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COMMENTARY By David W. Virtue, DD I www.virtueonline.org I May 18, 2026 A Wisconsin priest has surveyed thousands of Episcopal churches in an effort to pinpoint what fuels growth. The Episcopal News Service, the official publication of The Episcopal Church documents the launching of the Rev. Chris Corbin’s project with backing from Forward Movement called the Growing Episcopal Churches Study. In it, he already has obtained survey responses from hundreds of Episcopal churches, and hopes to potentially hear from thousands more, to help pinpoint what factors makes some “bright spots” churches thrive compared to others. You can read the article here: https://episcopalnewsservice.org/2026/05/13/wisconsin-priests-survey-of-thousands-of-churches-aims-to-pinpoint-what-fuels-growth/ VOL believes the article’s results are severely deficient in a number of areas. What the Article Gets Right (in part). The article does contain one notable nod toward biblical faithfulness. Scott Gunn quotes the Great Commission indirectly, saying Forward Movement has "a mandate from the gospel to make disciples of all nations." He also states that the goal is to "transform lives through encounters with the living and true God." These are encouraging phrases on the surface. Where the Article Falls Short 1. Growth is framed primarily in institutional terms. The central concern of the study is attendance numbers, membership figures, and survey data. The metrics used — average Sunday attendance, bounce-back rates, decline groups — treat church health as something measurable by sociological methods rather than by faithfulness to Scripture and the proclamation of the gospel. 2. The Great Commission is absent as a driving theological framework. While Gunn briefly mentions making disciples, the article never seriously engages with Matthew 28:18-20 as the reason the church exists. There is no discussion of repentance, faith, conversion, baptism into Christ, or obedience to His commands — the actual content of the Great Commission. 3. The gospel itself is undefined. The article mentions "the gospel message" and "advancing the gospel" multiple times, but never defines what that gospel is. In biblical terms, the gospel is the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of sins (1 Corinthians 15:1-4). Without that definition, "gospel" becomes an empty word that can mean anything. 4. Spiritual growth is reduced to felt needs. The 2018 RenewalWorks report cited in the article found that Episcopalians "hunger for spiritual enrichment but don't always find it." The response was to identify catalysts like "engagement with Scripture" and "a deeper prayer life" — which are good things — but framed around consumer satisfaction rather than biblical discipleship and evangelism. 5. No mention of sin, repentance, or salvation. A biblically faithful article about church growth would inevitably grapple with the church's call to preach repentance and the forgiveness of sins (Luke 24:47). None of that appears here. The Deeper Problem: Ideology Over Orthodoxy The article reflects a broader issue within The Episcopal Church: the tendency to address decline through organizational strategy rather than theological renewal. If a church is shrinking, the biblical question is whether it is faithfully preaching the Word and making disciples. That question is never seriously asked here. True church growth, as the New Testament presents it, flows from the proclamation of Christ crucified and risen, the work of the Holy Spirit, and obedience to the Great Commission — not from survey methodology alone. The article does reflect a pattern common in mainline Protestant decline — addressing symptoms through data and strategy while sidestepping the deeper theological questions about faithfulness to Scripture and the Great Commission. But there is an even deeper problem that the article studiously avoids — the theological and moral revolution that The Episcopal Church has undergone over the past three decades, and its catastrophic effect on church growth. Pansexuality, Gay Marriage, and Church Decline The Episcopal Church formally approved same-sex marriage rites in 2015. Rather than stemming decline, the years following that decision have seen accelerating membership losses. The denomination has shed roughly 500,000 members in a single decade, dropping to 1.5 million total members in 2023. Average Sunday attendance has collapsed from 600,000 in 2014 to approximately 410,000 today — a loss of nearly one third of its worshipping congregation in less than ten years. The embrace of pansexuality and the normalization of same-sex marriage have not grown The Episcopal Church. They have emptied its pews. This is not a coincidence. When a church abandons the authority of Scripture on matters of human sexuality — clearly addressed in Genesis 1-2, Romans 1, and 1 Corinthians 6 — it sends an unmistakable signal that Scripture is negotiable. And when Scripture is negotiable on sexuality, it becomes negotiable on everything, including the gospel itself. Faithful Anglicans and orthodox Christians did not leave The Episcopal Church because they were indifferent. They left because they could no longer in good conscience remain in a body that had departed from biblical teaching. The Global Anglican Communion, represented by GAFCON and the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA), exists largely as a direct response to The Episcopal Church's theological drift. Those bodies — committed to biblical orthodoxy — are growing. The Episcopal Church is not. The data speaks for itself. DEI Has Not Made Churches Grow The Episcopal Church has also invested heavily in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) frameworks, embedding them into its institutional culture, its hiring practices, and its theological discourse. Presiding Bishops and church leadership have repeatedly emphasized racial reconciliation, social justice, and institutional equity as central to the church's mission. These are not unimportant concerns. Scripture calls the church to justice and to welcome all peoples into the body of Christ. But DEI as an ideological framework is not the gospel. It does not address sin, it does not proclaim the atoning work of Christ, and it does not call men and women to repentance and faith. When DEI replaces evangelism as the animating mission of a congregation, the result is a church that is more focused on sociological categories than on the salvation of souls. The evidence is clear: DEI has not made Episcopal churches grow. It has given the institution a vocabulary for internal debates while the pews continue to empty. A church that spends its energy on land acknowledgments, pronoun policies, and anti-racism curricula — while neglecting the proclamation of Christ crucified and risen — has substituted the agenda of the culture for the mandate of the gospel. What Actually Grows Churches The New Testament is not silent on what produces genuine church growth. In Acts 2, the early church grew because the apostles preached Christ, called for repentance, and the Holy Spirit moved in power. Three thousand were added in a single day — not because of a survey, not because of a DEI initiative, but because the gospel was proclaimed with clarity and conviction. The churches that are genuinely growing today — whether evangelical, Pentecostal, or orthodox Anglican — share common characteristics: expository preaching of Scripture, a clear articulation of the gospel of sin and salvation, fervent prayer, personal evangelism, and a high view of the authority of the Bible. These are precisely the things The Episcopal Church has systematically marginalized. Conclusion The Growing Episcopal Churches Study may produce interesting sociological data. But no amount of survey methodology will address the root cause of Episcopal decline. That root cause is theological — a departure from the authority of Scripture, the uniqueness of Christ, and the Great Commission as the church's defining mandate. Until The Episcopal Church is willing to ask not just "what makes churches grow?" but "are we faithfully preaching the biblical gospel?" — no study, no strategy, and no institutional initiative will reverse its decline. True church growth, as the New Testament presents it, flows from the proclamation of Christ crucified and risen, the work of the Holy Spirit, and obedience to the Great Commission. It cannot be manufactured by sociological research. It must be received as the fruit of faithfulness to the Word of God. David W. Virtue is the founder and editor of VirtueOnline, the leading orthodox Anglican news and commentary site.

