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VirtueOnline — The Voice for Global Orthodox Anglicanism | July 17, 2026 We must allow the Word of God to confront us, to disturb our security, to undermine our complacency and to overthrow our patterns of thought and behavior. — John Stott From Gallup: The average American teenager gives TikTok about 90 minutes a day, and close to five hours once you add the other platforms. Ninety minutes a day comes to 540 hours a year on a single app; five hours a day comes to roughly 1,700 hours annually across all of them. Set that against the same child who sits in church every Sunday and hears, at most, forty minutes of direct teaching — something near thirty-five hours in a year. Forty to one is the generous math; the honest number is far worse. One grim study estimates that as many as a third of America's churches — some 100,000 congregations — could close in the coming years. At the very least, political scientist Ryan Burge expects tens of thousands of churches to close, many of them rural. Anglicanism needs to return to its roots: the historic formularies — the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Book of Common Prayer, and the Ordinal. These provide the doctrinal and liturgical foundation of the Anglican tradition and should be the primary standard by which Anglican identity is measured. — Bishop Robert Todd Giffin When we die in Christ, we too begin chapter one of the Great Story. We can face death with our hope firmly rooted in the resurrection of Jesus and His promise to bring to himself all those who call on his name (John 14:2–3). — Chris Findlay I am not permitted to let my love be so merciful as to tolerate and endure false doctrine. — Martin Luther Dear Brothers and Sisters, I www.virtueonline.org | July 17, 2026 LET THE AMERICAN CHURCH DIE The collapse of Christian America isn't the end of the church, writes James Bell. We are spending millions of dollars a week to heat and cool buildings that are almost empty. We have named the idolatry of power. We have named the hypocrisy, the political entanglement, and the theological failures that drove a generation of Christians away. But if we truly believe the American church is dying, we have to face the structural reality of what that loss has produced — not just spiritually, but institutionally, financially, demographically. We have to take an honest look at where we actually are, and how we got here. The Arithmetic of Decline Half of all churches in the United States have fewer than sixty people in the room on a Sunday morning. Not the average — the median. Sixty. Half the churches in America are smaller than the average high school classroom. And that number is not leveling off. It is accelerating. Over the last thirty years, forty million Americans have left the church. In a single recent year, more than 4,000 Protestant churches closed their doors permanently — far more than were planted. Giving to religious organizations, which once accounted for more than half of all charitable giving in America, has collapsed to under a quarter. Seminary enrollment continues to drop year over year, which means the next generation of leaders needed to replace an aging pastorate simply is not there. The average senior pastor in America is fifty-eight years old. Seventy-one percent of current church leaders have no succession plan. They cannot produce one because, in many cases, there is no one coming. The young men and women who might have entered ministry a generation ago are either not in the church at all, or they have watched enough pastoral failure up close that they want no part of the institution. We have been tempted to read these numbers as a temporary setback, a season of pruning, or a cultural phase that will eventually reverse itself if we just pray harder, vote better, or find the right consultant. We have hired church growth experts, rebranded our logos, updated our worship styles, and launched capital campaigns. We have read every book, attended every conference, and implemented every strategy. It is none of those things. It is a death. And until we are willing to let the American church die, we will never see what God wants to resurrect. An Architecture Built for Christendom The crisis we are facing today is not the result of a sudden cultural shift in the 2020s. It is the inevitable outcome of a theological compromise that was made in the 1950s, institutionalized in the 1980s, and weaponized in the 2010s. We built an architecture designed to manage a Christian empire, and we are shocked that it is failing now that the empire is gone. In the post-World War II era, the American church entered a golden age of cultural alignment. To be a good American was to be a good Christian, and to be a good Christian was to be a good American. The Eisenhower administration added "Under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954 and put "In God We Trust" on the paper currency in 1956. Church attendance soared, not necessarily because of a massive spiritual revival, but because church membership was the primary marker of civic respectability. In response to this cultural boom, the church began to build. And what it built was an infrastructure designed for a Christendom it assumed would last forever. Denominations erected massive headquarters in major cities. Congregations bought prime real estate in the rapidly expanding suburbs and built sanctuaries designed to seat thousands. Seminaries expanded their campuses to train the professional clergy needed to staff these operations. The Christian publishing industry, the Christian music industry, and the Christian broadcasting networks exploded into billion-dollar enterprises. We built an ecosystem that required enormous amounts of capital, massive cultural approval, and a steady stream of consumers to sustain it. And for fifty years, it worked. But it worked because it was riding the wave of cultural Christianity, not because it was making disciples. The architecture we built was perfectly designed to manage the religious preferences of a Christianized culture. It was entirely unequipped to form resilient, counter-cultural disciples in a post-Christian world. When the cultural wind shifted — when it was no longer socially advantageous to be a Christian, when the internet exposed the hypocrisy of religious institutions — the architecture began to crack. The buildings were too expensive to maintain. The programs were too exhausting to run. The professional clergy were burning out under the weight of managing organizations that functioned more like mid-sized corporations than spiritual communities. And the people in the pews, who had been trained to be religious consumers rather than disciples, simply walked away when the product no longer met their needs or when the cultural cost of association became too high. The Most Expensive Project in American Christianity We are not experiencing a sudden crisis. We are experiencing the structural failure of an architecture built for a world that no longer exists. And nowhere is that failure more visible than in the buildings we are desperately trying to save. The refusal to let that old architecture die is currently the most expensive project in American Christianity. Across the country, thousands of congregations of forty or fifty people sit in buildings built for five hundred. They spend every dollar they collect just to keep the lights on, fix the roof, replace the HVAC system, and pay a part-time pastor to maintain the machinery of a bygone era. They are exhausted. The volunteers are burned out. The deacons are aging. The Sunday school rooms are empty. The community around them has completely changed, but the church has not changed with it. They have little to nothing left for actual mission, neighborhood renewal, or discipleship. The institution exists entirely to sustain itself. Every dollar that comes in goes right back out to maintain the building and the programs that serve the remaining members. There is nothing left for the neighborhood outside the doors. What This Means for Anglicans This is the situation we face today, dear friends. The Episcopal Church is in rapid decline, as are all the "seven sisters" denominations that once dominated the American religious landscape. The Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) needs to resolve its internal issues quickly, then develop new models of discipleship that will work in the 21st century. To its detriment, it is not yet doing so. Repeating the old rhythms of "come and hear" rather than "go and tell" offers no future; lay-driven models of discipleship offer real hope. But will ACNA embrace them, or carry on hoping things will simply work out? Time will tell. CAPITULATION AT YORK: SYNOD EMBRACES KAIROS II In a shameful capitulation at York, the Church of England's General Synod voted overwhelmingly to encourage members to "engage with" a Palestinian-Christian document accusing Israel of genocide, brushing aside warnings from the Chief Rabbi and other Jewish leaders. The motion, brought by the Diocese of Carlisle under the pious title "Standing in solidarity for a just peace in Israel and Palestine," commends the incendiary Kairos II declaration — a screed that describes the State of Israel as "a colonial enterprise built on racism" and brands its war against Hamas a genocide. Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis called the vote shameful, describing Kairos II as a document full of falsehood that rejects dialogue and challenges Israel's very existence. The bishops backed it 25 to 0, with five abstentions — not one could summon the courage to vote no. A fig leaf was applied — "receive" became "hear" — but attempts to strip out Kairos II failed, and the motion presses Church investors to review policies in light of the ICJ's opinion on the occupation: divestment by another name. An amendment formally declaring "genocide" and blaming October 7 on Israeli oppression died only for lack of time. Here is a church that cannot fill its own pews yet finds time to prosecute the Jewish state — exchanging the Gospel of reconciliation for the gospel of accusation, and history will note which one it chose to preach. You can read more here: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/britain-s-pm-in-waiting-and-the-church-of-england-throw-israel-under-the-bus But there was revolt within the Church of England against the motion. The Church's Ministry Among Jewish People (CMJ UK) wrote to General Synod affirming the importance of hearing the witness of Palestinian Christians, then added: "Our concern is not that these voices are being heard, but that they are presented largely in isolation from other faithful Christian perspectives." CMJ UK declared itself deeply disappointed by the Synod's acceptance of the Kairos II motion. THE SUICIDE OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND The Church of England is committing suicide. With Kairos II, its Synod has aligned itself with the spirit of the age as surely as the compromised German state church of the 1930s aligned itself with its own — clergy blessing what the culture demanded and calling it prophecy. The Church of England is killing itself. When an institution dies, someone must render a verdict. Was it murder? Misadventure? Natural causes? I have watched the Church of England die by inches for more than forty years, and I can render only one verdict: suicide. No secular assassin crept into Lambeth Palace by night. No parliament outlawed the gospel. No persecutor burned the churches. The Church of England took the knife to her own throat, slowly, deliberately, and with the full approval of her own leadership. The numbers tell the story the bishops will not. Average Sunday attendance has collapsed from roughly 785,000 in 2013 to 581,000 in 2024 — a Church a quarter smaller in a single decade. The bishops now trumpet several consecutive years of modest post-pandemic upticks, but a bounce off a Covid trough is not a revival; the long arc bends steadily downward. More than 3,500 church buildings have closed across Britain in the past decade — some converted into pubs, gyms, swimming pools, and, in the bitterest irony of all, mosques. A church that once baptized, married, and buried a nation now struggles to fill its pews on Easter morning. Decline of this magnitude does not simply happen. It is chosen. And the Church of England chose it, decision by decision, Synod by Synod, sermon by mumbled sermon. If a single sentence captures the suicidal instinct of the Church's leadership, it came from a former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who declared that the Church "has a lot of catching up to do with secular values." "Be ye transformed," said St. Paul — quite the opposite notion from Archbishop Williams. You can read more here: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/the-suicide-of-the-church-of-england JEW-HATRED WILL BACKFIRE ON ITS HATERS Hatred of Jews has a bad habit of backfiring. Antisemitism has gone global. In one country after another, Jews are being excoriated over Israel's conduct of the war in the Middle East. Israel stands accused of genocide, of baby-killing, of deliberately starving the citizens of Gaza. October 7, 2023 — the slaughter of some 1,200 Israelis and the dragging of roughly 250 hostages into the tunnels of Gaza — is now brazenly repositioned as payback for Israel's treatment of the Palestinians. Never mind that two million Arab citizens live inside Israel in peace and prosperity, with seats in the Knesset, judges on its Supreme Court, and doctors in every Israeli hospital. Israel