise authority as a shepherd rather than as a lord who uses another's livelihood as leverage for money, loyalty, or submission. Jones's conduct, it found, fell grievously short of that standard. How the Case Reached Trial The proceedings grew out of complaints that surfaced publicly in September 2025. On September 12, then-Archbishop Steve Wood and Bishop Ray Sutton met with Jones to issue a Godly Admonition requiring him to cooperate with an investigation into whether the complaints against him rose to a presentable offense. Jones refused. On September 21 he was placed under a 60-day inhibition barring him from ministry. In response, the chaplaincy body announced its departure from the ACNA, and on October 6 it filed a lawsuit against the province alleging trademark infringement and seeking one million dollars in damages. The College of Bishops declared Jones's seat vacant and reconstituted the province's chaplaincy under Bishop Jay Cayangyang. A Board of Inquiry referred all four charges to trial on December 16, and Jones was served with a summons on April 24, 2026. A New Jurisdiction In December, Jones and his chaplaincy leadership incorporated a new denomination in Alabama, the Anglican Reformed Catholic Church, with Jones as its presiding bishop. For a period the new body described itself on its website as entering the Union of Scranton, an Old Catholic grouping, and framed the move as a reunion with the wider catholic tradition rather than a schism. That description was later removed. The ACNA has not recognized the withdrawal as affecting its own chaplaincy jurisdiction under its canons. A Province Under Strain The verdict lands while the ACNA is contending with turmoil at its highest level. Wood, who signed the original admonition against Jones, has himself been suspended from ministry since last November and is scheduled to stand trial before the same Court for the Trial of a Bishop from September 7 to 12 on three charges, including conduct giving cause for scandal and sexual immorality. Bishop Julian Dobbs, the Dean of the Province, has been exercising the canonical duties of the archbishop since Wood's inhibition. Jones, 64, a former Air Force fighter pilot, has consistently dismissed the ACNA's investigation, characterizing it earlier as a witch hunt in remarks to more than 120 chaplains. He did not respond to a request for comment for this story. David W. Virtue, DD, is founder and managing editor of VirtueOnline. His writings can be found here: www.virtueonline.org You can subscribe to receive his free biweekly VIEWPOINTS. You can also view his Substack on the Middle East here: davidvirtue2.substack.com

A South Carolina bishop shares a chancel with the church his diocese spent a decade — and half a billion dollars — to leave By David W. Virtue, DD www.virtueonline.org August 20, 2026 CHARLESTON, SC — On the grounds of Porter-Gaud School in Charleston, a new chapel bearing the old name of St. Timothy's was set apart last week by two bishops who, by their own churches' reckoning, are not supposed to be able to stand together at the same altar. The Rt. Rev. Ruth Woodliff-Stanley, Episcopal Bishop of South Carolina, and the Rt. Rev. Charles F. “Chip” Edgar III, Anglican Bishop of South Carolina, jointly consecrated the building. A video of the occasion showed perhaps thirty people present. Holy Communion was celebrated at two stations. Bishop Edgar, in what he plainly meant as a courtesy, announced that any who wished not to receive were free to abstain. Most received. It was a gracious scene. It was also an incoherent one. And the incoherence is not a matter of manners or mood. It goes to the root of what these two men have spent the last decade telling their people the Church is for. What Separation Cost To understand why the picture jars, set it against the history that produced it. In 2012 the historic Diocese of South Carolina — the fifth-oldest diocese in the Episcopal Church, older than the General Convention itself — withdrew from The Episcopal Church over that body's abandonment of the plain teaching of Scripture on marriage and human sexuality. What followed was not an amicable parting but nearly a decade of scorched-earth litigation over property valued at roughly half a billion dollars. Parishes founded before the Revolution were dragged through the South Carolina courts. Congregations that had worshiped in the same buildings for two and three centuries were told they might be turned out of them. When the dust finally settled in 2022 and 2023, the Anglican diocese kept the great majority of its parishes and its people — but the 314-acre St. Christopher Camp and Conference Center and a cluster of historic parishes reverted to the Episcopal remnant. Families were separated from sanctuaries their forebears had built. Clergy careers were unmade. The legal bills alone ran into the millions. That was the cost of separation. It was paid because a line had been crossed that could not, in conscience, be uncrossed — because the innovation at issue was held to be not a difference of opinion but a departure from the faith once delivered. That was the testimony. That was what all the suffering was for. Which is precisely why last week's chapel service does not add up. The Bishop Who Built Something Let it be said clearly: Chip Edgar is no lightweight, and this is no drive-by. He is a serious churchman and a proven planter of churches. He took the Cathedral Church of the Apostles in Columbia from a core group of twenty-five to an average Sunday attendance near four hundred. He inherited from Mark