The Ascension means Caesar is not lord. The state is not lord. The market is not lord. Ideology is not lord. Technology is not lord. Nations rise and fall, rulers come and go, civilizations flourish and decay, yet above them all reigns the ascended Christ. — Rev. Dr. Ronald Moore Christianity is in its very essence a resurrection religion. The concept of resurrection lies at its heart. If you remove it, Christianity is destroyed. — John Stott The mainline churches became too much like a country club. With just a little bit of Jesus sprinkled on top. They didn't take Jesus seriously enough, and a lot of people said, "Well, why don't we go to the country club then? We'll have more fun, and I can drink there." Mainline churches catering to things in society, such as same-sex marriage and transgenderism, are also contributing factors. — Ryan Burge There are only two possible ends to human existence: living for oneself alone, or living for the transcendent Other, and through him for all others. — John Doherty, the Witherspoon Institute The Church of England today produces almost no significant theological work that is recognizably orthodox. Its intellectual energy goes into managing diversity, navigating competing truth-claims, and finding language capacious enough to hold together people who disagree on everything fundamental. This is not theology. It is conflict management costume-playing in vestments. — Gavin Ashenden The Gospel has been undermined by occultism. Consider Bishop James Pike's involvement with mediums, Bishop William Swing's syncretism inspired by a Hindu swami, Bishop John Spong's heresies inspired by his involvement with the Theosophical Society, and Gene Robinson's flagrant disregard for the authority of Scripture inspired by "Queer Occultism." — Alice Linsley Denominations that embrace the evangelical/born-again identification and those that don't. Assemblies of God is most likely to ID as evangelical: 92%. The mainline is all below 40%. Episcopalians are the lowest: 13%. — Ryan Burge Protestantism is Christianity stripped of Roman Catholic excess and man-made superstition. It is not megachurches, strobe lights, or smoke machines. True Protestantism is grounded in strict, Bible-centered belief. The Reformers did not invent something new. They returned the Church to what it was always meant to be. Female archbishops, LGBTQ flags, and dancing vicars do not represent Protestantism. — The English Remnant Dear Brothers and Sisters | www.virtueonline.org | May 15, 2026 THE STRANGE MELANCHOLY When Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in the 19th century, he observed that despite our prosperity, there was a "strange melancholy in the midst of abundance." Fast forward to the 1990s. In Fight Club, Tyler Durden captured his generation's growing sense of discontent: We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War is a spiritual war. Our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars, but we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off. Skip ahead to today. Most Americans have luxuries that the prosperous in the 1800s couldn't imagine and the movie gods of the 1990s only dreamed of: supercomputers in our pockets, AI to do our bidding, entertainment always at our fingertips. And yet amid this abundance, Tocqueville's "strange melancholy" persists. Deaths of despair have reached alarmingly high levels. Loneliness has been declared a public health epidemic. Student mental health has never been worse. And, like Durden, many of us are regularly pissed off. Psychologist Richard Beck sums it up: The data is pretty clear. While America is the most affluent nation in the history of the world, our rates of anxiety, depression, suicide, and addiction are all skyrocketing. We're not doing well. We are a deeply unwell society. This raises an urgent question: What's the matter with us? We could blame many culprits — the rise of the smartphone, the media, those "other" people. Yet each of these points to a deeper underlying problem. As Andrew Root argues, something more fundamental is worth a closer look: the way we're pursuing happiness. The Way of Disappointment In a million subtle ways, we're told that personal fulfillment is something we can win. Happiness is something we can achieve — if we just put in the work. Whatever we think will make us happy, we can go after it and get it. The pressure starts early and never lets up in our modern meritocracy. "You can be happy by way of marriage if you just find the perfect spouse." "You can have the family, the career, the body of your dreams, if you just ___." But what happens if you fail? If you can't rise through the ranks? Either you're a loser with no one to blame but yourself for not measuring up, or you find someone, some group, some system to blame as the oppressor. If you can't play the winner, playing the victim at least deals with the guilt. Or what happens when you do achieve your dreams — get the job, find the right spouse, accomplish everything you set out to do — and still have a gnawing sadness that won't go away? Then what? As Westerners, we typically respond to these letdowns in one of two ways. We dig deeper, grind harder. We jump on the achievement treadmill — move faster, work harder, fill up the schedule, get people to like us, prove to everybody that we're somebody. Until we burn out. Or we cope by quitting. We binge on Netflix. We attach our self-worth to a college football team. We shop, scroll, drink, or do whatever we can to escape the burden and boredom of life. Sometimes we do both in the same day and call it "work-life balance." Here's the paradox: you can't find true happiness by aiming for it. You can only discover it by living a life worth living. We live in sad times because we don't know who we are as humans, or how to live worthily. The Psalter offers us another way — a way to attend to life and answer the question "What's the point?" Psalm 8 is a gateway to that answer, inviting everyone to a new and life-giving way to live into our humanity. The Way of Worship Psalm 8 begins: "O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens" (v. 1). The Psalms offer a way of life centered on God. We're called into the worship of the God whose name fills the earth and whose glory towers above the heavens. Theologians describe this dynamic as God's immanence and transcendence. God is wholly different from us. His glory surpasses anything we can compare it to — the most majestic mountains, the most beautiful flower, the most riveting story, the thrill of a first kiss. None of it compares. And yet, as Augustine says, "God is closer to you than you are to yourself." He knows you better than you know yourself. Worshiping God releases us from the trap of self-focus. It frees us to live according to the logic of the universe. When I say worship, I mean the raw and beautiful diversity of worship we see throughout the Psalms: telling God our sadness, confessing our sins, arguing with him, praising him for his goodness and majesty. Instead of navel-gazing our way through life, we're pulled out of ourselves — and begin radiating outward, reflecting our Creator and Father. (H/T TGC) AI: GIFT AND THREAT Barna reports the following: 66 percent of practicing Christians say AI is improving their lives, yet 57 percent also say AI is a threat. Gen Z and Millennials are particularly sensitive to the rise of AI as a high risk. Pastors diverge sharply from the Christians they lead: 72 percent of pastors say AI is a threat, compared to 57 percent of practicing Christians. Seventy-two percent of American teenagers are already turning to AI for companionship. That's not just extreme cases or troubled kids — that's three in four teenagers going to a machine for connection. And it doesn't stop with teens. More and more people are turning to AI than to clubs, churches, or other social spaces. There's a married man in your church who's said more to a chatbot in six months than to his wife. And to him, it's not a problem. He's just processing. Right? Besides, his marriage went flat years ago. CHURCH OF ENGLAND: ON LIFE SUPPORT Private Eye reports that the Church of England is a very unhealthy organization. Their account: "When the new Archbishop of Canterbury Sarah Mullally glances around the House of Bishops at its next meeting, she may be forgiven for wondering where everyone has gone. Of the 42 dioceses in the Church of England, seven have no bishop in post, two more are suspended, one is on long-term sick leave, and a further five bishops have set a retirement date. For more than a third of dioceses to be effectively vacant is unprecedented in modern times. "The Crown Nominations Commission, which appoints diocesan bishops, is used to appointing three or at most four each year. No doubt they will find 16 ambitious clergy willing to step up to the top jobs. But finding so many at once may require scraping of the talent barrel." With a population close to 62 million and only one million regular worshipping Anglicans — average weekly attendance just over 702,000 — the Church of England has nothing to boast about. There are some 3.1 million practicing Muslims in England today with an average age of 24. You might be forgiven for thinking Christianity is dead on arrival. King Charles has made it clear he is the king of all faiths, not the Faith. If someone quietly padlocked Lambeth Palace, would anybody notice? Would anybody really care? One doubts it. ACNA: WAGONS IN A CIRCLE Are the wheels coming off the ACNA? It certainly appears that way. The bishops are circling the wagons before Archbishop Steve Wood's trial has even begun. Bishop Phil Ashey of the Diocese of Western Anglicans put his foot none too gently in his mouth when he delivered a statement wrapped in canonical legalese, declaring that Wood might be exonerated of the sexual charges. When confronted by acting Dean Julian Dobbs, Ashey immediately backtracked and issued an apology. But the damage had been done — revealing just how close-knit the ACNA House of Bishops is, and what they will do to keep that club together no matter what. They succeeded with Bishop Stewart Ruch. Will they succeed with Wood? Time will tell. Read more: Wagons in a Circle: The Architect Defends the Archbishop ACNA Bishop Issues Apology for Saying Archbishop Wood Should Be Exonerated Hearings to Begin in ACNA Primate's Trial What Bishop Ashey Withdrew — and What He Did Not At the same time, ACNA faces a deeper crisis of identity: Who and what is the ACNA? I invited a theologian and a canon lawyer to address the question directly — Is the ACNA a confessional body or a body governed by conciliarism? Canon theologian Chuck Collins and canon lawyer Phil Ashey duke it out for the soul of the church here: Confessional or Conciliar: The Battle for ACNA's Soul THE ABUJA CONTRADICTION: THREE VIEWS Global Anglicanism came in for serious attention this week when Jay Thomas, an Anglican priest in the Diocese of The South, published a scathing piece in First Things titled "Anglicans and the Abuja Contradiction." Thomas argues that the Abuja Affirmation marks a decisive rupture in Anglicanism, with GAFCON bishops effectively creating a second communion centered on the Jerusalem Declaration rather than the See of Canterbury. Though framed as a restoration of scriptural authority, the gathering produced not a reformed Anglicanism but a new institution with a Protestant confessional polity — one that claims to resolve the communion's fifty-year authority crisis while actually deepening it. His central charge: GAFCON condemns Canterbury's "hermeneutical pluralism" on sexuality while quietly