alone is blamed for the devastation of Gaza, with barely a mention of Hamas, which started the war and has hidden behind Gaza's civilians ever since. So when the Church of England blasts the Jews, that too will backfire. When the CofE has vanished, as surely it will, the Jews will still be around. Israel will get the last laugh. You can read more here: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/jew-hatred-will-backfire-on-its-haters SIN MANAGEMENT OR COVENANT ACCOUNTABILITY? Are church canons little more than sin management? It is a fair question, and a cynical age has earned the right to ask it. Canon law, in the hands of a church that has forgotten its Lord, degenerates into something worse than bureaucracy. It becomes power management dressed in legal vestments. The Episcopal Church proved the point for two generations, wielding the Dennis Canon to seize property and Title IV to prosecute the orthodox while the doctrinally heterodox sailed through untouched. You can read a province's real theology by watching whom its canons discipline — and whom they conspicuously never touch. Last month, the Anglican Church in North America gave its own answer to the question. Whether that answer holds is now the most consequential test facing the province. You can read more here: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/sin-management-or-covenant-accountability SIMPLER, HUMBLER, DODGIER: COTTRELL'S FAREWELL The Archbishop of York's farewell address to Synod was a masterclass in saying nothing beautifully. Stephen Cottrell rose to deliver his final presidential address of the quinquennium, and it must be said at the outset: the man is good at this. He has spent five years perfecting a rhetorical form all his own — the address that absorbs every criticism, confesses every failure, and leaves no one, least of all the speaker, as the subject of an accountable sentence. This performance was the finest of the genre. It deserves to be studied the way one studies a conjuror: not for what appears, but for what disappears. The Church is being humbled, but by whom? You can read more here: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/simpler-humbler-dodgier NET ZERO: THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND'S ONE UNQUALIFIED SUCCESS On the lighter side, you can read my satirical essay on NET ZERO. The CofE announced this week that it will not meet its target of net-zero carbon emissions by 2030, and the faithful across England wept — all eleven of them. This is, of course, deeply unfair to the church. The Church of England is in fact well ahead of schedule on net zero. It is simply measuring the wrong thing. While the bean counters at Church House fret over boiler emissions and the carbon footprint of votive candles, the church has been quietly achieving net zero where it really counts: in the pews. You can read more here: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/net-zero-the-church-of-england-s-one-unqualified-success TESTIMONY BEHIND CLOSED DOORS If the Kairos II debacle wasn't enough to render the Church of England speechless at Synod, both Canterbury and York tried to muzzle the testimony of ex-gays behind closed doors, fearing the wrath of the homosexualists in the church. The Church of England has found a new use for safeguarding: silencing the testimony of Christians whose lives have been changed by Jesus Christ. Archbishops Sarah Mullally and Stephen Cottrell threatened to cancel a General Synod fringe event in York examining how the Labour government's proposed conversion practices ban could criminalize Christian testimony, prayer, and pastoral care. After media exposure, they backed down — but only halfway. What remains is a Church willing to hear the Gospel only in private, apparently. You can read more here: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/testimony-behind-closed-doors-canterbury-and-york-try-to-muzzle-changed-lives-at-general-synod A GLIMMER OF GOOD NEWS: MARRIAGE DOCTRINE HOLDS There was a glimmer of good news in the Church of England. A Private Member's Motion on same-sex relationships, brought by Professor Helen King, that would have undermined the doctrine of marriage was defeated. The amended motion stated that it is a legitimate theological perspective to believe that a committed, faithful, intimate same-sex relationship is entirely compatible with Christian discipleship and ministry — whereas only last year the House of Bishops affirmed that sexual intercourse, as an expression of faithful intimacy, properly belongs within marriage exclusively, and that the Church of England's doctrine of marriage has not been altered. The amended motion passed in the House of Clergy and the House of Laity, but was thankfully defeated in the House of Bishops. The voting: House of Bishops — For 11, Against 14, Abstentions 4 House of Clergy — For 93, Against 79, Abstentions 0 House of Laity — For 101, Against 83, Abstentions 0 Because a motion must carry in all three Houses, the bishops' narrow majority killed it. A knife-edge veto is a reprieve, not a victory — but we thank God for it. VINDICATED: BERNARD RANDALL WINS HIS SEVEN-YEAR BATTLE In other news, after a seven-year legal battle fought on multiple fronts, the Rev. Dr. Bernard Randall — supported throughout by the Christian Legal Centre — has secured a legal settlement with Trent College and overturned, in substance, the Church of England's safeguarding blacklisting of him. His offense? Preaching a sermon on freedom of belief and gender identity. Dr. Randall, 53, a former Cambridge University college chaplain, is now free to preach in church and to work in education for the first time in seven years. The Employment Appeal Tribunal ruled the original judgment against him unsafe on grounds of possible panel bias, Trent College was ordered to pay £20,000 in costs, and a confidential settlement followed. A diocesan safeguarding review, two years in the making, found no safeguarding concern whatever. Remember what occasioned all this. In July 2019, Dr. Randall preached in a CofE school, in a CofE chapel — precisely the setting where pupils might reasonably expect to hear orthodox Christian teaching. The sermon was pastoral, rooted in Anglican belief, and encouraged debate. It came after the school had invited in the external campaign group Educate and Celebrate, which openly stated its aim to "smash heteronormativity" and to embed Queer Theory throughout the culture of the school. For that, a chaplain was dismissed, reported to the government's Prevent counter-terrorism program, and blacklisted by his own Church. Secular authorities vindicated him repeatedly; the Church that should have defended him has yet to offer so much as an apology. ANN WIDDECOMBE, 1947–2026 Ann Widdecombe, one of Britain's most recognizable Christian voices in public life, was found dead at her home on the edge of Dartmoor on July 9, having sustained serious injuries. Police have described the killing as a targeted attack and launched a murder investigation; a 28-year-old man arrested in South Yorkshire on suspicion of murder was subsequently rearrested by counter-terrorism police on suspicion of terrorism offenses as investigators work to establish a motive. He has not yet been charged or named. Widdecombe, 78, served as Conservative MP for Maidstone from 1987 to 2010 and as a junior minister under John Major. She later sat as a Brexit Party MEP (2019–2020) and, since 2023, served as Reform UK's immigration and justice spokesman. After leaving Westminster, she became widely known for her television appearances, writing, and public speaking. Raised an Anglican, she left the Church of England in 1993 over the ordination of women and converted to Rome, where she remained, a Catholic of firm and public conviction, until her death. She opposed abortion and assisted suicide without apology or equivocation, championed animal welfare, and never once trimmed her convictions to suit the age. Britain has lost one of its bluntest and bravest Christian voices. May she rest in peace, and may justice be done. SUPPORT VOL If you value what VOL writes, please consider a tax-deductible donation. This work is a labor of love, but we have bills to pay. There are no salaries — but daily writing continues, and a webmaster, researcher, and overseas journalists must be supported. VOL has brought on new writers with clear insights into Scripture and culture. We have no mega-donors and no grants — only faithful readers who believe in what we do. We are now read in over 100 countries by tens of thousands of readers who trust us to cover the most pressing issues facing Anglicanism today. Only a small percentage contribute. We have proven ourselves over more than 35 years. Please consider a tax-deductible donation. 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

By David W. Virtue, DD I www.virtueonline.org I July 17, 2026 When an institution dies, someone must render a verdict. Was it murder? Misadventure? Natural causes? I have watched the Church of England die by inches for more than forty years, and I can render only one verdict: suicide. No secular assassin crept into Lambeth Palace by night. No parliament outlawed the gospel. No persecutor burned the churches. The Church of England took the knife to her own throat, slowly, deliberately, and with the full approval of her own leadership. A Long, Slow Dying The numbers tell the story the bishops will not. Sunday attendance has collapsed from roughly 788,000 in 2013 to some 557,000 today. More than 3,500 church buildings have closed across Britain in the past decade—some converted into pubs, gyms, swimming pools, and, in the bitterest irony of all, mosques. A church that once baptized, married, and buried a nation now struggles to fill its pews on Easter morning. Decline of this magnitude does not simply happen. It is chosen. And the Church of England chose it, decision by decision, Synod by Synod, sermon by mumbled sermon. "Catching Up" With the World If a single sentence captures the suicidal instinct of the Church's leadership, it came from a former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who declared that the Church "has a lot of catching up to do with secular values." Read that again. The man charged with defending the faith once delivered to the saints announced that the Church's task was to catch up with the world. Not to convert the world. Not to confront the world. To catch up with it—as though the Sermon on the Mount were a rough first draft awaiting revision by Islington dinner parties. St. Paul told the Romans, "Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind." Williams inverted the apostle: be conformed to this world, and be quick about it, lest secular Britain find you embarrassing. When the shepherd announces that the sheep must learn from the wolves, the flock's fate is sealed. The Betrayal of Doctrine The catching up proceeded apace. Marriage between one man and one woman—the plain teaching of Christ Himself, the doctrine of the Book of Common Prayer, the universal witness of the Church for two millennia—was quietly traded away for blessings of same-sex unions and the applause of the Guardian's leader writers. The Church did not lose the argument over marriage; she declined to make it. The faith itself was dumbed down until it could offend no one and therefore save no one. Sin became "brokenness." Repentance became "journeying." The Cross became a symbol of inclusion rather than the instrument of atonement. Bishops learned to speak fluently about carbon emissions, colonialism, and every fashionable cause of the moment, while falling silent on judgment, heaven, hell, and the blood of Christ. Why? Fear. Fear of being called narrow-minded. Fear of the mockery of the chattering classes. The English bishop came to dread one thing above all others—not the judgment seat of Christ, but a bad headline. And so the gospel of the crucified and risen Lord, the message that turned the Roman Empire upside down, was abandoned by men and women too timid to be thought exclusive. A Church That Follows, Not Leads Underneath every capitulation lies a single fatal premise: that the Church must follow society rather than society follow the Church. Once that premise is granted, everything else follows with mathematical certainty. If the culture embraces the sexual revolution in all its pansexual variety, the Church must bless it. If the culture regards evangelism as impolite, the Church must abandon it. If the culture calls the teaching of children "indoctrination," the Church must apologize for catechizing the young—using the fear of indoctrination as a scapegoat for its own failure to hand on the faith at all. But a church that follows society has nothing to say to society. It becomes an echo, and nobody ever converted to an echo. The world does not despise the Church of England because she is too Christian. The world ignores her because she is not Christian enough to be worth despising. The Crown and the Faith Nor has the Crown escaped the contagion. The King, who bears the ancient title Defender of the Faith—the faith, singular, the Christian faith as received by the Church of England—long ago signaled his preference to be a defender of faith in general, a chaplain to the multifaith conscience of modern Britain. The definite article was the whole point of the title. Henry VIII's parchment did not commission the monarch to defend spirituality at large, but the faith of Christ crucified. When the Supreme Governor of the Church of England treats Christianity as one option in Britain's religious food court, the message to the nation is unmistakable: even the Crown no longer believes the Church's claims are true. The Rise of Islam and the Silence of the Church Meanwhile, another faith has been rising in England's green and pleasant land—one that suffers from no crisis of confidence whatsoever. By some counts, more Muslims now gather in Britain's mosques each week to worship Allah than Anglicans gather in their parish churches to worship the risen Christ. Islam does not apologize for its truth claims. Islam does not convene listening processes to discern whether the Quran needs catching up with secular values. Islam catechizes its young without embarrassment, and its young believe. And how has the Church of England responded? With appeasement. Interfaith platitudes have replaced evangelism. Bishops who cannot bring themselves to say that Jesus Christ is the only way to the Father will happily share platforms celebrating "the three Abrahamic faiths," as though Calvary were negotiable. Persecuted Christians across the Muslim world look to Canterbury for a champion and find a diplomat. The Church that sent missionaries to the ends of the earth now lacks the nerve to evangelize the street outside its own lych-gate. The Scandal of Exclusivity At the root of it all lies the Church's rejection of the one thing Christianity cannot surrender: its exclusivity. "I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me." That claim built Canterbury Cathedral. That claim sent Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley to the flames rather than recant. That claim is the scandal, the stumbling block, the offense—and it is the power of God unto salvation. A church embarrassed by that claim has nothing left to offer but weak tea and weaker theology. Strip Christianity of its exclusivity and you do not get a broader Christianity; you get no Christianity at all. The Church of England made that trade, and the empty pews are the receipt. The Verdict Let the record show that the Church of England was not martyred. She was not murdered. She was offered, in every generation, the choice set before Israel of old: "I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life." Her leaders chose death—politely, procedurally, with working groups and facilitated conversations—but death all the same. Yet the gospel does not die when a national church dies. God is raising up a believing remnant in England, in growing orthodox congregations, in Global South Anglicans who have not bowed the knee to Baal, in ordinary believers who still open their Bibles and believe what they read. The candle Latimer promised Ridley they would light in England has not gone out. But it no longer burns in Lambeth Palace. The Church of England committed suicide. The Church of Jesus Christ, against which the gates of hell shall not prevail, lives on. David W. Virtue, DD is the president and managing editor of VIRTUEONLINE, the most widely read orthodox Anglican Online News Service with readers in 100 countries. More than 21,000 stories are archived at VIRTUEONLINE’S website: www.virtueonline.org

By David W. Virtue, DD I www.virtueonline.org I July 15, 2026 Antisemitism has gone global. In one country after another, Jews are being excoriated over Israel’s conduct of the war in the Middle East. Israel stands accused of genocide, of baby-killing, of deliberately starving the citizens of Gaza. October 7, 2023 — the slaughter of some 1,200 Israelis and the dragging of roughly 250 hostages into the tunnels of Gaza — is now brazenly repositioned as payback for Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. Never mind that two million Arab citizens live inside Israel in peace and prosperity, with seats in the Knesset, judges on its Supreme Court, and doctors in every Israeli hospital. Israel alone is blamed for the devastation of Gaza, with barely a mention of Hamas, which started the war and has hidden behind Gaza’s civilians ever since. Little is said of Hezbollah, or the Houthis, or of the evil empire of Iran, whose declared purpose is the annihilation of the Jewish state. A democratic nation no bigger than New Jersey is held responsible for all the ills of the Middle East. Meanwhile, the pressure ratchets up on Israel to accept a two-state solution that would inevitably see more rockets raining down on the small democratic state. Israel cannot win. Israel, it seems, is not permitted to win. The Church of England Joins the Prosecution Now the Church of England has joined the pile-on, condemning Israel in terms unthinkable a decade ago. On July 13, at its General Synod in York, the Church’s governing body voted overwhelmingly to encourage Anglicans at every level to engage with Kairos Palestine II — a document formally titled A Moment of Truth: Faith in a Time of Genocide, produced last November by Palestinian Christian activists. The document brands Israel a colonial, settler and exclusionary entity; describes the Jewish state as an apartheid system built on Jewish supremacy; dismisses Israel’s right of self-defense by asking how a colonizer can defend itself against the colonized; condemns the Abraham Accords; damns Christian Zionism as a theology of racism; and calls for boycotts, divestment and sanctions against the world’s only Jewish state. The Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, Sir Ephraim Mirvis, pleaded with the Synod to reject it, warning that the document was shocking, riddled with falsehood, and little more than “political activism dressed up as theology.” Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, warned that the King himself — Supreme Governor of the Church and patron of the Council of Christians and Jews — could find the Church he represents set against Britain’s Jewish community. The Board of Deputies of British Jews condemned the document’s toxic narrative about Jews and urged the Church to reject it outright. The Synod did not listen. The House of Bishops voted 25 to 0 in favor, with five abstentions. The clergy voted 115 to 20; the laity, 113 to 27. A fig-leaf amendment changed the word “receive” to “hear” — a distinction the Bishop of Blackburn, Philip North, rightly observed makes no difference whatsoever on the ground. The new Archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally, defended the document as reflecting Palestinian pain and trauma. The most piercing word came from the theologian Ian Paul, who asked why the Synod has never once debated the persecution of Kurds, Yazidis, Uyghurs, or Nigerian Christians, nor the ethnic cleansing of some 850,000 Jews from Arab lands — yet found time to platform a manifesto delegitimizing the Jewish state. “I wonder what we will say when the last Jew leaves Britain,” he told the Synod — because British Jews now know the Church will not speak up for them. A Church Descending into Darkness This is a Church accelerating its descent into moral and spiritual darkness, and its pronouncements would have Winston Churchill rolling in his grave. The Church that once steeled a nation against tyranny cannot now summon the courage to stand with the Jewish people while synagogues are firebombed and Jewish schoolchildren hide their blazers on London buses. Her pews empty, her parishes close, her clergy chase every secular fashion — and the Synod’s answer is to lecture the Middle East’s only democracy on morality. Physician, heal thyself. Let it also be said plainly where much of the fault lies. Successive British governments have allowed an imported Islamist antisemitism to fester in their cities while policing the speech of anyone who dared to name it. Weekly marches glorify intifada; Jewish students are hounded from campuses; and a political and ecclesiastical establishment too frightened to defend its own Jewish citizens is likewise too frightened to defend its own Christian inheritance. The failure is not one of race but of nerve. The Coming Exodus There is now open talk that Britain’s Jews may be driven out altogether if the brutal antisemitic attacks continue. If they go, there is a silver lining — for Israel. They will take their genius, their capital, and their children with them, and Israel will be the richer for it: more Jews, more money, and decidedly more brains. Jews arriving in Israel bring highly developed skills, languages, entrepreneurial capital, and a technological brilliance unsurpassed anywhere in the region. Israel absorbed the 850,000 Jews expelled from Arab lands after 1948 and turned them into the engine of a start-up nation; she will absorb Britain’s Jews just as readily. Britain’s loss will be measured for generations. History’s Verdict For here is the lesson the haters never learn: Jew hatred always backfires on the hater. Spain expelled its Jews in 1492 and began its long slide from golden age to backwater, while the Ottoman Sultan who welcomed them marveled that Ferdinand had impoverished his own kingdom to enrich a rival’s. Germany drove out its Jewish scientists in the 1930s, and the atomic age was born in America instead. Wherever Jews have been expelled, the expelling nation grew poorer, duller and darker. Wherever they were received, blessing followed. God’s word to Abraham has not been repealed: “I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse” (Genesis 12:3). Nations, like men, reap what they sow. Britain — and its established Church — should tremble at what they are sowing. David W. Virtue, DD, is the founder and editor of VirtueOnline (www.virtueonline.org)

By David W. Virtue, DD I www.virtueonline.org I July 14, 2026 In the space of a single week, the man about to become Britain's prime minister and the Church of England's parliament both turned on the Jewish state. Andy Burnham, Labour's unopposed leader-in-waiting following Keir Starmer's resignation, apologized to the world for his party having stood too close to Israel and pledged to squeeze her harder. Days later, the General Synod, meeting in York, voted to "hear" a libelous Palestinian manifesto that brands Israel a racist colonial enterprise and explains away the October 7 massacre. It is a week British Jews will not soon forget. Burnham's Opening Salvo Burnham, 56, re-entered Parliament in June by winning the Makerfield by-election and faces no challenger for the Labour leadership. In a video message setting out how he intends to govern, he stuck it to the Jews in no uncertain terms. "Many people feel that at the start of Israel's military operation in Gaza, my party didn't get it right and I am sorry about that," he said. "The terrible suffering in Gaza is a scar on our collective conscience. It's completely unacceptable that innocent Palestinians including children continue to be killed... We've got to do more to put pressure on the Israeli government." He endorsed the recognition of "the Palestinian state," sanctions on Israeli ministers, and "waves of sanctions on violent settlers and the organizations that support them." He backed the restrictions on arms licenses "to make sure that no British bombs or bullets can be used by the IDF in Gaza or in the West Bank." And he promised more: further sanctions on those involved in the violence, and measures to ban trade with Israeli settlements. To be fair, Burnham managed a single throat-clearing sentence condemning Hamas's October 7 attack and the antisemitic violence that has followed on British streets. One sentence — and then straight back to the dock, where only Israel ever stands. There was no acknowledgment that it is Hamas that caused the suffering in Gaza by using "innocent Palestinians including children" not just as human shields but as cannon fodder — war crimes against their own people. No mention that Hamas has been regularly torturing and murdering Gazans who dare oppose the tyrannical terrorist group. No mention that Hamas hid in the tunnels it built to commit war crimes against innocent Israelis, including children, while failing to build one single shelter for its own civilians. Hamas barred Gazans from those tunnels because the Islamist barbarians wanted as many of them as possible to die under bombardment — a deliberate strategy to get the credulous, post-truth progressive world to support barbarism against civilization. Nor did Burnham mention that Hamas, though much depleted, is still attacking Israeli soldiers in Gaza and still refusing to disarm because, as it has repeatedly declared, it intends to commit more atrocities against Jews. All of it said and done to delegitimize and destroy Israel. The Synod Climbs Aboard Not to be outdone, the Church of England's General Synod climbed on the bandwagon. In a debate stretching from Sunday evening into Monday morning, Synod passed a motion from the Diocese of Carlisle standing "in solidarity" with Palestinians "in non-violent resistance to the ongoing occupation" and calling on the whole Church to engage with the Kairos Palestine documents — chief among them Kairos II, formally titled A Moment of Truth: Faith in a Time of Genocide. Produced last November by Kairos Palestine, an ecumenical movement of Palestinian Christians, Kairos II describes Israel's military campaign in Gaza as genocide and the Jewish state as a "colonial, settler, and exclusionary entity." It goes considerably further than the original 2009 Kairos Declaration: it describes Palestinians as the indigenous people of the land, attacks the Abraham Accords, and calls on churches to "distinguish between dialogue with Jews and dialogue with Zionism." The manifesto labels the Balfour Declaration a "historic injustice." It vilifies Christian Zionism as a "theology of racism, colonialism, and ethnic supremacy" that "calls on a tribal, racist god of war and ethnic cleansing," claiming that Christian support for Israel "has produced apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide of indigenous people." The document mentions Hamas only once — condemning the killing of civilians in one breath and explaining the massacre away in the next, as "itself born out of decades of injustice, oppression and displacement since the Nakba of 1948, and more than sixteen years of an immoral, suffocating blockade on Gaza." Synod's managers, sensing trouble, amended the motion so that the Church would "hear" rather than "receive" the Kairos documents — as "heartfelt expressions of the lived experience of Palestinian Christians." A second amendment added repentance for the Church's historic antisemitism, presumably as an inoculation against the obvious charge. Bishop Philip North of Blackburn, describing the hatred for Israel and the Jews that he encounters on the ground in his own diocese, told Synod that such "nice distinctions" between "receive" and "hear" make no difference in the street. He was right. The verbal fig leaf changed nothing. The amended motion then passed overwhelmingly: 25 bishops for, none against, five abstaining; clergy 115 to 20, with 30 abstentions; laity 113 to 27, with 35 abstentions. Not one bishop of the Church of England voted against it. The Jews Protested. Synod Shrugged. Jewish leaders had begged Synod not to do this. Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis urged members to reject Kairos II as "a one-sided account of a complex conflict" that "downplays the historical experiences and legitimate concerns of Jewish people, and offers little more than political activism dressed up as theology." "It is truly shocking that a document which purports to speak in the name of truth contains so much falsehood — using extreme rhetoric to challenge the very concept of a Jewish state, and to oppose existing peace agreements in the region," Mirvis warned. After the vote, he condemned the outcome as shameful. The Board of Deputies of British Jews excoriated Kairos II's "toxic narrative about Jews." The manifesto's central libel — that Zionism is a settler-colonial movement built on Jewish supremacy with genocidal intent — is "so false and destructive that the only responsible action is to reject it," the Board said, calling it "a libel against Jews everywhere." Even Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, warned that the King — Supreme Governor of the Church of England and patron of the Council of Christians and Jews — could find, through no fault of his own, that the Church he represents has torched decades of Jewish-Christian relations. Anglican biblical scholar Ian Paul cautioned on his blog that Palestinian Christians have historically been "deeply involved" in violent terrorism in their rejection of Israel, and that the motion would do irreparable harm to Jewish-Christian relations. In the debate he asked why Synod had singled out Israel for condemnation while never once debating the persecution of Kurds, Yazidis, Uyghurs, Yemenis, or Nigerian Christians, or the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Arab lands. "I wonder what we will say when the last Jew leaves Britain because they know that we will not speak up for them," he said. Lichfield's Bishop Michael Ipgrave, a former chair of the Council of Christians and Jews, acknowledged that Kairos II speaks about Zionism and Israel in ways that stand in marked contradiction to how most Jewish people understand themselves, their history, and their identity. And what of the new Archbishop of Canterbury? Dame Sarah Mullally spoke for the motion. Hearing the documents, she assured Synod, "does not mean we agree with everything in these documents." As a pastor, she said, she hears "the cry of our Palestinian Christian sisters and brothers." One listens in vain for a comparably urgent word about the cries from the Nova festival, or from British synagogues now under police guard. The Irony of Repentance There is a profound irony in all this. Four years ago the Church of England formally apologized for eight centuries of Christian Jew-hatred, lamenting the medieval laws that led to the expulsion of England's Jews in 1290. Now its parliament has commended to every level of the Church a manifesto that condemns Israel as a Jewish supremacist state and frames Hamas's October 7 massacre as the inevitable consequence of Israeli policy. Synod repented of antisemitism in one clause and platformed it in the next. From Balfour to Burnham How far Britain has fallen. This is the nation of the Balfour Declaration, the nation that midwifed the Jewish national home. Winston Churchill was the most consistent Zionist among the great British statesmen of his era. Testifying before the Peel Commission in 1937, he rejected the notion that Jews were intruders in Palestine, comparing the Arab claim to that of "a dog in a manger" — the dog may have lain there a long time, but that does not give it final right to the manger. Blunt even by the standards of the day. In his 1920 article "Zionism versus Bolshevism," he wrote of a Jewish state by the banks of the Jordan as an event in world history beneficial to the British Empire and in harmony with the truest interests of Britain. And he bitterly opposed the 1939 White Paper restricting Jewish immigration to Palestine — "a plain breach of a solemn obligation" — voting against his own party rather than break faith with the Jewish people. From Balfour and Churchill to Burnham and the bishops at York: from a solemn obligation to a shrug. A Long Memory Let history record what happened in Britain in July 2026. In one week, the man poised to enter Downing Street apologized for standing by Israel, and the established Church — with not a single bishop dissenting — commended a document that calls the Jewish state a racist colonial entity and rationalizes the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. Both will pay for it. Prime ministers come and go; Burnham will discover soon enough that Downing Street devours its occupants. And the Church of England — a church that cannot fill its pews, cannot hold its doctrine, and can no longer tell the difference between the cry of the oppressed and the propaganda of their oppressors — is fading into national irrelevance, with mosque attendance in Britain now rivaling its own. Israel, by contrast, is going nowhere. She has outlived Pharaoh and Haman, Rome and the Inquisition, the pogroms and the Holocaust. She will outlive a Manchester politician and a York debating society. She is a rising nation, unstoppable in economic and military might, and she keeps a long memory of who blessed her and who cursed her. "I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse." Britain once believed that promise, and under Balfour and Churchill she stood on the right side of it. This week she changed sides. The Jewish state will still be standing when the Church of England has faded into the sunset — an establishment husk, irrelevant to God and the British people alike, waiting only for its own Judgement Day. END

By David Straw I www.virtueonline.org I July 14, 2026 This is a follow-up piece: Palace on a slope: Why coherence isn’t the same as truth https://www.virtueonline.org/post/a-palace-built-on-a-slope-why-coherence-is-not-the-same as-truth In A Palace Built on a Slope I described a closed theological system some Roman Catholic apologists have constructed. I called it the Mind Palace. It operates like Star Trek’s Kobayashi Maru. It creates a no-win scenario. No matter what evidence you bring, the system always wins. Arguing inside the palace room by room only makes it stronger. The real task is to step outside and examine the foundation itself. Here is what happened when I tried to do exactly that. THE CONVERSATION The conversation I had was about Anglican orders. Rome declared the Edwardine Ordinal defective in form. Therefore, Anglican orders are invalid. Therefore, Anglican clergy lack apostolic succession. Case closed, I was told. Settled since the sixteenth century. I pointed out a historical problem. From 1439 until 1947, Rome’s official teaching, defined at the Council of Florence, held that the matter of priestly ordination was the handing over of the instruments, the chalice and paten. This was no local custom. It was the Church’s formal answer to what made the sacrament valid. Especially striking: Rome had long accepted Greek ordinations that lacked the instruments entirely. Then in 1947 Pius XII issued Sacramentum Ordinis. Suddenly the instruments were no longer required. The laying on of hands alone sufficed. For five hundred years Rome had one answer. Then it had the opposite one. The reply came quickly. The instruments were never truly essential. They had always been symbolic. Pius XII did not change anything. He merely clarified what had always been true. Notice what just happened there. A teaching formally defined by an ecumenical council was quietly set aside. Whatever Rome teaches today becomes what she has always believed. Whatever she taught yesterday becomes an early draft that was never really definitive. They even offered a wedding analogy: rings and cake do not make a marriage valid. Only the vows do. My objection, it seemed, had confused the essential with the accidental. It was a tidy answer. It was also rigged from the start. If Rome changes, that proves development. If Rome stays the same, that proves consistency. A system built so it cannot lose has stopped being theology and started being ideology wearing theology’s clothes. THE OBJECTION So I asked the obvious question. Is there any historical fact that would ever count against Rome’s claims? Or does the system guarantee in advance that no evidence ever could? Someone will object that I am imposing a modern, secular standard on theology. They might say the early Church did not think in terms of falsifiability. The Fathers were not Enlightenment rationalists. But that misses the point. I am not demanding Karl Popper from the Fathers. I am simply asking whether the Church historically treated her own doctrinal judgments as genuinely open to scrutiny. For much of her history, the records show that she did. Here is the proof. ROME ARGUING WITH HERSELF Long before the nineteenth century, Rome’s own theologians debated these matters openly. Thomas Aquinas emphasized the imposition of hands as central to conferring the grace and power of order. Yet later medieval practice and the Council of Florence in 1439 elevated the handing over of the chalice and paten as the matter of the sacrament. Florence’s definition thus stood in tension with the Church’s greatest scholastic authority from the outset. This was no marginal dispute. Centuries later, the French Oratorian Jean Morin devoted his life’s scholarship to the ancient ordination rites of the Latin, Greek, Syriac, and Babylonian churches. Work like his kept the historical question alive for three centuries before Rome finally settled it in 1947. Rome was not forced by outsiders. Her own tradition had been arguing with itself through her greatest theologian and her most careful historian for five hundred years before she finally chose a side. That is not the behavior of a system in which every conclusion is already protected from historical scrutiny. It is the behavior of a Church that was, for a very long time, genuinely undecided. WHAT NEWMAN CHANGED Every serious discipline recognizes that a real claim must, in principle, be capable of being challenged. Scientific theories must be open to falsification. Legal arguments must survive counterexamples. Historical arguments must allow evidence that could alter conclusions. This is not a uniquely modern demand. It is intellectual honesty. For much of her history, Rome herself operated closer to this standard. What changed the posture was John Henry Newman’s theory of doctrinal development. It gave a framework capable of absorbing historical inconsistency after the fact. Changes became clarifications. Apparent contradictions became deeper continuity. Earlier formulations could always be reread in light of later definitions. Before Newman, Rome had real historical tensions, as any ancient institution does. After Newman, she had a theory explaining why those tensions could never count against her. THE QUESTION THAT MATTERS I have watched sincere Christians drift toward Rome, convinced they had found a system with no loose threads. In one sense they are right. Rome offers a theology where there are no loose threads, because the system is built so every thread can be woven back in after the fact. A system from which no evidence can ever escape is not thereby proven true. It has only become unreachable. Coherence is not the same as truth. A loop that cannot lose is not the same as a loop that has won. If you find yourself in one of these conversations, do not feel you must master every historical detail. Ask one simple question. What historical evidence would actually cause you to conclude that Rome’s claims were mistaken? Then listen carefully. Sometimes the most revealing discovery is not that a position has answered every objection, but that it has quietly reached the point where no possible objection ever could. Certainty built on an unfalsifiable system is not certainty. It only feels that way from the inside. The Rev. David Straw is Rector of Trinity Anglican Church (ACNA/REC) in Evansville. He is a church planter who has helped plant three Anglican churches He was ordained to the diaconate in 2007 and to the priesthood in 2008. He is a graduate of Wesley Seminary. He and his wife have been married for nearly 35 years and have four children.