Lawrence not a demoralized rump but one of the healthiest orthodox Anglican dioceses in North America, and he has stewarded it well. Whatever is said here is said about a single decision, not about the man's ministry or his orthodoxy, both of which have been costly and real. That is what makes the decision so puzzling. This was not a weak bishop cornered into a gesture. This was a strong one who did not need to make it. The Arithmetic of the Aisle The numbers do not soften the picture. They sharpen it. Bishop Edgar's Anglican Diocese of South Carolina reports an average Sunday attendance of 7,715, according to its own 2023 parochial report — more than fifty active congregations and some seventeen thousand baptized members. Bishop Woodliff-Stanley's Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina reports an average Sunday attendance of 2,668 as of 2024, across roughly thirty congregations. The historic, undivided diocese ran about 9,085 on a Sunday before the 2012 walkout. The arithmetic tells the whole story of the schism in three figures: the Anglicans left with the overwhelming majority of the flock, and the Episcopal Church was left with a remnant less than a third their size. So, when Bishop Edgar stood beside Bishop Woodliff-Stanley, he did not do so as the leader of a struggling band grateful for recognition. He did so as the shepherd of a diocese nearly three times the size of hers. He conceded nothing to necessity. He conceded it, if he conceded it at all, to sentiment — and sentiment is a poor foundation on which to build back what was torn down at such price. What a Consecration Says Consider what a consecration is. To consecrate is to set a thing apart — to declare, before God and the congregation, that this ground is holy, given over to the worship of the Triune God according to the faith of the Church. It is not a ribbon-cutting. It is a confession made in brick and stone. A joint consecration is therefore a joint confession. Two bishops setting apart one altar say to all who watch: we are agreed on the God who is worshiped here and the Gospel that is preached here. But that is the very thing these two jurisdictions are not agreed upon. It was disagreement on that point — not on liturgy, not on carpet, not on personalities — that emptied the pews, filled the courtrooms, and cost half a billion dollars in contested property. You cannot separate over a matter you have called a departure from the Gospel and then co-consecrate as though the separation had been about the flower guild. To do so is not to heal the breach. It is to unsay the reason for it. The Tell of the Two Stations The two Communion stations, and the announced permission to abstain, are the tell. They are meant as sensitivity. They function as confession. For if the communion were whole, there would be no need of two tables and no need to excuse anyone from either. The provision for abstention is a quiet admission that communion between these bodies remains impaired — impaired for exactly the reasons that produced the separation in the first place. The service says with its mouth that all is well and says with its furniture that it is not. A fig leaf is still an admission of nakedness. The Witness of the Twelfth Bishop There is a rebuke to all of this, and it comes from within the diocese's own house. C. FitzSimons Allison — the twelfth Bishop of South Carolina, a leading figure in the Anglican realignment, and a participant in the watershed Singapore consecrations of 2000 — did the exact opposite of what was done at Porter-Gaud. In 2022, at the age of ninety-five, Allison formally resigned his standing as a bishop of The Episcopal Church and wrote to the Presiding Bishop to say he had been received into the Anglican Church in North America. He did not need to. As he himself said, everyone already knew where he stood. He did it anyway, because a testimony that is not made plain is a testimony only half-kept. Allison's whole life had been a lesson in the cost of that plainness. Decades earlier, at a House of Bishops meeting at Kanuga in his final years as a diocesan, he remained in his pew during the Eucharist and declined to receive the bread and wine alongside brother bishops whose teaching he could no longer own. He did not trumpet it; for years he barely spoke of it. But it was a wounding act and a deliberate one — communion refused not out of pride but out of honesty, because the sacrament of unity cannot be made to paper over a division that is real. He understood, long before it was fashionable, that shared bread is a claim about shared faith, and that to receive where you do not believe is to lie with your body at the rail. A man of ninety-five understood what the arithmetic of a shared chancel obscures. He had spent his last strength making the line unmistakable. It is a hard thing that the current occupant of a chancel in his old diocese should spend an afternoon making it blur. The Wider Question This is not merely a South Carolina story. It is the GAFCON and Global South question written small on a Charleston campus. The orthodox Anglican world has staked its integrity on a single, hard-won principle: that communion broken over the Gospel cannot be resumed by good feeling while the cause of the breach remains. Impaired communion means impaired communion. A bishop cannot be in and out of fellowship with the same body on the same afternoon, receiving at a shared rail what his own church declares he cannot fully share. If the men who paid the price of realignment now treat that price as a misunderstanding to be smoothed over with a joint blessing, they teach their people that the whole costly exodus was negotiable after all — a matter of degree, not of truth. Bishop Edgar has led his diocese faithfully through the hardest decade in its history. That is exactly why the people who followed him out deserve to hear, plainly, why he stood where he stood last week — and why the line that cost them so much still holds. A chapel is a fine thing to consecrate. But a testimony, once set apart, is a holier thing still, and it is not ours to un-consecrate for the sake of a gracious afternoon. David W. Virtue, DD, is founder and managing editor of VirtueOnline. His writings can be found here: www.virtueonline.org You can subscribe for free to receive his biweekly VIEWPOINTS. You can also view his Substack on the Middle East here: davidvirtue2.substack.com