tolerating the same disagreement within its own ranks on women's ordination. By enshrining this double standard, GAFCON has reproduced the very ecclesiological dysfunction it set out to cure. George Conger at Anglican Ink pushed back. Thomas's charge, Conger argues, collapses on inspection. Classical Anglicanism has always recognized hierarchies of doctrine — the Thirty-Nine Articles themselves distinguish between matters necessary to salvation and things indifferent — and GAFCON's position that sexuality touches core doctrines of creation and the moral law in ways that ministerial ordering does not is a recognizable exercise in Anglican theological triage, not incoherence. Thomas doesn't refute this distinction; he simply ignores it. More damaging still, his appeal to natural law and magisterial tradition as co-equal authorities with Scripture isn't classical Anglicanism at all — it's Anglo-Catholicism's rehabilitation of a dual-source theory of revelation that the English Reformers explicitly rejected in Articles VI and XX. And Thomas offers no workable alternative. "Reject the Abuja affirmations" — and then what? Submit to a Canterbury that has spent decades dismantling biblical teaching on sexuality? GAFCON didn't dissolve the Communion; Canterbury did — through the consecration of Gene Robinson, the blessing of same-sex unions, and the steady marginalization of orthodox voices. A Concerned Anglican responding at VOL goes further still. Conger's central counter-argument — that GAFCON's position mirrors the logic of the Elizabethan Settlement — is his most revealing error. The Elizabethan Settlement was not a principled theological achievement but a political accommodation that deliberately left the most contested questions unresolved. Comprehensiveness as a governing principle does not stay bounded by the intentions of those who first deployed it; it licenses progressive expansion of the tolerable. The broad churchmen of the 19th century and the revisionists of the 20th are not aberrations from the Settlement's logic — they are its eventual destination. GAFCON's designation of women's ordination as a second-order question is institutional arithmetic, not theological wisdom. Every province that proceeded from women's ordination to blessing same-sex unions did so with internal logical coherence. Canterbury did not abandon orthodoxy on sexuality despite accepting women's ordination; it did so because women's ordination had already installed the hermeneutical framework that made the next steps inevitable. The instrument that resolves this impasse, the Concerned Anglican argues, already exists within the Anglican tradition: the Vincentian Canon — quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus (what has been believed everywhere, always, and by all) — deployed by the Caroline Divines who gave Anglican theology its most durable intellectual architecture. Applied with rigor, it confirms sexual ethics as first-order: grounded in creation, confirmed by universal patristic consensus across East and West, never seriously contested in the undivided Church. Women's ordination fails the same test decisively. This is not a Roman position — Lancelot Andrewes deployed precisely this methodology against Bellarmine without being on his way to Rome. It is more authentically Anglican than either the Jerusalem Declaration's confessionalism or the Elizabethan Settlement's comprehensiveness. Read all three pieces: Anglicans and the Abuja Contradiction — Jay Thomas, First Things The Abuja Contradiction That Isn't — George Conger, Anglican Ink The Contradiction That Actually Isn't — A Concerned Anglican, VirtueOnline MISSIONS: THE NEW PARADIGM There is a new paradigm for missions sweeping over the Global South, especially in regions hard hit by Islamic fundamentalism. The old order of "come and hear" is over. "Go and tell" is the order of the day — but this begs the question of who is actually doing it. It is not bishops and most clergy, who prefer to see the rewards of other people's efforts, ending in performative behaviors that have very little to do with the gospel. Western Christian leaders have a 1950s approach to mission and it is not working. In a piece titled ACNA: Imagination Forfeited, I argue that ACNA's identity was essentially negative — not the Episcopal Church — and no movement has ever been catalyzed by negation. Ask ten ACNA clergy what Anglicanism is and receive ten answers: Anglo-Catholic, Reformed, Charismatic, Prayer Book conservative. Each coherent on its own terms, none of them the same thing. That is not a communion. It is a coalition, and coalitions held together by a common enemy dissolve the moment the enemy recedes. Every tradition requires a commonly owned confession — a shared understanding of its particular grace and calling. Without it, disintegration is not a risk. It is a destiny. We also assumed we would prevail because we were orthodox. But right beliefs held in the wrong spirit produce exactly what we have — a church confident in its legitimacy and uncertain of its purpose. We needed apostolic bishops freed from administration and devoted to catalyzing movement. Instead, we built a supervisory superstructure that consumed the resources mission required. Meanwhile the Spirit has been moving at remarkable scale — through Iran, China, and along the Swahili Coast, where High Church Anglicans with full liturgical inheritance and evangelical fire are multiplying communities of remarkable depth. They didn't choose between Anglican and apostolic. They refused the choice. We have mule churches. We need rabbit churches. Rabbits multiply; mules do not. The difference isn't resources or liturgy or episcopal order — it is apostolic imagination. Jesus never said make church members; he said make disciples. Disciples multiply movements. Church members maintain institutions. We have spent fifteen years doing the latter and wondering why nothing multiplies. What we need is not another summit or reorganization, but a network of networks: institutionally lean, missiologically alive, held together by a shared rule of life and apostolic imagination rather than diocesan machinery. The tradition is sufficient. The moment is still — barely — available. But not by doing what has never worked with greater enthusiasm. SAM ALLBERRY: WHAT THE CHURCH MUST LEARN Sam Allberry's fall from grace continues to reverberate around the Christian world, particularly in the Anglican Communion and the ACNA. An excellent take comes from Elizabeth Woning, writing for The Christian Post: Sam Allberry's recent moral failure has prompted reflection on a foundational question: how did activist pressure — rather than scientific research — come to reshape medical and cultural understanding of same-sex attraction? In the 1970s, LGBT activists successfully pressured the American Psychiatric Association to reclassify homosexuality, silencing dissenting clinicians in the process. That ideological victory established the framework we still operate within today — one that treats same-sex attraction as a fixed identity rather than an experience rooted in emotional and developmental history. The consequences of that framework are measurable and troubling. Despite decades of growing legal and social acceptance, LGBT-identifying populations continue to show disproportionately high rates of depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and suicidality — even in nations like the Netherlands with stronger civil protections than the U.S. A 2019 genome-wide study of nearly 500,000 individuals found no "gay gene," but did find genetic correlations between same-sex behavior and conditions like depression, anxiety, ADHD, and addiction — suggesting the distress is not simply a product of social stigma. What's missing is a more honest clinical approach — one that explores the formative and emotional dimensions of same-sex attraction the way a therapist would explore chronic depression, rather than simply affirming it as immutable identity. The CHANGED Movement exists because many people have found healing through exactly that kind of honest interior work, supported by faith. Sam Allberry's situation, like others before him, points not to inevitable failure but to the cost of a cultural narrative that forecloses deeper questions before they can even be asked. Read more at VirtueOnline SUPPORT VOL If you value what VOL provides, please consider a tax-deductible donation. This is a labor of love — but bills must be paid. There are no salaries, yet daily writing continues, and a webmaster, researcher, and overseas journalists must be supported. VOL has brought on new writers in 2026 with clear insights into Scripture and culture. We have no mega-donors and no grants — only faithful readers who believe in what we do. Tens of thousands trust us to cover the most pressing issues facing Anglicanism today; only a small percentage contribute financially. We have been at this for more than 35 years. Online: virtueonline.org/donate By check (tax-deductible): VIRTUEONLINE, P.O. Box 111, Shohola, PA 18458 Thank you for your faithful support. David

By Arlie Coles THE LIVING CHURCH May 6, 2026 The Anglican Church in North America’s Court for the Trial of a Bishop will hold hearings this week on the first pretrial motions filed in the disciplinary matter of the Most Rev. Steve Wood, according to a court announcement. Archbishop Wood, the denomination’s primate, was indicted on ecclesiastical charges of personal and sexual misconduct last December. His trial is scheduled to begin July 20. Four priests and seven laypeople filed a complaint against Wood last October, alleging that as bishop of the Diocese of the Carolinas and rector of St. Andrew’s Church in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, Wood plagiarized sermons, bullied staff, and made continual sexual advances toward a children’s ministry director. Wood has denied the allegations. The ACNA’s disciplinary system sets a denominational prosecutor against an accused bishop, who is tried by a neutral court of three bishops, two priests, and two adult confirmed church members. Before trial, both sides may make requests of the court by motion. Four motions—two from the defense and two from the prosecution—will be considered at a hearing on May 7, the court announced last week. The court plans to continue the hearing on May 20 if needed. The court will first consider a motion to dismiss the case entirely, filed by Wood’s defense in March. The court did not publish the text of the motion, but its rules say that defenses of this type may be made on the basis on poor service of papers, expiration of a statute of limitations, or failure by the prosecution to state specific accusations that would constitute a canonical violation. (ACNA canons set a statute of limitations at ten years preceding a complaint against a priest or deacon, with extension possible. There is no statute of limitations for complaints against bishops). If the court does not grant Wood’s motion to dismiss, it will also consider a second motion to close his trial to the public—potentially continuing the controversial practice from its previous trial of the Rt. Rev. Stewart Ruch. The private nature of that trial had prompted the bishop and standing committee of the ACNA’s Diocese of South Carolina to question the province’s interpretation of “open court,” a term used in the court’s rules. “‘Open court’ is a legal term of art generally understood to mean in public or non-confidential proceedings,” they wrote in a February letter to the province’s Executive Committee. “American jurisprudence for court and