The Alliance I July 13, 2026 Today, the General Synod debated a Private Member’s Motion which, if it had passed, would have undermined the doctrine of marriage as the church has received it. The amended motion stated that it is a legitimate theological perspective to believe that a committed, faithful, intimate same-sex relationship is entirely compatible with Christian discipleship and ministry. Whereas, only last year the House of Bishops affirmed that sexual intercourse, as an expression of faithful intimacy, properly belongs within marriage exclusively, and that the Church of England’s doctrine of marriage has not been altered. Today, the amended motion passed in the House of Clergy and the House of Laity, but was thankfully defeated in the House of Bishops with voting as follows: House of Bishops – For 11, Against 14, Abstentions 4 House of Clergy – For 93, Against 79, Abstentions 0 House of Laity – For 101, Against 83, Abstentions 0

ACNA's New Title IV Canons Put a Province on Trial By David W. Virtue, DD www.virtueonline.org July 13, 2026 Are church canons little more than sin management? It is a fair question, and a cynical age has earned the right to ask it. Canon law, in the hands of a church that has forgotten its Lord, degenerates into something worse than bureaucracy. It becomes power management dressed in legal vestments. The Episcopal Church proved the point for two generations, wielding the Dennis Canon to seize property and Title IV to prosecute the orthodox while the doctrinally heterodox sailed through untouched. You can read a province's real theology by watching whom its canons discipline — and whom they conspicuously never touch. Last month, the Anglican Church in North America gave its own answer to the question. Whether that answer holds is now the most consequential test facing the province. THE WRECKAGE THAT FORCED REFORM Let us be honest about how we got here. The ACNA did not revise its disciplinary canons in a season of tranquil theological reflection. It revised them because the old ones collapsed under the weight of actual use. Last December, the province's trial court acquitted Bishop Stewart Ruch of episcopal neglect after closed proceedings so troubled that two prosecutors resigned mid-trial. The province's own archbishop and primate, Steve Wood, stands accused of personal, financial, and sexual misconduct, inhibited from ministry, his trial now moved up to September 7 in Charleston. Bishop Derek Jones has decamped into schism with three suffragans, trailing indictments and a federal lawsuit behind him. Three bishops, three scandals, one province — and a set of disciplinary canons, inherited at the ACNA's 2009 founding from Episcopal Church texts that predated even that body's 1994 and 1997 reforms, that proved unequal to every one of them. The old system had no standing investigative body. It required sworn statements from three bishops or ten persons merely to begin an accusation against a bishop — a drawbridge pulled up so high that by the time anyone crossed it, the castle was already burning. It made the archbishop the intake officer for complaints, including, absurdly, complaints that might one day concern an archbishop. And where the canons were silent, the vacuum was filled by the habits of American civil litigation: motions practice, attorney maneuvering, expense, and delay. The wall was rebuilt because it fell down. Nehemiah would understand. But he would also ask what the builders believed. WHAT THE PROVINCE ACTUALLY DID The Provincial Council, meeting at Cornerstone Tulsa June 17-19, approved a comprehensive replacement of Title IV — thirteen canons, the culmination of nearly three years of work by the Governance Task Force under Canon Andrew Rowell, with the Title IV drafting subcommittee chaired by Notre Dame law professor Samuel Bray. Days later, a special virtual Provincial Assembly ratified it. Rowell told the Assembly that the scale of the changes matched the scale of the need. He is right about the scale. The question is the substance, and here the drafters deserve a careful reading, because what they produced is not what cynics might expect. The new canons open with Scripture, not procedure. Canon 1 grounds the entire disciplinary enterprise in the ministry of reconciliation of 2 Corinthians 5 and the shepherd's charge of 1 Peter 5. Pastoral resolution is declared the norm for disputes — but with a bright line the old Anglican establishment never drew: allegations of sexual misconduct and abuse within familial relationships are declared not susceptible to reconciliation. No more “handling it pastorally” as a euphemism for burying it. Presentments for sexual misconduct carry no statute of limitations at all, and willful concealment or obstruction lifts the ten-year limit on everything else. The bishop who hides the crime forfeits the protection of the calendar. More striking still are the footnotes. The Task Force defends its evidentiary standard — clear and convincing evidence, deliberately higher than the civil preponderance standard some commenters wanted — by citing Deuteronomy 19 on the testimony of witnesses, 1 Timothy 5 on accusations against elders, Genesis 38 on corroborating physical evidence, and Canon 21 of the Council of Chalcedon on weighing the credibility of accusers. When was the last time an Anglican province in North America reached past American jurisprudence to Chalcedon? This is a deliberate attempt to recover canon law as theology rather than ecclesiastical human resources policy. The structural reforms follow the same logic. A standing nine-member Reports Investigation Committee replaces the ad hoc, one-and-done Boards of Inquiry that had to be invented afresh for every crisis. A non-clergy Reports Administrator — the canons forbid clergy from holding the post — becomes the intake officer, freeing the archbishop from a role he should never have held. Trials move from sprawling seven-judge courts to three-judge panels drawn from a standing Disciplinary Tribunal, on a model borrowed in part from the Church of Ireland. And the whole system pivots from an adversarial process, where lawyers duel before a passive court, to an inquisitorial one, where the tribunal itself controls the search for truth. Discipline becomes fact-finding, not litigation. That is not sin management. That is a province attempting, on paper, covenant accountability. WHERE THE PROSECUTION PRESSES On paper. Now for the cross-examination, because no honest observer should let this document pass unexamined, and the drafters themselves have left the evidence in their own margins. First, the concentration of power. The Reports Investigation Committee investigates the report, decides whether a prima facie case exists, formulates the presentment, and then appoints the proctor who prosecutes it. Investigator, grand jury, and prosecutor in a single standing body. The drafters built in a genuine safeguard — every presentment must disclose all exculpatory material and explain any allegation not referred, a discipline American prosecutors honor mostly in the breach — but concentrated power is concentrated power, and standing bodies develop standing interests. The committee that develops “expertise over time” can also develop momentum, and momentum has victims. Second, the adverse inference. Under the new canons, an accused cleric who declines to give a statement has not thereby failed to cooperate — but his silence may be considered relevant when the tribunal weighs the truth. No American court would tolerate that. The church is not the state, and there are defensible theological reasons why a shepherd accountable to God cannot plead the Fifth before the flock. But let no one pretend this is a small thing. A system that draws inferences from silence had better be very sure of its own righteousness. Third — and here this correspondent must declare an interest — the confidentiality regime. The new canons impose a duty of confidentiality on all parties from report through ruling, and even a layperson's failure to keep silence may be weighed against credibility in adjudication. The Task Force's own marginal commentary laments disciplinary matters being fought out on the front pages of newspapers. One understands the impulse; the Ruch trial was not improved by leaks and counter-leaks. But a church that was burned by press coverage has now written canons that lean against parties talking to the press, and this publication has spent thirty-five years documenting what flourishes in ecclesiastical darkness. Confidentiality that protects victims is a mercy. Confidentiality that protects institutions is a shroud. The canons do not yet tell us which one the ACNA has purchased. Fourth, the accused still stands alone. On the floor at Tulsa, ten delegates moved to mandate an advocate for any accused clergyman, mirroring the advocate already provided for accusers. The amendment failed. The Task Force's own notes concede that defending a presentment that ends in dismissal could still cost an accused hundreds of thousands of dollars, and they express the hope — a hope, not a canon — of assembling a pro bono bar of proctors with the American Anglican Council and the Anglican Legal Society. Rowell has promised the question will be a priority in the next cycle. It should have been a priority in this one. A church serious about restoration defends the accused as vigorously as it hears the accuser, for the simple reason that some of the accused are innocent, and an innocent man ruined by process is a victim of the church as surely as any other. THE TEST THE CANONS CANNOT ESCAPE And now the irony that should keep every ACNA bishop awake at night. The new Title IV, by its own transitional provisions, does not apply retroactively. Archbishop Wood will stand trial on September 7 — barely two months after the Assembly's ratifying vote — under the very canons the whole province just agreed were fundamentally deficient — the ad hoc procedures, the civil-litigation habits, the seven-judge sprawl. The reform's credibility hangs on a trial it does not govern. Dioceses have until December 1 to certify that their own disciplinary processes meet the new standard. The paper deadline will be met. The real deadline is different, and it has no date certain: the first moment the new machinery is asked to discipline a bishop who is a friend of the institution rather than an inconvenience to it. So — are church canons little more than sin management? The ACNA has wagered its answer in thirteen canons that quote St. Paul and cite Chalcedon. The wager is honorable. But canons do not vindicate themselves. The Episcopal Church's Title IV also reads beautifully, and it became a sword against the faithful. Text is cheap. Enforcement is theology. The province has built the wall. Whether God or the institution lives inside it, the trials will tell. The Rev. Canon Andrew Rowell and the Governance Task Force's revision documents, with public comments, are available at anglicanchurch.net. David W. Virtue, DD, is the founder and editor of VirtueOnline, the leading orthodox Anglican news and commentary service, www.virtueonline.org. More than 21,000 stories are archived at VOL.