By David W. Virtue, DD www.virtueonline.org August 19, 2026 Seven primates of the Anglican Communion met recently in São Paulo, Brazil, and pledged to labor together on the great global questions of the age. They issued a statement. They affirmed dignity. They deplored colonialism, secularism, polarization, migration, corruption, and climate change. What they did not do — what they dared not do — was look out the window at their own emptying pews. They were the Most Rev. Alba Sally Sue Hernández García of the Anglican Church of Mexico; the Most Rev. Marinez Rosa dos Santos Bassotto of the Anglican Episcopal Church of Brazil; the Most Rev. Brian Williams of the Anglican Church of South America; the Most Rev. Shane Parker of the Anglican Church of Canada; the Most Rev. Juan David Alvarado Melgar of the Anglican Church in Central America; Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe; and the Most Rev. Philip Wright of the Church in the Province of the West Indies. They were joined by Bishop Anthony Poggo, secretary general of the Anglican Communion. It was the first time the primates and provincial secretaries of the Americas had gathered as one. Rowe brought with him the Rev. Charles Robertson, his senior adviser, and the Rev. David Ulloa Chavez, the church's lead for Global Episcopal Partnerships. A Photograph, Not a Gospel It is tempting to file all seven under the banner of the progressive left. The truth is more revealing. Three of these provinces — The Episcopal Church, the Anglican Church of Canada, and the host province of Brazil — have formally abandoned the Communion's teaching on marriage. The others have not. Brian Williams's Anglican Church of South America is a Global South and GAFCON-aligned province, orthodox on sexuality. The Church in the Province of the West Indies, newly led by Archbishop Philip Wright, is among the more theologically traditional provinces present. Mexico styles itself a “Global Center.” What united this gathering, then, was not a shared gospel but a shared photograph — and the quiet willingness of orthodox provinces to lend their presence to a table set by the Communion's revisionist wing. They kept faith, too, with Canterbury. The gathering registered no dissent from the leadership of Archbishop Sarah Mullally, installed as the first woman to hold the office after herself carrying the motion to bless same-sex couples through the Church of England's General Synod. GAFCON, which claims to speak for some 85 percent of the world's practicing Anglicans, has declared her unable to lead. In its 2023 Kigali Commitment it renounced Canterbury as an Instrument of Communion; in Abuja this March it constituted a Global Anglican Communion under its own council. Whether the true figure is the 85 percent GAFCON asserts or the 45 to 50 percent its critics allow, the direction of travel is not in dispute: the Communion's center of gravity has already left the room in which these primates were sitting. The public-relations machine turned up the usual cant about “reconciliation” and being a “prophetic presence,” and settled on the conviction that the great issue before them was Brazil's Indigenous peoples, “stewards of the Amazon and faithful voices in the struggle for climate justice.” Thousands of dollars in airfare were spent to announce what could have been sent by email — that dignity is good and diversity is rich. They voted to revitalize a Committee on Migration in the Americas. They noted the dignity of all people. This is not breaking new ground. It is virtue signaling, and governments do not, by and large, consult religious bodies on what they think about anything at all. And What of the Seven Provinces? Consider the numbers these shepherds did not carry to Brazil. The Episcopal Church, Sean Rowe's own province, counted 1.96 million members in 2010. By 2023 that had fallen to 1.55 million, and in 2024 the church quietly declined to publish a membership figure at all. Average Sunday attendance — the truest measure of a living church — stood at 724,845 in 2009, fell to 547,107 by 2019, and reached 413,034 in person in 2024. The median Episcopal congregation now gathers 38 people on a Sunday morning. The average Episcopalian is sixty years old. The denomination's own analysts have projected, on present trends, a church with no Sunday attendance within a generation. When The Episcopal Church consecrated the openly partnered Gene Robinson in 2003, whole congregations walked out; from that exodus came the Anglican Church in North America, which in 2024 reported 130,111 members and 96,148 in worship — growing in every category it tracks, for the third-year running, even as the church it left behind contracts. The Anglican Church of Canada, Shane Parker's