administrative hearings generally favor open proceedings with confidentiality and closed proceedings being applied only where necessary to protect identities of victims.” ACNA chancellor Bill Nelson, who is also chancellor of Wood’s Diocese of the Carolinas, expressed disagreement with the Diocese of South Carolina when asked about the term at a provincial Q&A on April 17. “In the secular law context, ‘open court’ often refers to proceedings open to the public, but can also refer to proceedings in which the full court is convened and all parties are represented and present, even when the public is not invited,” Nelson said. “We shouldn’t assume an ecclesiastical trial is going to be conducted in the same manner or follow the same norms as American secular courts.” The court will also consider two motions filed by provincial prosecutor Elizabeth Medley: a motion for the court to “Re-Establish Fairness,” which the province described as a request for the court to “take certain procedural actions to ensure a fair trial,” and a motion to disqualify the Rev. Canon Jeff Weber from serving as Wood’s defense counsel. While the basis of that motion has not been published, a connection between Weber and the procedural tumult of the Ruch trial has been publicly alleged. Weber, a North Carolina lawyer and priest in the Diocese of Christ Our Hope, was serving as the Presiding Officer of the court when the longtime provincial prosecutor, Alan Runyan, unexpectedly resigned mid-trial. Runyan accused Weber of bringing in evidence a previous court order had labeled off-limits, then using the evidence to improperly question a prosecution witness for an hour. Assistant prosecutor Rachel Thebeau also resigned a week later, alleging that Weber had colluded with the provincial office to access the evidence in her files. The Rt. Rev. Phil Ashey, who is acting as a canonical adviser to Archbishop Wood, defended the court’s actions under Weber at May 2 lecture on ecclesiastical justice. “The province did not forward all of the evidence, including exculpatory evidence, to the court,” Ashey said, “and the court decided … to exercise what courts frequently do in fact-finding, which is to subpoena the records.” As news broke in The Washington Post of the allegations against Archbishop Wood during the Ruch court’s deliberations, Weber published two blog posts decrying “trial by publicity” and “our age’s reluctance to swear under oath.” The posts coincided with a public swearing dispute between the provincial office and the complainants in the Wood case, and both themes appeared in the court’s acquittal of Ruch. The Ruch decision might be seen as precedent in the Wood case, though it is not clear whether Weber had already decided to represent Wood as the court deliberated. Weber stepped down from the court on January 21. Before the Ruch trial, Weber served with the Rt. Rev. Alan Hawkins (Diocese of Christ Our Hope) in leadership at Anglican 1000, the ACNA’s original church-planting arm. The state bar of North Carolina reprimanded him in 2019 for failing to communicate with a client whose settlement money he held as he closed his office, and for disclosing confidential information about the matter to the client’s husband against her wishes. In deciding the motion to disqualify Weber, the court will consider accused bishops’ rights under the church’s current Title IV disciplinary canons to be represented by counsel, which has typically meant counsel of their choice. Pending revisions to Title IV, which will be voted on by the ACNA’s legislative body this summer but which will not be in effect for the Wood matter, forbid former court members from serving as counsel for either side in new cases for three years. Given the numerous pretrial motions, Bishop Ashey expressed uncertainty that Wood’s trial would be concluded by the year’s end and said “a good chance” existed that Wood will be exonerated, characterizing the allegations as coming from church staff who “felt aggrieved by the manner in which they were terminated as employees.” The Post reported in October that Wood’s clergy complainants accused Wood of habitually “demean[ing] them or others” without reference to termination, and that the former children’s minister resigned after Wood allegedly attempted to kiss her in his office. Sources speaking contemporaneously to The Living Church described a known culture of clergy and employee turnover under Wood. Wood remains unofficially active in the diocese while his case pends, though he remains formally inhibited from ministry. “I’ve been receiving telephone calls from him on almost a weekly basis,” Ashey said, “and it almost always has to do with a question of compliance with the inhibition.” “It is a specific question, like ‘This person is my friend, but they’re also a leader in the church. I’ve been called to a dinner at their house. Can I go and actually have dinner with this longtime friend, as long as I say I can’t say anything about the trial?’ ‘I have a friend, you know, who is trying to provide economic relief and development to the poorest country in Africa, and he wants me to be an adviser and a fundraiser for him. I’m not wearing my collar. Can I do that?’” “Sometimes his attorneys will pass questions along to me about how the canons of the church currently operate,” Ashey said. As the denomination reviews the turbulent Ruch trial, prepares to try its archbishop, and plans to adopt comprehensive revisions to Title IV all at once, attention to navigating episcopal discipline is split between current and future canons. The Diocese of South Carolina, stressing that Wood’s trial “will come before this same court and follow these same procedures,” wrote that the ACNA should “learn as much as possible, and quickly, from what has already occurred so future proceedings may be received as just and credible.” “Some people have said, ‘Well, this shows that the whole system is rotten, and that we’re going to die, we’re going to fracture,’” Ashey added at his lecture. “Others have said, ‘Well, actually, the system is working because we have new legislation in front of us.’ You’ll have to decide for yourselves.” Arlie Coles is a lay Anglican from the Diocese of Dallas who writes about modern Episcopal history and polity. She is also a machine-learning researcher serving on General Convention’s Task Force on Artificial Intelligence and Intellectual Property.

Op-Ed By Anglican Futures I May 13, 2026 On the 11th of May 2026, a jury at Kingston Crown Court determined that the Revd Jonathan Fletcher had committed at least sixteen acts of indecent assault on a man over a period of about twenty-five years. The majority of assaults involved being beaten on the naked buttocks with a gym shoe, as a punishment for masturbation, including one beating that was so serious it provoked prolonged suicidal ideation. Another alleged assault involved, an “action replay,” in which Fletcher made the complainant try to masturbate in front of him, before masturbating himself. Jonathan Fletcher is now 83, a brain scan in 2023 showed early signs of dementia and in 2025 psychiatrists reported there was by then sufficient memory loss for the judge to rule that he was ‘unfit to plead’. Fletcher was therefore not required to attend the trial. Instead, it was decided that the jury, would simply be required to examine the facts before them and, rather than pronounce him ‘guilty’, determine whether he had done the acts. The legal arguments continued, and after a defence born of technicalities upon technicalities, Fletcher avoided being charged with Grievous Bodily Harm (GBH), essentially because the defence psychiatrist had not had the opportunity to interview the complainant. Eventually, the defendant was accused of the remaining eight charges of indecent assault. The charges were arranged in four pairs, each pair relating to a different time period. The first of each pair related to a single act of indecent assault, the second to a further ‘three or more’ acts in the same time period. Fletcher had previously pleaded not guilty to all charges and that stance was maintained by the counsel for the defence, James Mulholland KC, throughout the hearing. The jury were advised that to find that Fletcher committed an indecent assault they had to be sure the act in question occurred, was indecent and was non-consensual. On all eight counts the jury found, “He did the act.” Further details of the trial can be found in reports by Evangelicals Now, the Daily Telegraph, Premier Christianity News and the Church Times. It is not publicly known when the complainant first spoke of this abuse to others. During the time of the offences, Jonathan Fletcher was a curate at St Andrew the Great, Cambridge (1973-1976) and St Helen’s Bishopsgate (1976- 1981), and then, after a year of travelling, minister of Emmanuel Church, Wimbledon in 1982, where he remained until he retired in 2012. In February 2017, the Diocese of Southwark was sufficiently concerned about Fletcher’s behaviour to remove his Permission to Officiate. They did not, however, inform his successor, the Revd Robin Weekes of their decision until November of that year. It took nearly eighteen months for a statement, signed by Weekes among others to be sent to church leaders in the conservative evangelical Anglican ReNew network, and then, merely warning them not to invite Jonathan to speak at their churches. JF April 1st 2019 Statement.pdf The content of that statement was widely regarded as regrettable in at least three respects. In it was an assurance to the recipients that “no matters of criminal concern had been raised“, at a time when the most that could actually be said was that no such matters had yet been raised with the authors and those whom they had consulted. The letter also failed to consider the precedent, which had already been set in the case of Bishop Peter Ball, that abusive Church of England clergy could be charged with misconduct in public office. In addition, this risked discouraging those who did think they had been subject to criminal offences to come forward. This is because the statement gave the perception that those assuming leadership on the matter had already determined the actions to be less serious. As if to leave no doubt, those failings were both compounded due to the letter, inexcusably, making no mention of victims at all, which inevitably gave the impression that the authors, and the process leading to it, were not victim-centred. The first Daily Telegraph article, published in June 2019, spoke of “spiritual abuse”, with articles outlining reports of physical and sexual abuse coming later that year. This led to an Independent Lessons Learned Review by the safeguarding charity Thirtyone:eight. The Review focused on Jonathan Fletcher’s time at Emmanuel Church Wimbledon. They spoke to almost one hundred individuals – including twenty-seven who reported experiencing behaviours that some alleged to be harmful, as well as office holders and members of the Church. The pattern it revealed was complicated. Jonathan Fletcher was a charismatic leader, who the complainant described as, “Very witty, very clever, very charismatic – glamorous is the word that comes to mind – to us he was a Superstar. He bowled us over.” It was said by some that he was an exceptional bible teacher and the Review quoted one individual as saying, “The majority felt wonderfully positive about JF [Jonathan Fletcher]; he drew us to him and we were thankful to God.” (p50). This made it harder for many to believe that Fletcher could be harming others. The Review described it as the “myth of homogeneity” which “leads to