Archbishop of York’s Farewell Address to Synod Is a Masterclass in Saying Nothing Beautifully By David W. Virtue, DD www.virtueonline.org July 11, 2026 The Archbishop of York rose in York on Friday to deliver his final presidential address of the quinquennium, and it must be said at the outset: the man is good at this. Stephen Cottrell has spent five years perfecting a rhetorical form all his own — the address that absorbs every criticism, confesses every failure, and leaves no one, least of all the speaker, as the subject of an accountable sentence. Friday's performance was the finest of the genre. It deserves to be studied, the way one studies a conjuror: not for what appears, but for what disappears. Let us count the vanishings. THE HUMBLING WITHOUT A HUMBLER The address's emotional centerpiece is a line Cottrell has been polishing for years and readily admits to repeating: he prayed the Church of England might become a humbler church, and never realized the prayer would be answered by the church being humbled. It is a lovely line. Note the grammar. Being humbled — by whom? The passive voice has no agent, and that is the point. The Church of England was not humbled by an act of mysterious providence. It was humbled by the Makin review's findings on John Smyth. It was humbled by the resignation of an Archbishop of Canterbury. It was humbled by the David Tudor case — the abuser whose appointment as Area Dean was twice renewed at Chelmsford under the man now speaking. It was humbled by a serving diocesan bishop, Helen-Ann Hartley of Newcastle, declaring publicly that Cottrell's own position was untenable and that the institution was hemorrhaging credibility. None of this appears in the address. Not Smyth, not Makin, not Tudor, not the resignation calls against the speaker himself. In their place stands an answered prayer. This is theodicy as public relations: institutional and personal culpability transubstantiated into the gentle discipline of a loving God. The Almighty, it turns out, makes an excellent press officer. SAFEGUARDING IN THE FIRST-PERSON PLURAL The safeguarding passage is a study in pronoun management. The failures are always ours. The dealing with them weighs on us. Never once — read it carefully — is Stephen Cottrell the subject of a verb of responsibility. The one place the first-person singular appears is in gratitude: he is grateful to the auditors, grateful to the Charity Commission (the regulator, one notes, that came scrutinizing), grateful above all to victims and survivors who continue to hold the church to account. And here the performance becomes genuinely sophisticated. Cottrell directs Synod members to a survivor art exhibition — lino-prints, music, poetry, a Stations of the Cross co-created by three survivors — and announces he is personally hosting a fringe event alongside them. The aesthetics of penitence are immaculate. Survivor testimony is honored, displayed, curated, embraced. What it is never permitted to do is name a bishop. The exhibition absorbs the critique into the liturgy of the institution being critiqued. It is the safest possible place for the church's victims: inside the frame. THE HOSPITALITY DODGE On the quinquennium's central war — human sexuality — Cottrell offers a summary that is worth quoting in structure if not in words: everyone agrees, he says, that there is no place for homophobia and that all are welcome; what the church disagrees about is merely how that welcome to LGBTQI+ siblings should be expressed, and how clergy in same-sex marriages can minister. Observe what this framing accomplishes. The orthodox objection to the Prayers of Love and Faith was never about the expression of a welcome. It was about the doctrine of marriage, the authority of Scripture, and whether the Church of England would bless what God has not blessed. By recasting a doctrinal crisis as a dispute over hospitality styles, Cottrell positions the orthodox as grudging hosts quibbling over the seating plan — while quietly smuggling in the revisionist premise that clergy in same-sex marriages ministering in the church is a how question rather than a whether question. The debate is conceded in the act of describing it. He then declares himself deeply pained, as he has many times before, garnishing the pain with Jacob wrestling the angel. Pain is not a position. An archbishop is ordained to teach, and after five years of the Living in Love and Faith wars, the second-most senior cleric in the Church of England has yet to tell his church plainly what he believes marriage is and why. And consider what the address does not mention, though it hovers over this very group of sessions: the Private Members' Motion on sexuality awaiting debate; the fringe event on sexual identity transformation that was pressured into renaming itself from the forthright “People Change” to the anodyne “Journeys of Identity”; the Conversion Practices Bill that the bishops have supported, which threatens the liberty of the very testimony that fringe exists to give. The address floats serenely above the battlefield on which its hearers are actually fighting. THE U-TURN PERFORMED AS A CLARIFICATION Now the masterpiece. For five years, “mixed ecology is the norm” has been the banner under which parishes were starved, pastoral reorganization metastasized, and Save the Parish rose in revolt. On Friday, Cottrell announced that the phrase had been misheard — “through no fault of the listener” — and that no one ever intended to suggest new forms of church mattered more than parishes. Savor that construction. The listeners were not at fault; neither, apparently, was the speaker; the misunderstanding simply occurred, agentless as the humbling. And having established that there was never anything to retreat from, the archbishop executed the retreat: the parish, he now affirms, is the basic unit of the diocese; nearly sixty percent of national development funding is now aimed at parish revitalization, triple any other priority; and the next quinquennium, he suggests, should give greater clarity to the place of the parish. Every word of which is what Save the Parish, Alison Milbank, and this publication have been saying since 2021 — to fierce establishment resistance. The critics were right. The policy has been amended. And the amendment is presented as the correction of the critics' hearing. It takes a certain genius to surrender a position while implying the other side misread the map. ANECDOTES AGAINST ARITHMETIC Church growth, Synod was told, is actually going rather well — and the evidence offered was Carol, confirmed in the East Riding on Thursday night, and Linda, licensed to a group of rural parishes on Wednesday, where a packed church celebrated the end of a four-year vacancy. God bless Carol and Linda, sincerely. But a four-year vacancy offered as good news is an indictment wearing a party hat. Two named individuals stand in for the membership graphs the address declines to show: attendance still below pre-Covid levels, the long secular decline in Statistics for Mission, ordinand numbers that should terrify any strategist. Where data would convict, anecdote acquits. Even the address's genuine theological criticisms are defanged by charm. A serious accusation of Christological error — Nestorianism, from within his own Synod — is dispatched as a punchline: ask me later if you missed that episode. Heresy as an in-joke among friends. [Nestorianism is a 5th‑century Christological doctrine—condemned as heresy by the wider Christian church—that taught an excessive separation between Christ’s divine and human natures, effectively resulting in two persons rather than one unified person. No one has ever accused the CofE of harboring Nestorian thinking.] THE RHUMBA AT THE END OF THE WORLD And so to the close. A quinquennium that contained the resignation of one archbishop, public resignation calls against the speaker, the worst safeguarding reckoning in the Church of England's history, and open warfare over the doctrine of marriage — and the address ends with the gospel as dance music, feet tapping, and a heavenly brass band. One almost admires the nerve. Cheerfulness is the final evasion. Here is the through-line, and the epitaph for a rhetorical era: Stephen Cottrell's method is to dissolve every accusation into the language of shared pilgrimage. We were humbled. We are pained. We misheard one another. The pronouns do the work that repentance should, because in the first-person plural, no one in particular has done anything in particular, and therefore no one in particular need answer for it. The Church of England does not lack for eloquence. It lacks for a man who will stand somewhere and be found there when the questions come. On Friday in York, the Archbishop gave a farewell address of great warmth, considerable craft, and perfect elusiveness — the rhetoric of a man leaving the stage while ensuring the record shows he was never standing anywhere at all. Simpler, humbler, bolder, he prayed. Two out of three were dodged. The church was certainly humbled. The question Synod should ask, and did not, is by whom. David W. Virtue, DD, is the founder and editor of VirtueOnline, the leading orthodox Anglican news and commentary service, www.virtueonline.org. Some 21,000 stories are archived at www.virtueonline.org

By Dave Doveton, Anglican Mainstream. (Image: PRC Propaganda Poster, Wiki Commons, Public Domain) By Dave Doveton, Anglican Mainstream. I July 11, 2026 “See to it that no-one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world and not according to Christ.” Colossians 2:8. Language is one of the marks of being human. It sets us apart from the rest of creation. It is what elevates us as image bearers of the Divine, to share our creator’s communicative ability and his powers of reason. Jesus is after all, the Word made flesh. Language is the means by which we communicate reality and by which we understand reality. It is the chief medium whereby we transmit knowledge and culture, the way we communicate collective experience, values and traditions to following generations. Importantly it is the way we dignify other human beings. Dr Grams has observed[i] the rapid degradation of the language used in popular culture of America and the West. Language is used not to elevate other people but to revile, to denigrate; he notes how rancorous and untruthful speech has become mainstream. Language is also increasingly being used to mislead and deceive – especially by ruling elites who use propagandistic methods to exercise control and maintain power. In part one [ii], I examined the process whereby people are manipulated and controlled by mass formation and by the misuse of language, mainly in the form of propaganda. The use of language in the exercise of power: Groupthink or Collectivist Thought, and Newspeak George Orwell was one of the first to analyse the totalitarian systems of the 20th century. in his two novels Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, he categorised the way in which elites used language to gain political control and exert a comprehensive exercise of will over every sector of society, using several terms which he coined; one being Newspeak. Newspeak was a way of forcing language into describing, not reality but a pseudo-reality. Roger Scruton describes its purpose and effect, “Newspeak occurs whenever the primary purpose of language—which is to describe reality—is replaced by the rival purpose of asserting power over it. The fundamental speech-act is only superficially represented by the assertoric grammar. Newspeak sentences sound like assertions, but their underlying logic is that of the spell. They conjure the triumph of words over things, the futility of rational argument, and also the danger of resistance.”[iii] Fr Mike Johns gives some examples of Newspeak in contemporary culture which are instantly recognizable, “Examples of Newspeak are multiplying in our society. On one hand, slogans such as “reproductive rights” or “the right to choose” operate under the logic of the spell, as if the deliberate destruction of innocent human life in the womb can be made agreeable simply by renaming the act. So also, in matters sexual, where even biological reality is suddenly up for grabs, as in transgender ideology, and the nature of marriage itself is said to be open to redefinition.”[iv] Orwell described the aim of Newspeak as bringing people into a collectivist mindset or what he termed Groupthink, which I have described in part one. Newspeak also by its nature is anti-rational; “…Newspeak developed its own special syntax, which – while closely related to the syntax deployed in ordinary descriptions – carefully avoids any encounter with reality or any exposure to the logic of rational argument.”[v] Before Orwell used the format of a novel to describe the rise of totalitarianism through the manipulation and control of a population, Friedrich Hayek had written on the subject. In The Road to Serfdom, first published in 1944,he described how language could be used to force obedience to the system, but further than that, to unite all the population in a common purpose – the purpose of the state. To do this it was essential to control people’s opinions, so that all could be brought into conformity with what the state believed in terms of goals and policies. He states, “To make a totalitarian system function efficiently, it is not enough that everybody should be forced to work for the same ends. It is essential that the people should come to regard them as their own ends. Although the beliefs must be chosen for the people and imposed upon them, they must become their beliefs, a generally accepted creed which makes the individuals as far as possible act spontaneously in the way the planner wants.”[vi] Hayek then makes a shattering observation about what happens to people’s conception of ‘truth’ following this subtle co-option of a population into believing the state’s goals are their goals. “The word “truth” itself ceases to have its old meaning. It describes no longer something to be found, with the individual conscience as the sole arbiter of whether in any particular instance the evidence (or the standing of those proclaiming it) warrants a belief; it becomes something to be laid down by authority, something which has to be believed in the interest of the unity of the organized effort and which may have to be altered as the exigencies of this organized effort require it.”