province, tells a starker story still. From roughly 1.3 million members in 1961 it had fallen to 357,123 by 2017, with Sunday attendance of 97,421. Attendance has dropped some 40 percent since 2001, and a further 26 percent between 2019 and 2022 — what the church's own statistician called a “radical discontinuity.” Five separate methodologies converge on a single grim date: on present trends there will be no members, no attenders, and no givers in the Anglican Church of Canada by about 2040. Here too the orthodox left and founded the Anglican Network in Canada, now a diocese of the growing ACNA. And Brazil — the host. The Anglican Episcopal Church of Brazil claims 120,000 members, though independent counts put the active figure nearer 103,000, and honest observers nearer still to a rounding error in a nation of 210 million. In 2018 its synod redefined marriage without reference to sex and consecrated Marinez Bassotto, who now presides over the province. It was not the first rupture. In 2005 the Diocese of Recife, under the late Robinson Cavalcanti, left over Brazil's rejection of Lambeth Resolution I.10 and aligned with the Global South. The pattern is by now monotonous: the province innovates, the orthodox depart, the rolls thin. The remaining provinces are smaller than a single healthy megachurch. The Anglican Church of Mexico claims 100,000 baptized members; the Church of England Yearbook and a 2016 Cambridge study put the active number closer to 21,000. The Anglican Church in Central America, credited with 126,000 in 2010, today counts something over 35,000. The Anglican Church of South America — Brian Williams's evangelical, GAFCON-aligned province — numbers perhaps 35,000 to 41,600, the great majority of them in Argentina. Only the Church in the Province of the West Indies, with some 770,000 nominal members across eight Caribbean dioceses, brings real numbers to the table — and it is among the more orthodox provinces present. The Immigrants Who Filled Other Pews The migrant question the primates raised is trickier than their statement allows. There are lawful immigrants and unlawful ones, and the primates did not trouble to say which they mean to speak for. But the deeper point is the one they cannot afford to make. Immigrants have poured into the United States and Canada for a generation, and they have not filled Episcopal or Anglican pews. They have filled Catholic and Pentecostal ones. The newcomers are hungry for precisely the gospel these provinces have spent two decades explaining away. Meanwhile the primates found room in their communiqué for the Amazon and its stewards, and no room at all for the 380 million Christians whom Open Doors counts as persecuted for their faith — one in seven believers on earth. Nigeria alone accounted for some 3,100 of the 4,476 Christians killed for their faith in a single year. Has the Nigerian government been moved by an Anglican statement? Have any of them? Governments do not consult the resolutions of dying provinces. What Future? What Gospel? Presiding Bishop Rowe called the meeting a chance to “discern the future of our ministry together,” and spoke of a new chapter. Secretary General Poggo prayed that God would build His Church across the Americas. The Rev. Charles Robertson found it remarkable that primates of such diverse backgrounds could come together in fellowship. Some stayed on in São Paulo to launch a relief initiative called “A Place at the Table,” founded on the conviction that the world's troubles are less a matter of scarce resources than of distorted power — who is heard, who decides, who benefits, who is excluded. Perhaps it is a new chapter. But a new chapter is not the same as a new life, and there is no evidence here of the one thing that reverses the numbers set down above: the gospel preached without apology and believed without embarrassment. The primates say they look forward to working together again, supporting one another in their Gospel work. But what gospel? The word means good news. For provinces counting down to zero, the only news on offer is the assurance, exchanged among themselves at considerable expense, that they still have a future. Will the Indigenous peoples rise up and call them blessed? One wonders whether these primates believe a statement amounts to anything more than words on a page. The pews will render the verdict. They are already rendering it. David W. Virtue, DD, is founder and managing editor of VirtueOnline. His writings can be found at www.virtueonline.org You can subscribe to receive my biweekly VIEWPOINTS. You can also view my Substack on the Middle East here: davidvirtue2.substack.com

“All of us have inflated views of ourselves, especially in self-righteousness, until we have visited a place called Calvary. It is there, at the foot of the cross, that we shrink to our true size.” — John Stott “Either human intelligence ultimately owes its origin to mindless matter; or there is a Creator. It is strange that some people claim that it is their intelligence that leads them to prefer the first to the second.” — John C. Lennox “The Western Church possesses things Christians of previous centuries could scarcely have imagined. We have theological colleges and seminaries, publishing houses, denominational headquarters, pension funds, endowments, professional staffs, sophisticated communications systems, conferences, consultants, strategic plans, demographic studies, livestreaming equipment, websites, podcasts, and libraries containing more theological knowledge than many generations of Christians could have accumulated