incorrect assumptions that individuals who possess positive giftings and behaviours cannot behave in harmful, and/or abusive ways, which render them unfit for office.” It is, therefore, understandable that for many their response to the reports of abuse has been one of cognitive dissonance. As one participant told the Review: “When a friend emailed me the Telegraph articles, I was angry and upset with the newspaper’s reporting that made judgments about such serious accusations, and further allegations, before a court trial of the eye-witness evidence had been met. I have never experienced anything except kindness and equal mutuality from Jonathan.” (p44) The complainant in the trial had also struggled to understand what was happening, as he put it, “Never any comment afterwards – it was all very matter of course – everyday, perfectly normal behaviour.” The Review highlighted another serious problem. It explained that the culture in which Jonathan Fletcher operated is “interconnected”, one where “loyalty was important” and there was “a far reaching and intertwined network and the ability to impact on career aspirations”. This, the reviewers found, made reporting and responding to reports of abuse more difficult. “His [Jonathan Fletcher] influence over the church and the conservative evangelical wing of the Church…wherever you went everyone knew him, his spiders web of influence meant to stand up against him you were standing up against a lot of people.” (p58). “As he [Jonathan Fletcher] rose through ranks to become emperor, king, top dog – everyone around him was under him or their boss was – it felt like all roads led to Jonathan.” (p59) “People are easily written off by whispering campaigns, if you don’t tow the line, or step outside of expectations, loyalty is a big thing.” (p62) It is disappointing that more than 48 hours after the verdict, there has been no comment from any of the churches in which Jonathan Fletcher served. This stands in stark contrast, to the compassionate approach of Her Honour Judge Sarah Plashkes KC, who took the time to recognise the significance of the findings. Concerned that some may think that her decision to give Jonathan Fletcher an ‘unconditional discharge’ meant his acts were trivial, the judge went out of her way to explain that because of his dementia the “courts hands are tied.” There are only three possible disposals from a fact-finding hearing; a hospital order, which was not necessary; a supervision order which would be impossible to arrange; or an unconditional discharge. She continued, “It is important for victims of sexual assault to be heard. The complainant has had his case heard and independently and impartially considered by a jury. They are satisfied so that they are sure that Jonathan Fletcher indecently assaulted [the complainant] without his consent.” Twelve men and women, who knew none of those involved, who it had been established had no connection to any of the churches that Jonathan had served in, and had not been influenced by prior information, were asked to listen to the testimony of an individual. They heard him, believed him and determined that Jonathan’s behaviour met the criteria for an indecent assault. The verdict is definitive – it can no longer be said that Jonathan Fletcher’s behaviour was ‘normal’, or that it was neither ‘criminal’ nor ‘sexual’, or that those harmed had consented to the assaults. Those who have said such things in the past should surely not remain silent at this time. For Lee Furney, a survivor of Jonathan Fletcher, who waived his anonymity, this comes as a relief and a warning. He told the Daily Telegraph: “This long-awaited guilty verdict is the quiet kind of justice of truth being named plainly. It affirms something essential: that harm matters, that truth has weight and that even when delayed, accountability can find its way to the surface. May this moment be about honouring those who were wronged, restoring dignity where it was taken and reminding us all of the responsibility we carry to protect one another.” While the experience of any victim of abuse is unique, it is striking how many aspects of the complainant’s testimony have been experienced by others. In being willing to bring his case to court, the courageous victim, who cannot be named, has done great service by allowing himself to be a specific and publicly tested example of the type of abuses suffered by so many. That this is but a single example of a much wider cultural problem can be seen in the similarity between the complainant’s testimony and the experiences of others. In that context, the following extracts are offered, in the hope that whatever might be redeemed from this terrible situation can come about. It is hoped that those who have been harmed by Jonathan Fletcher, or others, might be assured that they too can be heard and believed and all concerned might commit themselves to reforming cultures where such abuse has already persisted for far too long. Open your mouth for the mute, for the rights of all who are destitute. Open your mouth, judge righteously, defend the rights of the poor and needy. Proverbs 31:8 (ESV) Spiritual abuse/bullying “It is hard to quantify… he beat me and it was painful – so what? There was the embarrassing situation – the ‘action replay’ – so what? It was the long term control that he exerted – I couldn’t take any major decision – not just without his advice but without his approval. You know that was the thing that was damaging. Anything of any significance – yeah.” Complainant’s testimony ” … a number of participants detailed manipulative, controlling or coercive behaviour and bullying and some used the term spiritual abuse to reflect their experiences.” Thirtyone:eight Independent Lessons Learned Review p38 Behaviour in Bible studies etc “He would sort of attract to himself people who he regarded as keen. There were 5-6 of us who started to think about following in his footsteps and getting ordained – his fan club/ acolytes – and that sense of being special was cultivated by his comments about you and about other people – you wanted to be in the group.” Complainant’s testimony “A number of participants spoke of a shame culture in Bible studies. This, in addition to the focus on ‘sound, solid and orthodox’ theology, for some, resulted in a pressure to get every answer right. These behaviours were also spoken about in relation to preaching groups, staff meetings and Bible study weekends. However, many commented that the challenge that came could be given in a passive aggressive manner, making it difficult to recognise and call out as inappropriate.” Thirtyone:eight Independent Lessons Learned Review p38 Letter Writing “Between 2012-3 Jonathan Fletcher contacted the complainant on a significant number of occasions asking him to provide a letter that he had never been abused by him.” Agreed facts of the case “In the right context letter writing can be profoundly helpful and demonstrate individual concern and care. However, in the letters shown to the Reviewers there was evidence of encouragement but also of clear manipulation.” Thirtyone:eight Independent Lessons Learned Review p40 Personal relational work & harmful behaviours “I first met him and got to know him at the church as a young teenager… we would get bus there and he would drive us home – he dropped me off last and it became a regular thing for us – sitting and chatting in the car.” The complainant spoke of how, decades later, he met regularly with Fletcher: “He would ask questions about my personal bible study and personal prayer. Various questions but always one question that came up – a touchstone sort of – which became a touchstone of my spiritual health – Actually he first asked it [ …] in the car chatting he said, “What was the worst thing about me?” – I was 16 a rugby player and fairly healthy and red blooded – the worst thing I could think to tell him was masturbation – and that would become a regular question – whenever he was asking me about my spirituality that question was always one.” Complainant’s testimony “He invested a large amount of time into mentoring relationships. This was a hallmark of ministry at Iwerne that JF continued in his ministry beyond Iwerne. It is important to recognise here that taking part in these camps was significant for many and these took place during formative years for many young adults… Again, a number of participants discussed positively the impact of personal work on their own spiritual life and career development… Others reflected that looking back they might now conceptualise these behaviours as a form of ‘grooming’ in the sense of preparing the way for future conduct.” Thirtyone:eight Independent Lessons Learned Review p40-41 Forfeit behaviours/ sanctions “When I turned 18 he introduced the idea of sanctions – if I had masturbated since I last saw him he would inflict a punishment. His favourite punishment was being hit with a gym shoe. I’ve been thinking about it – I thought it was consensual –and I never said, “No I’m not doing it, but looking back I was never asked – it was taken for granted… The thing that shocked me, surprised me, was I had to remove my trousers and underpants – that surprised me – it was on my bare buttocks that really surprised me.” Complainant’s testimony “A small number of participants had been involved with what are termed ‘forfeit behaviours’; these occurred within prayer triplets/quadruplets. These behaviours ranged from being hit on the naked bottom with a gym shoe, being given a cold bath, or being left outside in the cold while the rest of the prayer triplet/quadruplet were inside.” Thirtyone: eight Independent Lessons Learned Review p43 Impact “He gave me a particularly brutal beating – I can remember for weeks afterwards the effect – for several weeks when I wasn’t doing anything else, the thought in my mind at all times was “What would be the best way to kill myself?” – the easiest quickest and painless way to kill myself – that was all I could think about for several weeks” Complainant’s testimony “The level of fear in talking to the Reviewers at all, and especially about the behaviours experienced, demonstrates the impact these have had. The interviews demonstrated confusion, self-doubt and guilt in some and the difficulty of processing these experiences. There can be no doubt that deep and profound harm has been experienced.” Thirtyone: eight Independent Lessons Learned Review p40-41