[vii] The End of Truth In his word, God in his word forbids any misuse of language – that includes lying and false witness, but also deceptive language[viii] (such as propaganda, deceptive arguments, and false narratives). We have a mandate not just to discern and ignore falsehoods and deception, but to expose it, to call it out. Truth, like the Gospel is an open secret. Jesus himself encouraged us – “What I tell you in the dark, say in the light, and what you hear whispered, proclaim on the housetops. And do not fear those who can kill the body but cannot kill the soul…”[ix] Essentially, the very nature of what truth is, is being undermined, firstly by the postmodern assertion that all truth is relative, and secondly by the states’ claim to decide what the truth in certain situations is. Both these attacks render the individual powerless to discern what is counter to the truth – i.e. falsehood and lies. When the state polices what is ‘allowed speech’ it is enforcing its own version of the truth, and in essence claiming authority to define the truth. In a theological sense, when a state arrogates to itself the right to define truth it is being idolatrous, for only God has authority to define truth, and the state is usurping that right. In response, the reality of transcendent truth needs to be vigorously proclaimed and asserted at every opportunity by believers. That truth cannot be relative, nor defined by governing classes. Hayek realised how important this was, because if truth is undermined, so is the moral structure of a society: The moral consequences of totalitarian propaganda which we must now consider are, however, of an even more profound kind. They are destructive of all morals because they undermine one of the foundations of all morals: the sense of and the respect for truth.[x] One characteristic way totalitarian systems gain control is the progressive removal of ordinary citizens’ ability to make choices. This can be undertaken in several areas, for example, in the public square they may, like many governments today, restrict freedom of speech. They restrict what we may say or hear or read. This pertains to mass media and social media. In contemporary culture, social media has become a powerful way of spreading information, but also of mobilising people, so this is the more threatening medium for the state. Usually the restrictions are cast as “protection” from ‘hate speech’ and the opinions of ‘dangerous people’. This is taking place increasingly frequently, and in several democratic countries. It is in fact more than mere censorship, but a decision to control people’s minds – and a claim by governments to have the authority to define what truth is. In the United Kingdom the online safety act was framed as a tool to protect children, undoubtedly a noble motive, but it now appears that it will be used as an instrument to police the speech of adults. An open letter[xi] from OFCOM reveals that it will use its powers to ensure media platforms respond to spikes in what it deems ‘illegal content’ during what it defines as ‘crisis events’. A newly published green paper[xii] proposes new measures requiring media platforms to give prominence to what it terms ‘trusted news providers’ – mostly mainstream outlets such as the BBC and ITV, Channel 4 and national newspapers. YouTube[xiii] has already warned of the effects. Similarly, in Europe, Germany’s state media regulators are also preparing new rules that could force platforms like X, Facebook, TikTok and Instagram to give greater visibility to “trusted” or “reliable” media outlets in their algorithms. The EU has also faced accusations[xiv] of totalitarian style speech restrictions and has promulgated rules to favour ‘approved’ news and information sources. Australians are also seeing an increasing erosion of their freedom of speech through anti-discrimination laws, “hate speech” laws, workplace policies, healthcare mandates, and restrictions surrounding Christian teaching.[xv] Canada has already gone much further down this road by enforcing the use of ‘pronouns’ which are in essence a type of Newspeak as they don’t relate to anything real. For the believer, it is beholden on us not to submit to an idolatrous state. Scripture teaches that those who submit to idols become like them – they lose the ability to see/discern or hear. Isaiah reminds us, “Their idols are silver and gold, the work of human hands. They have mouths, but do not speak, eyes, but do not see. They have ears, but do not hear, noses, but do not smell…. Those who make them become like them; so do all who trust in them.”[xvi] Submission to idols will always entail a loss of freedoms. The state on the other hand loses the ability to see its citizens as human beings, of inestimable value and with the right to be free. The End of Reason Paradoxically, the age of enlightenment aimed at making human reason supreme, but as we pass through the final stage of this age, it seems that reason will be suffocated. Again, Hayek explains, “The tragedy of collectivist thought is that, while it starts out to make reason supreme, it ends by destroying reason because it misconceives the process on which the growth of reason depends. It may indeed be said that it is the paradox of all collectivist doctrine and its demand for “conscious” control or “conscious” planning that they necessarily lead to the demand that the mind of some individual should rule supreme — while only the individualist approach to social phenomena makes us recognize the superindividual forces which guide the growth of reason. Individualism is thus an attitude of humility before this social process and of tolerance to other opinions and is the exact opposite of that intellectual hubris which is at the root of the demand for comprehensive direction of the social process.”[xvii] Intellectual hubris is indeed the font of what we are seeing play out, and as Hayek warns, has regularly led to, and may again lead to the demand that the mind of some individual should reign supreme. The scripture has an apocalyptic term for this type of individual. ___________________________________________________________________________________ [i] https://bibleandmission.blogspot.com/2026/04/the-ethic-of-speech-in-new-testament.html [ii] https://anglicanmainstream.org/editorial/christians-in-an-age-of-mass-manipulation-what-can-the-church-do-part-1-mass-formation/ [iii] Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left. [iv] https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2026/03/100558/ [v] Scruton, ibid.. [vi] Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, ROUTLEDGE, 2001, p153. [vii] Hayek, op cit. p164. [viii] Psalm 12:1-4. [ix] Matthew 10:27,28. [x] Hayek, op cit. p155. [xi] https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-content/open-letter-to-uk-online-service-providers-regarding-civil-unrest-in-belfast [xii]https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/watch-this-space-a-new-strategic-direction-for-uk-media-green-paper-and-public-consultation and the paper here: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6a3958c3e590e5e061c9a43a/E03591532_TV_Green_paper_Accessible.pdf [xiii] https://x.com/GBPolitcs/status/2073714885444206675 [xiv] https://europeanconservative.com/articles/commentary/europe-is-being-gaslit-about-freedom-of-speech/ and https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/eu-tightens-grip-on-whatsapp-raising-new-free-speech-concerns/ [xv] https://mychristiandaily.com/new-report-reveals-christian-freedom-eroding-rapidly-in-australia/ and https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news-corner/free-speech-under-fire-as-australia-pushes-tough-new-hate-laws/ [xvi] Psalm 115:4-8. [xvii] Hayek, op cit. p166.

A Satirical Essay By David W. Virtue, DD I www.virtueonline.org I July 10, 2026 The Church of England announced this week that it will not meet its target of net-zero carbon emissions by 2030, and the faithful across England wept — all eleven of them. This is, of course, deeply unfair to the church. The Church of England is in fact well ahead of schedule on net zero. It is simply measuring the wrong thing. While the bean counters at Church House fret over boiler emissions and the carbon footprint of votive candles, the church has been quietly achieving net zero where it really counts: in the pews. Consider the numbers. Sunday attendance has been declining so reliably, so predictably, so sustainably, that actuaries now use it to calibrate their instruments. At current rates of decarbonization — sorry, decongregationalization — the Church of England will achieve Net Zero Worshippers well before 2050, comfortably beating the Paris Agreement, the Lambeth Conference, and the Second Coming, whichever arrives first. A Carbon-Neutral Kingdom And here is the genius the progress report missed: an empty church is a carbon-neutral church. No parishioners means no heating, no lighting, no tea urn belching steam after Evensong, no petrol burned driving to the 8 o'clock. Every congregation that quietly expires is a win for the planet. The Church Commissioners should stop apologizing and start applying for carbon credits. Sell them to British Airways. Fund the pension scheme. Everybody wins, except God, who was not consulted. The new Archbishop of Canterbury, we are told, remains convinced the church will still be around in 2030 and has helpfully clarified that net zero “applies to smoke, not people.” This is reassuring, though one notes that the Church of England abandoned smoke decades ago along with sin, judgment, hell, and most of the Thirty-Nine Articles. The only incense rising from most parish churches these days is the gentle vapor of a heat pump struggling manfully against a fourteenth-century nave. Ah yes, the heat pumps. General Synod, that great engine of missionary zeal, has spent more hours debating ground-source heating than it has spent debating the Resurrection — though to be fair, Synod regards the latter as the more controversial of the two. Rural churchwardens have been instructed to decarbonize buildings that predate the discovery of carbon. Somewhere in Norfolk, a 79-year-old treasurer is filling out a 40-page Net Zero Action Plan for a church with a congregation of six, four of whom are kneelers. When the Faith Goes, the Real Estate Follows Meanwhile, the evangelistic strategy writes itself. Why struggle to fill churches when you can simply close them? A closed church emits nothing. A sold church emits luxury flats. The Episcopal Church in America — always a decade ahead of Canterbury in the race to the bottom — has already put its New York headquarters on the chopping block, proving that when the faith goes, the real estate follows. The archbishop says she hopes Lambeth Palace will not go the same way, and one sympathizes. “Two-bedroom apartment, river views, original Cranmer features, chapel converted to wellness studio” is a listing no one wants to read. Though the developers, unlike the diocese, would at least fill the place. Here is the part the report will never say aloud: the Church of England's emissions problem was never carbon. It was hot air. Decades of it, rising from synods and study documents and Living in Love and Faith consultations, warming nothing but the self-regard of those producing it. If the church could capture and sequester the verbiage generated by its own commissions since 1990, it could heat every cathedral in England through the next ice age. And while the bishops audit the candles, the people have voted with their feet — which, being a form of walking, is at least carbon-friendly. They have gone to the Pentecostals, to the Romans, to the garden center, to bed. The mystery is not why they left. The mystery is why the church thinks a photovoltaic panel on the lych-gate will bring them back. The Gospel of Carbon Because here is the thing the whole sorry exercise reveals: a church that no longer believes it has a message worth heating a building for will always find something else to be earnest about. The gospel of carbon requires no repentance the bishops find awkward, no doctrine the culture finds offensive, and no God who might interrupt the planning process. It is religion with the religion removed — which, come to think of it, has been the Church of England's flagship product for fifty years. So let us not mock the missed target. Let us instead congratulate the Church of England on the target it is hitting, dead center, year after year: net-zero conviction, net-zero converts, net-zero confidence that the tomb was actually empty. The tomb, as it happens, is the one thing in Anglicanism that is supposed to be empty. The churches were meant to be full. END

The archbishops threatened to cancel a fringe event on sexual identity transformation — then backed down halfway. What remains is a Church willing to hear the Gospel only in private. COMMENTARY By David W. Virtue, DD I www.virtueonline.org I July 9, 2026 The Church of England has found a new use for safeguarding: silencing the testimony of Christians whose lives have been changed by Jesus Christ. The Archbishops of Canterbury and York — Sarah Mullally and Stephen Cottrell — threatened to cancel a General Synod fringe event in York examining how the Labour government's proposed conversion practices ban could criminalize Christian testimony, prayer, and pastoral care. After media exposure, they backed down — but only halfway. The private meeting may proceed on July 13. The public exhibition stand has been banned. Consider what that split decision actually says: the stories of men and women transformed by the power of God may be whispered behind closed doors to invited guests, but they must not be seen by the wider Synod. Testimony is now contraband. The Anatomy of a Cancellation The fringe event, “People Change: Sexual Identity Transformation,” is sponsored by Rebecca Hunt, a lay Synod member for Portsmouth Diocese and a lawyer with the Christian Legal Centre. Its speakers are three people the progressive wing of the Church would very much prefer did not exist. Matthew Grech is a Maltese Christian who was dragged through three years of criminal proceedings — the first international prosecution of its kind — for the offense of sharing his testimony on the radio. He was acquitted. He did not undergo “conversion therapy.” He became a Christian, and his desires changed. That, apparently, is the scandal. Dr. Mike Davidson, chairman of the International Foundation for Therapeutic and Counselling Choice, was de-banked by Barclays following activist pressure that included multiple death threats. Andrea Williams, chief executive of the Christian Legal Centre, rounds out the panel. The campaign against them began on June 27, when the Rev. Dr. Charlie Bączyk-Bell, a married gay priest and Synod member, took to social media to declare it “genuinely disgusting and astonishing that this trash is being given a space” at the Synod fringe. “Trash.” A fellow Synod member's Christian testimony, dismissed as garbage. Then came the letter — 82 Synod members, organized by the Rev. Robert Thompson, a West Hampstead vicar — invoking the Fringe Meeting Guidelines and demanding to know whether “safeguarding assessments” had been undertaken. For good measure, Thompson copied his correspondence to those responsible for Synod