in a lifetime. None of these things is evil. Many are genuine blessings. But they carry a peculiar danger. We can eventually build enough machinery that the machinery keeps running whether God shows up or not.” — Rev. Dr. Ronald Moore “Beware of manufacturing a God of your own: a God who is all mercy, but not just; a God who is all love, but not holy; a God who has a heaven for everybody, but a hell for none; a God who can allow good and bad to be side by side in time, but will make no distinction between good and bad in eternity. Such a God is an idol of your own, as truly an idol as any snake or crocodile in an Egyptian temple. He is not the God of the Bible, and beside the God of the Bible there is no God at all.” — J. C. Ryle Dear Brothers and Sisters, The parallels could not be starker. This summer the Vatican formally declared the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) to be in schism and excommunicated its bishops — Latin-loving custodians of Catholic orthodoxy who consecrated four new bishops in defiance of Pope Leo XIV and without papal approval. (Rome had lifted the Society’s earlier 1988 excommunications in 2009; it is the fresh, unauthorized consecrations that brought the hammer down again.) The ACNA was formed as an alternative to the heretical Episcopal Church. GAFCON and the GSFA were formed in opposition to the Church of England’s suicidal doctrinal drift and the Archbishop of Canterbury’s open promotion of pansexuality. All these groups see themselves as upholders of orthodoxy as they watch their parent bodies compromise the faith, sending their followers to hell with a watered-down, compromised faith that the orthodox believe is no faith at all. At the end of the day, liberal or progressive Christianity is not Christianity at all. The late J. Gresham Machen made the case more than a century ago that theological liberalism is not a corrupted form of Christianity but a different religion altogether — one belonging, as he put it, in a wholly separate category. It is the world’s values writ large with a soft overlay of watered-down doctrine. It can be safely said that we live in spiritually perilous times. Nobody is safe. We must be sober and vigilant, because our adversary the devil walks around like a roaring lion seeking whom he might devour (1 Peter 5:8). But Satan can also appear as an angel of light, and that makes him the more dangerous. Head-on confrontations rarely work for the Evil One. The subtler One tells Eve, “You will not surely die” — a direct contradiction of God’s warning in Genesis 2:17, quietly undermining God’s authority and promising safety in disobedience. Some 40 million Americans have walked away from the church over the past quarter-century — the “great dechurching” chronicled by Jim Davis and Michael Graham — and COVID only accelerated the exodus. By all accounts they are not coming back. Gen Z has little interest in historic Christianity, preferring the more anemic and vaguer talk of spirituality. But still the gospel continues on — not in megachurches, but in the quiet backwaters and homes of faithful believers, in small groups where discipleship is practiced, and in countries like Iran and China where the church is growing fastest. There are no fancy purple shirts and miters, no “father” to bless them as second-class Christians. God, apparently, needs none of the performance Christianity staged in the Vatican, even as the lavender mafia controls the inner workings of the largest church on earth. Most of American Christianity is empty and vacuous — three thousand miles wide, half an inch deep, with wokery from the pulpit and talk of renewal where there is none. Revivals come and go. The faithful look up and are not fed. Of course, there are always pockets of resistance, for which we can be thankful. There are the 7,000 who have not bowed the knee to Baal. God has His faithful remnant. It is to them we turn in these dire times for guidance, and to Scripture as our guide. THE ANGLICAN CHURCH IN NORTH AMERICA (ACNA) is slowly but surely heading toward an historic moment. An upcoming trial of its archbishop could well determine the church’s future. How it goes, how transparent it will be, and how the laity perceive it all remain to be seen. Women’s ordination hangs like a Damoclean sword over the whole denomination. More immediate are lawsuits that defy biblical prohibition. The church’s temporary dean, Bishop Julian Dobbs, has a suit against the departed Jurisdiction of the Armed Forces (JAFC) — now reconstituted as the Anglican Reformed Catholic Church — and the JAFC has responded in kind. Millions of dollars could be at stake for either side depending on how the courts rule. There are unconfirmed reports of a half-million-dollar legal war chest for Archbishop Steve Wood that, if true, defies everything we know about good stewardship. What would Jesus or the apostle Paul say about that? There are tens of thousands of Iranian and Syrian Christians without food and housing, and American Anglican bishops are bent on winning legal and ecclesiastical wars to benefit a mere 100,000 Anglicans. This cries out to heaven. You can be sure The Washington Post is waiting on the sidelines for round two. You can read several of my pieces on all this here: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/acna-should-end-the-lawsuits https://www.virtueonline.org/post/anglican-reformed-catholic-church-files-motion-to-dismiss-acna-bishop-dobbs-complaint https://www.virtueonline.org/post/acna-the-least-of-these-disinvited