A Concerned Anglican I www.virtueonline.org I May 14, 2026 A Virtueonline Exclusive George Conger’s response to Jay Thomas in Anglican Ink is being presented as theological analysis. https://anglican.ink/2026/05/12/analysis-the-abuja-contradiction-that-isnt/ It is not. It is institutional apologetics, a defense of GAFCON and the Anglican Church in North America dressed in the vocabulary of Anglican ecclesiology. Before engaging the argument on its merits, it is worth pausing to note what Anglican Ink actually is, because the publication’s identity is directly relevant to how its “analysis” pieces should be received. Conger is simultaneously the editor-in-chief of Anglican Ink and a regular on-air commentator on Anglican Unscripted, where he has made no secret of his sympathies in recent Anglican institutional disputes. He is an Episcopal priest in an ACNA-aligned diocese. Anglican Ink’s coverage of the past year’s Anglican institutional crises, which have been substantial, follows a consistent pattern: ACNA institutional communications receive prompt, prominent, primary-document treatment; parties on the other side of ACNA disputes receive press-release coverage or none at all. The November 2025 publication of an unverified “open letter from victims” in an active canonical dispute, without apparent editorial evaluation and without response from the accused, illustrates the standard. This is not journalism. It is advocacy with a masthead. Readers should receive Conger’s “analysis” of GAFCON’s critics accordingly: as the in-house commentary of a committed partisan, not the assessment of a disinterested observer. That said, institutional bias does not automatically produce wrong conclusions, and the strongest version of the critique requires engaging the argument rather than simply dismissing the arguer. So let us engage it. What Thomas Gets Right Jay Thomas’s First Things essay “Anglicans and the Abuja Contradiction” https://firstthings.com/anglicans-and-the-abuja-contradiction/ has real weaknesses. His authority structure leans toward a magisterial co-equality of Scripture and tradition that the English Reformers explicitly rejected, and Conger is not wrong to note that the logic of that position, pursued consistently, leads somewhere Thomas appears unwilling to go. The Reformers made a decisive choice: doctrinal faithfulness over institutional continuity. Thomas seems to want institutional continuity without the apparatus that historically made it function. But Thomas’s diagnosis of GAFCON’s incoherence is substantially correct, even if his prescription fails. He is right that GAFCON’s Jerusalem Declaration involves a confessional structure (a list of things that must be believed and held) while simultaneously treating women’s ordination as a tolerable “second-order” disagreement. He is right that this requires explanation. He is right that GAFCON offers none. His instinct, that something more principled is needed than institutional assertion, points toward a real solution, even if he cannot quite locate it. He is moving in the right direction. He simply does not arrive. The Elizabethan Settlement Is Not the Answer. It Is the Disease. Conger’s central counter-argument is that GAFCON’s position, communion on sexuality, tolerance on women’s ordination, mirrors the logic of the Elizabethan Settlement, which maintained doctrinal boundaries while permitting ceremonial and interpretive diversity. This is the weakest move in his piece, and it is worth dwelling on why. The Elizabethan Settlement was not, at its foundations, a principled theological achievement. It was a political accommodation that required theological clothing. Elizabeth needed a national church broad enough to hold a fractured nation together, and the Settlement accomplished that by deliberately leaving unresolved the most contested questions: the precise nature of eucharistic presence, the theology of episcopacy, the extent of predestinarian commitment. Hooker’s celebrated Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity is a work of genuine theological depth, but its enduring argument for comprehensiveness as a virtue was shaped, inevitably, by the political necessities it was written to serve. The Caroline Divines inherited that ambiguity and worked with extraordinary brilliance within it, recovering the patristic sources and deepening Anglican theological reflection in ways that remain indispensable. Yet the ambiguity itself carried consequences they could not fully anticipate. Comprehensiveness as a governing principle does not stay bounded by the intentions of those who first deployed it. It licenses progressive expansion of the tolerable. Chillingworth, Tillotson, the broad churchmen of the nineteenth century, the revisionists of the twentieth: these are not aberrations from the Settlement’s logic so much as its eventual destination, given enough time and cultural pressure. When Conger invokes the Elizabethan Settlement as a model for GAFCON’s comprehensiveness on women’s ordination, he is not pointing to a stable solution. He is pointing to the mechanism that produced the very crisis GAFCON exists to address. This is not a minor irony. It is the fatal flaw in his entire argument. Women’s Ordination Is Not a Second-Order Issue GAFCON’s designation of women’s ordination as a “second-order” question is presented as theological wisdom. It is institutional arithmetic. The Global Anglican Communion cannot hold together without the provinces that ordain women, therefore women’s ordination must be second-order. The theological rationale is reverse-engineered from the political conclusion. Conger calls this “necessary untidiness.” A more precise description is a structural contradiction at the foundation of the entire enterprise. The question is not merely whether women’s ordination is defensible or indefensible as a practice. The question is what hermeneutical infrastructure is required to sustain it theologically. The answer is substantial. To defend women’s ordination, one must argue: that the universal patristic prohibition is simply the imposition of Greco-Roman patriarchy rather than apostolic teaching; that the Church’s authority to alter the form of ordained ministry is essentially unlimited provided it serves contemporary justice categories; and that the hermeneutical principle governing scriptural interpretation is the trajectory of liberation rather than the consensus of the undivided Church. Each of those moves, once made, is not containable. If patristic consensus on orders is dismissible as culturally conditioned, on what principled basis is patristic consensus on sexual ethics not equally dismissible? The revisionist answer, stated with full logical consistency, is: it is not. And they are right, given their premises. Every province that moved from women’s ordination to blessing same-sex unions followed exactly this trajectory with internal logical coherence. Canterbury did not abandon orthodoxy on sexuality despite accepting women’s ordination. Canterbury abandoned orthodoxy on sexuality because it had already installed the hermeneutical framework that women’s ordination requires. GAFCON is attempting to use that framework while containing its conclusions. This is not untidiness. It is building on sand. Thomas senses this. Conger, invested as he is in GAFCON’s institutional project, cannot afford to see it. The Instrument Neither Side Is Using Conger correctly observes that classical Anglicanism has always recognized hierarchies of doctrine, that not every theological question carries equal weight, and that the tradition of theological triage is Anglican, not Protestant-confessionalist. He is right. But he never answers the obvious follow-up question: by what principled, historically grounded method do you actually perform the triage? Assertion is not a method. Institutional convenience is not a method. “Classical Anglican comprehensiveness” is not a method; it is a description of an outcome, and as we have seen, it is an outcome that progressively expands until nothing is excluded. Thomas gestures toward something like a method. His appeal to “the church’s historic and magisterial tradition” alongside Scripture suggests he understands that principled triage requires a principled standard. He simply cannot specify what that standard is, because he has not articulated a methodology for evaluating tradition that is neither Roman (tradition as co-equal magisterial source requiring a living adjudicating authority) nor Protestant (tradition as secondary and contestable by individual scriptural interpretation). The Anglican tradition already possesses the instrument that resolves this impasse. It is not new. It was articulated in 434 AD by Vincent of Lérins and deployed, with varying degrees of rigor, by the Caroline Divines who gave Anglican theology its most durable intellectual architecture. The Vincentian Canon (quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus: what has been believed everywhere, always, and by all) provides a principled, historically grounded, non-Roman basis for distinguishing what is irreversible apostolic deposit from what is later theological development or outright innovation. Applied with rigor, the Canon is neither Anglican Ink’s friend nor GAFCON’s. Sexual ethics grounded in creation order, confirmed by universal patristic consensus across East and West, expressed in every ancient liturgical tradition, never seriously contested in the undivided Church: this passes the test. It is first order, non-negotiable, and the Vincentian methodology confirms it as such. Women’s ordination, absent from the entire undivided Church, patristically prohibited without dissent, not present in any ancient liturgical tradition, and dependent on hermeneutical moves the Fathers neither made nor entertained, fails the test decisively. The Elizabethan Settlement failed to apply this instrument, and that failure created the latitudinarian drift that Canterbury now embodies. GAFCON is repeating that failure at a different point on the same trajectory. This is not a Roman position. Lancelot Andrewes, arguing against Bellarmine, was not on his way to Rome when he appealed to the patristic consensus of the undivided Church. He was deploying exactly the methodology Thomas is trying to reach and Conger refuses to engage. The Vincentian Canon is more authentically Anglican than either the Jerusalem Declaration’s confessionalism or the Elizabethan Settlement’s comprehensiveness. It predates both. It grounds Anglican reformed catholicism in something older and more durable than either: the irreversible deposit received by the undivided Church and confirmable by the threefold test of antiquity, universality, and consensus. A Future Worth Investing In Thomas asks whether GAFCON represents a coherent Anglican future. Conger answers yes, with the Settlement’s ambiguity as his warranty. Both answers are inadequate. A coalition that institutionalizes the hermeneutical framework that women’s ordination requires and that has demonstrably produced the revisionism GAFCON opposes is not a future worth the investment of orthodox Anglican energy. Not because GAFCON’s people are insincere, but because the foundation is methodologically compromised. The Elizabethan Settlement bought approximately four centuries before the rot became undeniable. GAFCON’s version of the same bargain will buy less time, in a faster-moving culture, with a weaker institutional framework. The actual Anglican future, if there is one worth having, belongs to those willing to apply the wisdom of Saint Vincent with integrity rather than convenience. That means first-order questions are determined by patristic consensus across the undivided Church, not by what a particular coalition can tolerate. It means the Elizabethan Settlement is received honestly as a political achievement with serious theological costs, not as a model of principled comprehensiveness. It means Thomas’s instinct toward “the church’s historic tradition” is taken seriously and given the methodological rigor it requires, rather than being dismissed as crypto-Romanism by an editor who cannot distinguish the Caroline Divines’ patristic method from Bellarmine’s magisterialism. George Conger is right that GAFCON’s triage is classically Anglican in form. He is wrong that the Elizabethan Settlement validates it, wrong that institutional comprehensiveness is an answer rather than a symptom, and wrong that Thomas’s appeal to tradition automatically leads to Rome. What leads to Rome is the absence of a principled non-Roman method for evaluating tradition. The Vincentian Canon is that method. The Caroline Divines knew it. Vincent articulated it in the fifth century. It does not require Canterbury’s blessing or GAFCON’s endorsement to be true. Jay Thomas’s piece: Anglicans and the Abuja Contradiction can be seen here: https://firstthings.com/anglicans-and-the-abuja-contradiction/