governance, safeguarding, the bishops of London, and — note this well — “those with interest in the Church's relationship with Parliament and government.” The threat was not even thinly veiled. The Archbishops duly wrote to Mrs. Hunt warning that the event could be contrary to the ethos of the Church of England and its safeguarding guidance. Safeguarding as a Weapon Let us be clear about what safeguarding is for. It exists to protect children and vulnerable adults from predators — a purpose the Church of England has failed at spectacularly and repeatedly, as the Makin Review and the wreckage of the Welby years attest. It does not exist to protect Synod members from hearing testimonies they find theologically inconvenient. Toby Young of the Free Speech Union named this tactic precisely: citing safeguarding concerns to silence people you disagree with is a scandalous abuse of a system designed to protect children from abusers. The Church that could not safeguard the victims of John Smyth has now discovered the vigor to “safeguard” its Synod from three Christians with microphones. Mrs. Hunt's response cut to the heart of it. The Living in Love and Faith process, she noted, changed no doctrine. The Church of England's teaching remains that sexual intimacy is reserved for the marriage of one man and one woman. The speakers at her event are not dissenting from the Church's doctrine; their opponents are. Yet it is the orthodox who must submit to “safeguarding assessments” while the revisionists write letters to Parliament. The Shadow of the Bill None of this is happening in a vacuum. Labour's Draft Conversion Practices Bill is before Parliament, and its definitions are breathtakingly broad. The government has described conversion practices as “any efforts to change, modify or suppress a person's sexual orientation or gender identity” — in any setting, religious ones included. Even the Church's own bench of bishops can see the danger. The Bishop of Leicester, Martyn Snow, told the House of Lords he had serious concerns about the Bill's failure to distinguish harmful practices from “perfectly acceptable practices of pastoral care and indeed prayer,” warning of a significant negative impact on legitimate spiritual care. The Evangelical Alliance and The Christian Institute have said existing law already covers genuine abuse. Matthew Grech's Malta ordeal is the proof of concept. Under a broadly drafted law, a radio testimony became a criminal prosecution. The York fringe event exists precisely to ask whether England is about to repeat Malta's error — and the Archbishops' first instinct was to prevent the question from being asked. Mullally's First Test This is Sarah Mullally's first York Synod as Archbishop of Canterbury, and the omens are poor. Both she and Cottrell voted for same-sex blessings in February 2023; their sympathies were never in doubt. What was in doubt was whether they would allow the Synod fringe — by definition the space for views that cannot get a hearing in formal debate — to remain free. The answer: only partially, and only after public exposure forced their hand. On Monday, Synod will debate a Private Member's Motion on sexuality. The fringe row is the opening skirmish of what promises to be a bruising session. The revisionist wing has now demonstrated its method: a social media denunciation, a letter with the right signatures, an invocation of safeguarding, a copy to Westminster. The machinery of cancellation, consecrated. The Gospel on Trial Strip away the procedure and the press statements, and one question remains: can the Church of England still tolerate the claim that Jesus Christ changes lives? That is not a fringe question. It is the Gospel itself. “And such were some of you,” Paul wrote to the Corinthians. “But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 6:11). Every conversion is a conversion practice. Every baptism testifies that people change. A Church that permits that testimony only in private rooms, away from public view, has already conceded the argument. The Archbishops did not merely mishandle a fringe event. They told the watching world which stories the Church of England is now ashamed of. The empty pews will take note. David W. Virtue, DD, is the founder and editor of VirtueOnline, the largest orthodox Anglican online news service. He has covered Anglican and Episcopal Church affairs for more than 35 years. Some 21,000 stories can be accessed at www.virtueonline.org

The Anglican Church of Canada has produced a 66-page liturgy for euthanasia. It is the most theologically damning document the Communion has seen in a generation. By David W. Virtue, DD I www.virtueonline.org I July 7, 2026 Picture the scene the Anglican Church of Canada has now scripted, rubric by rubric. A dying believer receives the Body and Blood of Christ. Prayers are said. A period of quiet reflection follows. And then, on cue — the liturgy itself makes provision for it — the medical team enters the room to administer the drugs that will stop the patient's heart. The chalice is cleared away so the syringe can take its place. This is not a hostile caricature. It is the plain choreography of "Pastoral Liturgies at the Time of Death in Contexts of Medically Assisted Dying," commended by the Council of General Synod in June 2026 for trial use wherever a diocesan bishop permits it, with feedback gathered until May 2027 and possible permanent adoption by General Synod in 2028. Here is the reading: The sacrament is then given with the following words. The body of Christ (given for you). The blood of Christ (shed for you). The following doxology may be said. Officiant All Glory to God, whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine. Glory to God from generation to generation, in the Church and in Christ Jesus, for ever and ever. Amen. Let it be said plainly: this document is not an act of pastoral care. It is a complete inversion of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. A GOSPEL TURNED UPSIDE DOWN The Gospel is the announcement that God in Christ entered death in order to destroy it. "The last enemy to be destroyed is death," Paul thunders in 1 Corinthians 15. Christ did not negotiate with the grave; he plundered it. Every Christian funeral for two thousand years has been preached in the teeth of death, not in partnership with it. What the Anglican Church of Canada has now produced is a liturgy in which the church walks a believer INTO the arms of the last enemy, hands folded, candles lit, and pronounces the ground holy. The document speaks of the moment of lethal injection in the language of "thin places" — that lovely Celtic image of the veil between heaven and earth grown gossamer. But the veil is not thin because heaven has drawn near. It is thin because a physician has been scheduled to tear it. Death remains what Scripture says it is: an enemy. A defeated enemy, yes — but defeated by Christ's dying and rising, not domesticated by a task force with a liturgical template. GETHSEMANE INVERTED The theological center of this document's corruption is found in its prayers of discernment. There, the person contemplating euthanasia is invited to see themselves in Jesus at Gethsemane, wrestling in the garden with a terrifying choice, and God is asked to "reveal your blessing... in these decisions." One hardly knows where to begin. Gethsemane is the precise moment in all of Scripture where the Son of God confronted an agonizing death — and surrendered his autonomy. "Not my will, but thine be done." The garden is where self-determination went to die so that we might live. To invoke Gethsemane as a warrant for choosing the hour of one's own death is not merely poor exegesis. It is exegesis standing on its head, blessing the very thing Christ refused. And note the sleight of hand. The document's introduction piously assures readers that the church is not blessing the choice of euthanasia itself — only the person. Thirty-five pages later, its own prayer asks God to bless the decisions. The authors could not sustain their own fiction for the length of their own booklet. PSALM 139 REWRITTEN AS A SUICIDE NOTE Worse still — and I do not use the word lightly — is the document's treatment of Psalm 139. This is the great psalm of the sovereignty of God over every human life: the God who knit us together in our mothers' wombs, who wrote all our days in his book before one of them came to be. It has been, for the entire pro-life movement, the charter text of human dignity from conception to natural death. The trial liturgies include a first-person "meditation" on this psalm in which the dying person muses whether ascending to heaven ahead of the body's own timing might itself be a path God has set before them. Here is what the meditation says on page 57: You set life in front of me. You did not remove obstacles but delighted in me finding my own way. You loved me and healed me over and over. You taught me to live well with the world and so you rejoiced in my community. You gave me hope. You lifted my spirit to the sunrise. And my darkness became your light. You called me to see your joy and to surrender. I am seeing my desire to fully surrender now, while I know my path. The psalm that declares our days are written by God is refashioned to suggest we may edit the final chapter ourselves. If there were a competition to find the one text in the Psalter least susceptible to a euthanasia reading, Psalm 139 would win it — and that is the text they chose. This is not interpretation. It is ventriloquism, forcing the Word of God to speak the words of the world. ABSOLUTION WITHOUT REPENTANCE, COMMUNION WITHOUT TRUTH The bedside rite provides for confession and absolution minutes before the lethal drugs are administered. Consider what this means. The universal tradition of the church — East and West, Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant — has counted the deliberate taking of innocent life, including one's own, as grave sin. Here, absolution is pronounced upon a person who is not renouncing the act but is fully resolved upon it, with the church's minister standing by as facilitator. Absolution has always required contrition and the intention of amendment. This rite offers pardon for a deed not yet done and firmly intended — a sacramental absurdity that would have made the medieval indulgence-peddlers blush. Tetzel at least waited until the sin was committed. Then comes Holy Communion. The early fathers called the Eucharist the "medicine of immortality." In this liturgy it becomes the hors d'oeuvre to a homicide — administered, by design, immediately before the fatal dose. Even the Nunc Dimittis is pressed into service: the song of old Simeon, who waited upon the Lord's timing for years and departed only when God gave leave, is appointed for recitation as the physician prepares the drugs. Simeon waited. Canada schedules. THE ABDICATION DRESSED AS HUMILITY The document's authors announce that they do not intend to enter the ethical arguments about euthanasia or offer any moral judgment for or against it. They then supply sixty-six pages of prayers, anointings, blessings and eucharists for its performance. This will not do, and every first-year seminarian knows why: lex orandi, lex credendi. The law of prayer is the law of belief. The church teaches by what it prays far more powerfully than by what it resolves. A church that writes prayers for the needle has made its moral argument; it simply lacks the courage to state it. The Prayer Book Society of Canada saw this clearly, declaring any such liturgy explicitly opposed to the doctrine and discipline enshrined in the 1962 Book of Common Prayer. They are right. You cannot liturgize what you will not defend. And there is a final cruelty buried in the guidance: clergy whose consciences forbid participation are instructed to ensure that another cleric is found. The objector must become the procurer. This is precisely the "effective referral" trap that has ensnared Canadian physicians, now imported into holy orders. THE CONTEXT: 80,000 DEAD AND COUNTING None of this occurs in a vacuum. Since legalization in 2016, Canada's Medical Assistance in Dying regime has killed some 80,000 people — roughly one in every twenty deaths in the nation. The program's boundaries expand relentlessly, with extension to those whose sole affliction is mental illness on the horizon, and documented cases of the poor, the disabled and the despairing steered toward death because care was too expensive or too slow. The state will pay to kill you free of charge; it makes no such promise about your dental work. Into this culture of death — the most permissive euthanasia regime in the Western world — the Anglican Church of Canada has spoken. And what it has said is: let us find suitable prayers. Contrast the early church. The Didache, written within living memory of the apostles, condemned the taking of innocent life without qualification. The first Christians rescued the exposed infants of Rome from the dung heaps and refused the empire's cheap deaths, and the pagan world marveled and was converted. The church grew because it would not kill, and would not bless killing. The Anglican Church of Canada is shrinking for the opposite reason, and cannot see the connection. WHERE ARE THE SHEPHERDS? Every diocesan bishop in Canada must now answer a question that admits no evasion: will you permit this rite in your diocese? Bishops of the Anglican Network in Canada and the wider Anglican realignment have long warned that the theological rot of the Canadian church did not stop at the blessing of sexual sin. Here is the proof. A church that lost the doctrine of creation in one generation has lost the doctrine of death in the next. The Global South and GAFCON, gathering their forces in the wake of the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals' collapse, should take careful note: this is what the "walking together" model produces. While the Instruments of Communion call for three more years of discernment, Canada has discerned its way to sacralized suicide. To the faithful remnant in Canada — and they exist, in parishes and pews and not a few clergy — I say: do not despair, but do not be silent. Refuse this rite. Say so publicly. The ministry of the church at a deathbed is prayer, presence, and the honest proclamation that Jesus Christ has defeated death — not a benediction over its administration. The Great Physician heals. He does not hold the syringe. Any church that cannot tell the difference has ceased, in that moment, to be a church at all, and has become a chaplaincy to the culture of death — vested, candled, and utterly lost. The trial-use document may be read in full on the Anglican Church of Canada's website. Feedback from dioceses is being gathered until May 2027. The graphic was provided by an anonymous former Episcopal cleric which prompted LLM to create this image.