https://www.virtueonline.org/post/court-denies-wood-s-bid-to-pry-open-board-of-inquiry-files-six-day-trial-set-for-september-7 It should break your heart. THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH lurches forward across a dozen dioceses in one sexual scandal after another, catalogued by Anglican Watch, the unofficial watchdog for the Episcopal Church. In a piece titled “The Shepherds Who Feed Themselves,” Anglican Watch says TEC has perfected the art of protecting its bishops and abandoning the abused: “The Episcopal Church likes to present itself to the world as the safest room in American Christianity — inclusive, enlightened, trauma-informed, ahead of every curve. For a season the boast had substance. A generation ago, its sexual-misconduct policies were held up as a model other communions were told to imitate. But a church can live a long time on the memory of its own virtue, and this one has. While the Roman Catholic Church was hauled through the courts and the Southern Baptist Convention was forced into a public reckoning with its predators, the Episcopal Church — small, genteel, and largely beneath the notice of the secular press — has quietly perfected a different art: the art of protecting its bishops and abandoning the abused.” “The pattern runs across a dozen dioceses, and it is always the same. The clergyman survives. The bishop who shielded him retires with his pension intact. And the person who was harmed is handed a ‘pastoral response,’ shown the door, and told that the machinery of the church has, regrettably, done all it can.” You can read more here: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/the-shepherds-who-feed-themselves THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND will spend £100 million to atone for a sin its own ledgers may not record. The whole English edifice rests on Queen Anne’s Bounty, the fund founded in 1704 to relieve impoverished clergy, and on its eighteenth-century holdings in the South Sea Company. The Commissioners’ researchers concluded that the Bounty had grown fat on the slave trade. Archbishop Welby apologized for it. The Bishop of Manchester likened the Church to a burglar who cannot in conscience keep his loot. A hundred million pounds followed the apology out the door. The trouble is that penitence without truth is not repentance. It is theatre. And the longer one examines the fund the Church now calls Healing, Repair and Justice, the more one suspects that the sin being atoned for was, in the crucial particular, misread. Then the historians arrived. Professor Richard Dale — a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the author of a study of the South Sea Company — pointed out what the accountants had missed. The enterprise had two distinct parts. One traded in human beings. The other was a vehicle for government debt. Queen Anne’s Bounty put its money in the second: South Sea annuities, which were in plain terms gilts — loans to the Crown. To confuse the two, Dale wrote, was an elementary error. And the trade the Church now weeps over was, in cold fact, a chronic loss-maker; no investor grew rich on it, least of all one who never bought the trading shares. As Dale summed it up, the Bounty’s investments, in stock or in annuities, earned nothing from the slave trade. The American precedent. VirtueOnline has watched a version of this play out in The Episcopal Church for more than twenty years, and the American experience is worth setting beside the English one — if only because it exposes how loosely the word “reparations” is thrown about. It is often said that The Episcopal Church seeded reparations with $1.7 million. It did not. The national church’s contribution was a resolution, not a cheque. At the 2006 General Convention, Resolution A123 apologized for the Church’s complicity in slavery and directed every diocese to document that complicity — but it moved no money. The dollars, when they came, came piecemeal and from below: from seminaries and dioceses, not from any churchwide fund. The $1.7 million was Virginia Theological Seminary’s, established in 2019. Unlike England’s still-unspent commitment, it has actually paid out. The seminary began issuing cash payments in February 2021 — roughly $2,100 a year to each identified descendant of the Black laborers, enslaved and free, whose work built the institution. This is not the grumbling of a partisan. Even the Commissioners’ own historical advisers have conceded, in print, that the annuities and the trading securities were two separate instruments. When your own witness concedes the point, the case is in trouble. You can read more here: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/a-fund-built-on-a-footnote GLOBAL PERSECUTION haunts the world. More than 388 million Christians now live under high to extreme persecution for the name of Jesus Christ. That is one in every seven believers on earth — a record — and the number climbs with each passing year. Open Doors’ 2026 World Watch List, released in January, put the figure eight million higher than the year before — not a plateau, but an escalation. Behind the number are faces. Among the persecuted are 201 million women and girls and 110 million children under the age of fifteen. In the last reporting year alone, 4,849 Christians were murdered for their faith, 4,712 were detained, and more than 3,600 churches and Christian properties were attacked. This is not a distant abstraction, a line on a chart, a cause for a committee. It is the Body of Christ, and it is bleeding. Nowhere is the wound deeper than sub-Saharan Africa. Of the 4,849 Christians