A Forced Retraction, a Forced Recusal, and an Institution Running Out of Room By A Concerned Anglican I www.virtueonline.org I May 13, 2026 Special Report: A VOL Exclusive On May 8, 2026, the Right Reverend Phil Ashey, architect of the canons of the Anglican Church in North America, current Bishop Ordinary of the Diocese of Western Anglicans, and self‑declared canonical volunteer to Archbishop Stephen Wood, issued a letter to the ACNA College of Bishops withdrawing or apologizing for substantial portions of the public lectures on “Ecclesiastical Justice” he had delivered six days earlier. VirtueOnline reported the letter under the headline of his withdrawn prediction that Archbishop Wood would be “exonerated.” That headline does not begin to describe the document. Read in full, the letter is one of the most candid pieces of institutional self‑incrimination the ACNA has produced in this decade. It is worth reading slowly. It is more worth reading for what it does not say than for what it says. A Retraction in Seven Movements In a single letter, Bishop Ashey withdrew his statement that bishops had “caught up with the Washington Post” and signed the presentment against Archbishop Wood, conceding, for the record, that no bishops have signed the presentment and that his original framing impugned their integrity. He withdrew his prediction that Archbishop Wood would be exonerated. He withdrew his characterization of complainants as having been “terminated as employees” and apologized to the individuals concerned. He withdrew his ascription of motive to the College in approving the new Title IV revisions, having framed those deliberations as driven by bishops’ “fear and nervousness about being subject to presentment.” He withdrew the implication that the five senior bishops who signed the inhibition of Archbishop Wood had acted under social‑media pressure rather than on the merits. He clarified that his role with Archbishop Wood is volunteer and unappointed, and that he has no authority to determine whether the archbishop has complied with his inhibition. He renewed, having previously declined, an offer to recuse himself from all further meetings of the College of Bishops until the Wood proceedings are concluded. Each of these withdrawals corresponds to a specific institutional defense Bishop Ashey was constructing on May 1 and 2. Together they describe, with unusual clarity, the shape of the defense itself: a defense that recasts complainants as disgruntled former employees, frames the canonical process as compromised by press coverage, suggests that the bishops who imposed the inhibition acted under reputational pressure rather than on substance, attributes self‑protective motives to a College deliberating reforms it ought to be deliberating on merit, and predicts exoneration in advance of a trial whose proceedings have not yet begun. That defense did not appear by accident in lectures titled “Ecclesiastical Justice.” It is the institutional defense the ACNA has been quietly running since the Washington Post first published in October 2025. Bishop Ashey simply said it out loud, in the wrong week, before the wrong audience. The Forcing Function The letter names its own occasion in the second paragraph. “Dean Julian Dobbs has brought to my attention the concerns some of you have raised to him.” That sentence carries the institutional architecture of the entire document. Bishops complained to the Dean. The Dean delivered the message. Bishop Ashey wrote. The letter was then released with the author’s permission for pastoral redistribution, which is to say it was always intended to function as a public correction. This is not the structure of a personal apology. It is the structure of a managed retraction. What forced the management is also apparent. Bishop Ashey’s lectures were delivered May 1 and 2. VirtueOnline summarized them on May 4. The Living Church reported on them shortly thereafter, naming Bishop Ashey publicly as Archbishop Wood’s canonical adviser, quoting the exoneration prediction directly, and recording his characterization of the complainants as former employees aggrieved by their terminations. The Motion to Dismiss in the Wood matter was argued on May 7. The letter is dated May 8. A bishop functioning as personal counsel to the accused was, in the same week the dismissal motion was heard, delivering public lectures that prejudged the outcome and disparaged the complainants. The College noticed. The Dean noticed. Twice now, Bishop Ashey has offered to recuse himself from College deliberations over the appearance of conflict of interest. The first offer was declined; the second was made under conditions in which declining it again would itself become news. What the Letter Does Not Touch The retractions are precise. The omissions are precise as well. Bishop Ashey does not withdraw his May 2 claim, reported by The Living Church, that “the province did not forward all of the evidence, including exculpatory evidence, to the court.” That is a substantive accusation of prosecutorial misconduct against the very provincial apparatus prosecuting Archbishop Wood. If it is accurate, the institution has a deeper problem than the apology suggests. If it is not, the uncorrected claim now sits on the record alongside the withdrawn ones, indistinguishable from them in posture but evidently distinguishable in the willingness of its author to correct it. Nor does the letter address what is by now the most damning pattern in the province’s recent discipline record. In October 2025, VirtueOnline reported that “ACNA bishops led by Bishop Phil Ashey contend that the charges of misconduct … laid at the feet of Bishop Derek Jones … are grounds for an inhibition.” That public advocacy preceded the inhibition of Bishop Jones, an act whose canonical theory has yet to survive even rudimentary federal scrutiny, since the inhibiting authority had no remaining jurisdiction over a bishop whose endorsing body had already disassociated from the province. The same architect, at that time, raised no public concern about due process, predicted no exoneration, and offered no recusal. The institution then inhibited three additional JAFC suffragan bishops, the Right Reverend Michael Williams, the Right Reverend Marshall MacClellan, and the Right Reverend Mark Nordstrom, on the day following the December 2025 announcement of the Anglican Reformed Catholic Church, against whom no canonical complaints had been filed, whose only common attribute was their participation in the formation of an alternative ecclesial body. From 2009 until 2022, the ACNA’s Provincial Tribunal was never used. Since then, the province has inhibited four bishops connected to a single jurisdiction, none of them sexually accused, none of them financially accused, all of them critics or non‑participants, while the architect of the canons under which those inhibitions were issued is now publicly defending the one bishop in the same province who is sexually accused, financially accused, and a sitting Archbishop. The May 8 letter does not address that asymmetry. It cannot. There is no defense available for it. An Institution Running Out of Room It is no longer responsible to describe the ACNA as a province experiencing difficulties. The province is experiencing an institutional collapse, and the May 8 letter is one of its symptoms. In the past nine months alone, an archbishop has been inhibited on three canonical charges including sexual immorality and abuse of ecclesiastical power. Four bishops connected to a single jurisdiction have been inhibited in a province whose discipline machinery sat unused for its first thirteen years. The province has been sued in federal court for trademark infringement and unfair commercial competition, the canonical apparatus having generated secular legal exposure that ecclesiastical bodies ordinarily exhaust every available means to avoid. A bishop’s trial concluded in an acquittal that survivors and observers across the orthodox Anglican world received as confirmation that the province’s discipline mechanisms function to insulate institutional reputation rather than to deliver accountability. The Dean of the Province has resigned. His replacement now stands accused, in a sworn affidavit by the province’s former director of communications, of having previously discussed appointing a “bishop‑friendly” Board of Inquiry should charges ever come against the Archbishop he is now charged with disciplining. The province’s discipline canons are being rewritten, mid‑trial, in ways its own architects acknowledge are driven in part by bishops’ fear of becoming subject to them. Within that landscape, Bishop Ashey’s letter is not an outlier. It is a representative artifact. It is what institutional collapse looks like when the institution is still well‑mannered enough to write letters about it. The architect of the system rises to defend its most senior figure, says aloud what the institution has been saying privately, is corrected by bishops who recognize the cost of saying it aloud, and writes a letter of retraction that nonetheless leaves the underlying defense intact and the directional asymmetry of the system unaddressed. The wagons are still in a circle. The circle is just better policed. The Reckoning the Letter Withholds There is a meaningful difference between a retraction and a reckoning. A retraction withdraws particular sentences. A reckoning asks how those sentences came to be uttered, what posture produced them, and what that posture says about the institution from which the speaker speaks. Bishop Ashey’s letter is, by its own description, the former. It withdraws what he said. It does not ask why he believed it, why he said it before a lay‑and‑clergy audience, or what it means that the architect of the ACNA’s discipline canons is functioning simultaneously as personal counsel to the bishop most consequentially under those canons. It does not ask whether the same posture was operative when the same architect publicly led the case for the inhibition of Bishop Derek Jones, or when the institution he helped build proceeded to inhibit three additional bishops on no canonical predicate beyond their association with an alternative jurisdiction. It does not ask whether the directional asymmetry of the province’s discipline machinery, swift against critics and non‑participants, generous toward incumbents, might require something more than corrections of phrasing on the eve of a trial. Faithful Anglicans watching this institutional moment should receive Bishop Ashey’s letter with the seriousness owed any public retraction, and with the further seriousness owed to what such a retraction reveals. The ACNA was constituted, in part, to remedy a Communion in which discipline had become an instrument of partisan and institutional control. In its first generation, the province has reproduced that pattern with admirable efficiency, differing only in the direction of the bias. The May 8 letter does not arrest that trajectory. It documents a moment within it. The pattern of the ancient and undivided church is one in which the protection of the vulnerable is not subordinated to the reputation of the great, and in which the architects of a system are accountable to it on the same terms as those it was built to discipline. By that measure, the institution has been weighed in the balance. The reader is left to judge whether it has been found wanting. Submitted under pseudonym to protect the author and those they serve.