killed for their faith last year, 3,490 — more than seven in ten — died in Nigeria, where Boko Haram, the Islamic State West Africa Province, and Fulani militants raid Christian villages at will while a paralyzed government looks the other way. Whole communities have been erased from the map. Girls carried off a decade ago have never come home. The slaughter has grown so routine that the world has all but stopped counting. Many of the slain are Catholics and Anglicans, though Pentecostals and evangelicals fall in the same cross-hairs. But that is not the whole story. The more Nigerian Christians are persecuted, the more the church grows — with some Christian groups reaching out to Muslims with the gospel of Jesus Christ. The irony should not be missed. Western Anglicanism is dying — not from persecution (why would anyone bother to persecute a theologically diluted church that holds no real convictions?) but from irrelevance to God and to the culture that has already assimilated it. You can read more here: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/the-global-persecution-of-christians-haunts-the-world THE EPISCOPAL DIOCESE OF NEW YORK and its bishop, the Rt. Rev. Matthew F. Heyd, would like you to believe they are on the cutting edge of renewal — a word more often associated with evangelicals than with liberals. Heyd wrote a commentary for Religion News Service titled “The Episcopal Church Is a Story of Renewal, Not Decline,” holding up two congregations in Kingston, New York, becoming one as a symbol of that renewal. What Heyd actually points to is two small Kingston congregations — St. John’s and Holy Cross–Santa Cruz, long known for their feeding programs — that have merged into the new Church of the Holy Spirit. He describes the result as “exceptional,” but says what is happening in Kingston isn’t unique — that it offers a picture of congregational life across the Diocese of New York. The frame is explicitly tied to Sean Rowe’s restructuring: Rowe is reconfiguring the wider structures of the Episcopal Church to better support local communities, and through this work, Heyd writes, “we have come to believe that our story is renewal — not decline.” The theme is renewal “at ground level,” through local congregations, chaplaincies, and schools. Heyd isn’t actually claiming church growth in the Tim Keller sense — no plants, no new attendance numbers, no multiplication. He is redefining “renewal” as vitality in existing congregations (feeding programs, local presence) rather than numerical expansion. Keller’s plants and weekly attenders were countable; Heyd’s “renewal” is asserted as a matter of belief — note the language, “we have come to believe that our story is renewal.” Tim Keller expanded his ministry through a deliberate strategy that moved from a single congregation to a global church-planting movement. Heyd’s talk of renewal is fictional. He is taking a word and turning it upside down to make it mean what he wants it to mean. Keller didn’t just grow a church — he built a reproducible model and a training pipeline, which is why observers credit him as a pioneer of the contemporary urban church-planting movement rather than simply a successful pastor. By contrast, the Diocese of New York has gone steadily downhill. Average Sunday attendance in 2015 was 16,878; by 2024 it had dropped to 9,486 — a decline of 43.8 percent, and it is still falling. From 2015 to 2019 the diocese was in a slow bleed, from 16,878 to 15,594. Then attendance fell off the edge — 15,594 down to 6,945 at the 2021 trough. That is a 55 percent collapse in two years. COVID didn’t dent this diocese; it cut it in half. The years 2021 to 2023 brought a real but partial bounce, back up to 9,866 by 2023. But here is the number that matters: even at that recovery peak, the diocese was still 37 percent below its 2019 level. The bounce recovered barely a third of what the cliff took. And then 2024 — the “renewal” year — went back down, from 9,866 to 9,486. For the national frame in the same table: the Episcopal Church as a whole went from 614,241 in 2015 to 413,034 in 2024, down 32.8 percent, with the same trough-in-2021 shape. So New York didn’t underperform the denomination by accident — at −43.8 percent it fell harder than the −32.8 percent national average, in the very city where Keller built a global church-planting network from a standing start. Keller’s line went up because people were counted coming in. Heyd’s line went down, and “renewal” is the word chosen to describe the descent. Two Kingston congregations with feeding programs don’t move a curve that lost 7,400 Sunday worshippers in a decade — they are the candle, and the chart is the dark. YOUTH PASTORS are in short supply, according to an article in The Gospel Coalition. “There’s way more demand for youth pastors than folks who want to do it,” says Sam Bierig, dean of Spurgeon College at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. You can read more here: https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/missing-youth-pastors/ The Episcopal Church does have youth ministry, but it looks quite different from the megachurch model, where a dedicated, full-time, seminary- or Bible-college-trained youth pastor is a standard staff fixture. A few things distinguish the Episcopal picture. The role is overwhelmingly lay, part-time, and precariously funded. In Episcopal parlance the position is usually titled “Director of Youth Ministry,” “Youth Minister,” or “Youth and Family Minister” rather than “youth pastor,” and it is understood as lay ministry rather than an ordained office. The Episcopal Church’s own youth-ministry network explicitly casts a wide net to include anyone serving “paid, volunteer, part-time, full-time, or just starting out” — which tells you how thin the professional ranks actually are. Many of the current openings are part-time, and the field has long struggled with underpayment and short tenures. It is concentrated in larger, wealthier parishes; a full-time paid youth minister is really only sustainable in a sizable, resourced congregation. The bottom line is that with the slow passing of the baby boomers in TEC, and churches now averaging around 38 in Sunday attendance, youth ministry will soon be a thing of the past. AI TO THE RESCUE — or so some imagine. Did you know that 48 percent of practicing Christians now say they would trust AI with their own spiritual growth? Not the casual attenders, not the Christmas-and-Easter crowd — practicing Christians, the people who show up, give, serve, and open their Bibles. According to Barna’s latest research, conducted with Gloo, nearly half of them would entrust their spiritual life to a machine. It gets more personal than that. Nearly one in three American adults now rate the spiritual counsel of AI as trustworthy as a pastor’s — a figure that climbs among the young, approaching two in five among Gen Z. And roughly a third of practicing Christians say they want their own pastor to walk them through it, even as only 12 percent of pastors feel equipped to do so. They are worried about the thing — worried about Scripture mangled, worried about a machine that begins to play God — and they are using it anyway, living inside a tension they cannot resolve. The shepherd is asleep at eleven o’clock at night; the algorithm is awake. That is the whole problem in a sentence. ARCHBISHOP SARAH MULLALLY: And Ten Urgent Challenges for the Church of England (Darton, Longman & Todd), edited by the religion journalist Tim Wyatt, is out now. Wyatt supplies a biography and an exclusive interview; ten Anglican writers each take a challenge — spirituality, mission, Anglican unity, safeguarding, the climate, same-sex marriage, transgender inclusion, and the rest — and Rowan Williams adds a consoling afterword. Reviewing the book in Premier Christianity, Rachel Bedford — herself a Church of England minister — praises the portrait of Mullally but faults the volume for missing the greatest challenge of all. The book has chapters on racism, ableism, LGBT inclusion, climate change, and the divisions of the global Communion, she notes, yet it barely engages the Church’s first calling — to go and make disciples. One contributor names the tragedy of a “flat-tyre community, too secular in its preoccupations, in a spiritually hungry society,” and reaches for the old word respair — recovery from despair — as England’s deepest need. The people of England are hungry for the Church’s spiritual leadership, and there is a deep hope that the Church would show moral courage in proclaiming the good news of Christ. Apart from the odd sentence like that, Bedford writes, the gaping omission is any serious reckoning with mission and evangelism. If the Church’s primary calling is to “go and make disciples,” it is a glaring absence to find no chapter on the Church’s need to grow in confidence and effectiveness in proclaiming the Gospel — and none, either, on the collapse of the young in the pews. The most recent Statistics for Mission put the average number of under-18s in a Church of England parish at fewer than seven. The early Church did not survive because it settled every doctrinal dispute. It survived because it preached Christ and formed disciples. Yes, and amen. Don’t look to Mullally to change the church’s direction. It is not going to happen. The Church of England is on suicide watch; the Global South owns the Anglican franchise now; the Mother Church is gently floating down the Thames, hoping against hope that it won’t sink by the time it hits the North Sea. To all who have been supporters of Barnabas Aid: There will be a Thanksgiving Service for the founder of Barnabas Aid the late Dr Patrick Sookhdeo on Wednesday September 2 in Oxford. Promoters apologise that they have not been able to contact those who have been supporters directly but their requests for an invitation to be sent to the 100,000 supporters of Barnabas Fund have been consistently refused. Those wishing to attend and give thanks for Dr Patrick’s life and ministry should please email adminsa@ocrpl.org for details of the time and the place. The service will also be livestreamed. We ask that church pastors and leaders make this known to their congregations, many of whom will include those who supported Dr Patrick and Barnabas Aid. SUPPORT VIRTUEONLINE 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 the daily writing continues, and a webmaster and overseas journalists must be supported. VOL has brought on new writers with clear insight into Scripture and culture. We have no mega-donors and no grants — only faithful readers who believe in what we do. We are now read in more than 100 countries by tens of thousands of readers who trust us to cover the most pressing issues facing Anglicanism today. Yet only a small fraction contributes. We have proven ourselves over more than thirty-five years of writing about Anglican affairs. Please consider a tax-deductible gift of $25.00. It helps enormously. Online: virtueonline.org/donate By check (tax-deductible): VIRTUEONLINE, P.O. Box 111, Shohola, PA 18458 Thank you for your support. David W. Virtue, DD President and Managing Editor