ACNA has mule churches. We need rabbit churches COMMENTARY By David W. Virtue, DD I www.virtueonline.org I May 13, 2026 The Anglican Church in North America entered history at a genuinely pregnant moment. The Episcopal Church had lost its way. After years of conflict, lost buildings, broken relationships, orthodox Episcopalians needed something safe. Stable. A place to land. It didn’t happen. We left the house on fire. And then we built the same thing next door. We replicated the architecture we had repudiated. Dioceses multiplied. Bishops multiplied. Meetings multiplied. The kingdom did not. We were sincere. We worked hard. And we reproduced a model that wasn’t working when we left it. The ACNA was never the safe, stable, reliable expression of Anglicanism so many of us desperately sought. What emerged instead was something closer to a Star Wars bar scene — a fascinating collection of traditions, personalities, and ecclesial experiments, held together by what we had escaped rather than by where we were going. The genuine work of the Holy Spirit is visible, particularly among younger clergy finding their way forward. But it is happening around and despite the institution. Not because of it. ACNA had no clear identity. When asked what we were, our most honest answer was: not them. Not the Episcopal Church. That is not an identity. It looks backward by definition. It requires the Episcopal Church to exist in order to know what we are. No one has ever been converted by it. No movement has ever been catalyzed by it. Negation is not the Gospel. And we were unable to fill that vacuum with anything commonly owned. Ask ten ACNA clergy what Anglicanism is and receive ten answers. Anglo-Catholic. Reformed. Charismatic. Prayer Book conservative. Each coherent on its own terms. None of them the same thing. No shared center holding them together beyond not-TEC. That is not a communion. It is a coalition. And coalitions held together by a common enemy dissolve the moment the enemy recedes. Every tradition requires a commonly owned confession — a shared understanding of its particular grace and calling. Without it, disintegration is not a risk. It is a destiny. We also assumed we would prevail because we were orthodox. But the right beliefs held in the wrong spirit produce exactly what we have — a church confident in its legitimacy and uncertain of its purpose. Orthodoxy is a gift. It was never meant to be a trophy. NEEDED NOW We needed a handful of genuinely apostolic bishops — men freed from administration, devoted to catalyzing movement, identifying and releasing leaders, keeping us oriented toward mission. Instead, we built a supervisory superstructure that consumed the resources mission required. Institutional overhead is not a vehicle for apostolic mission. It is a replacement for it. Meanwhile the Spirit has been moving at a scale that should stop us in our tracks. Across the Global South. Through Iran and China. Along the Swahili Coast, where High Church Anglicans — full liturgical inheritance, catholic order, evangelical fire — are multiplying communities of remarkable depth and velocity. They didn’t choose between Anglican and apostolic. They refused the choice. They read their cultural moment. They proclaimed the Gospel boldly. And the kingdom advanced. We have mule churches. We need rabbit churches. Rabbits multiply. Mules do not. The difference isn’t resources or liturgy or episcopal order. The difference is apostolic imagination — the willingness to proclaim the Gospel of the Kingdom boldly, make disciples who actually obey Jesus, and trust that obedient disciples multiply. Jesus never said make church members. He said make disciples. Church members maintain institutions. Disciples multiply movements. We have spent fifteen years making church members and wondering why nothing multiplies. What we need is not another summit. Not another bishop. Not another reorganization. We need a network of networks — institutionally lean, missiologically alive, held together by a shared rule of life and apostolic imagination rather than diocesan machinery. Four or five truly apostolic bishops. Room for the Spirit to move. Space for indigenous leaders to emerge. The tradition is sufficient. The raw material is there. The moment is still — barely — available. But rabbit churches don’t emerge from mule institutions. Something has to change. Not at the level of structure first. At the level of imagination. I write this with genuine love for the Anglican way. For its beauty. For its depth. For what it could yet be in North America. The grief here is not cynicism. It is the grief of believing deeply in something and watching it settle for less than it was made for. We missed our moment. By God’s grace we may yet find another one. But not by doing what has never worked with greater enthusiasm. The kingdom does not wait for our institutional comfort. For more on the multiplying of churches click here: https://be.thechurch.digital/blog/the-case-of-multiplication-or-how-all-of-asia-heard-the-gospel Here are two sample paragraphs: Multiplication in Discipleship. Making disciples is supposed to be a multiplying movement, not an “addition” movement. Typically, though, disciple is not done nor viewed as such. Discipleship is usually carried out in what I call reciprocating discipleship, where Christians meet with Christians to “grow in the word.” Making disciples, however, is leading nonbelievers to Christ and teaching them to do the same thing. Disciples start to multiply. In Acts 19:8-10, we see Paul stayed in Ephesus for two years, and while he was there, all the residents of Asia heard the Gospel. ALL. Every single one of them. Historians estimate that there were between 8 and 15 million people in Asia during that time. Now remember, this was not the Bible Belt. This was pagan country. NO ONE had heard of Jesus Christ yet and within two years everyone heard the Gospel. Paul stayed in Ephesus during that time so we know he did not personally share with them. So how exactly did 8 million+ hear the Gospel in only two years? Exactly. Multiplication.

Two voices, two visions vie for the Anglican Church in North America: Will it be Bishop Phil Ashey's Conciliarism or Canon Chuck Collins' Reformation Anglicanism? COMMENTARY By David W. Virtue I www.virtueonline.org I May 12, 2026 The Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) is a province under deepening pressure. Archbishop Steve Wood, elected in June 2024, became the first archbishop in the denomination's history to face an ecclesiastical presentment, in October 2025, over allegations of sexual harassment, bullying of church staff, and plagiarism. He was inhibited on November 16, 2025 by Julian Dobbs, the newly appointed dean and acting archbishop — who subsequently himself faced allegations of financial misconduct connected to a UK-based charity under active police investigation. The province that was formed to be a refuge from the Episcopal Church's institutional dysfunction is now generating its own institutional crises at the highest levels of leadership. It is against this deeply troubled backdrop that the competing visions of Bishop Ashey and CanonCollins must be understood. Bishop Phil Ashey and the Conciliar Vision Bishop Ashey is a canon lawyer and former head of the American Anglican Council He was involved in the founding of the ACNA and the development of GAFCON and the Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches as counterweights to the Anglican Communion structures. In January 2025 he was consecrated as Bishop of the Diocese of Western Anglicans. His governing theological and ecclesiological framework is what he calls Anglican conciliarism — a vision he has developed over many years and set out systematically in his 2017 book Anglican Conciliarism: The Church Meeting to Decide Together. In it, Ashey argues that Anglicanism has always been shaped by a distinctive conciliar approach — episcopally led, synodically governed, and accountable to the authority of Scripture — and that the deficit of authority behind today's doctrinal conflicts and fractured unity stems from the failure to practice genuine conciliarism at the global level of the Communion. The roots of the conciliar model, as Ashey traces it, go back to the early church. Starting with the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15, the church gathered leaders from its biggest regions and made rulings that were binding on all local churches, following a pattern of episcopal leadership and synodical government. Ashey argues that Anglicans have a distinctive conciliar way of governing, first used in the early 7th century in the Provinces of Canterbury and York, which holds synods at every level of the church in order to gain the mind of the whole church, insists on regular and ongoing councils to ensure ongoing reformation, but also recognizes that councils can and do err, as Article XXI of the Thirty-Nine Articles states. It continually looks to Scripture for the church's final authority. Crucially, Ashey applies this conciliar framework directly to the ACNA's most pressing internal crisis — women's ordination. He argues that there is nothing preventing the archbishop and ACNA College of Bishops from following an Anglican conciliar process in addressing women's ordination. It would require the College to restructure the way it does its business so that there can be a conclave-like gathering at least once a year to address such difficult and controversial issues, involving gifted and qualified lay and clergy theologians and specialists as non-voting but fully contributing members, and requiring the preparation of teaching and catechetical materials for the whole church to receive the decision of the bishops. For Ashey, this is not a procedural nicety but a theological imperative. The authority of the bishops to guard the faith and order of the church is precisely the authority that cannot be delegated away — not to a constitution, not to a canon lawyer, and not to the path of least institutional resistance. The conciliar process is the mechanism by which the whole church, properly ordered, hears from God and acts accordingly. The strength of Ashey's position is its institutional seriousness and its Anglican rootedness. He is not calling for an evangelical free-for-all or an Anglo-Catholic veto — he is calling for the ACNA to be what its own founding documents claim it already is. He sees hope in the ACNA, where conciliarism is practiced at all levels of the church, which declares forthrightly that Scripture is its rule and ultimate standard, and tasks its bishops with protecting faith and doctrine. The weakness — and critics have identified it — is that conciliarism as a process is only as good as the theological convictions of those who operate it. A conciliar process conducted by bishops who are institutionally committed to maintaining the status quo on women's ordination will produce a conciliar ratification of the status quo. Process without conviction is machinery without fuel. The question is whether the conciliar process will be the vehicle for genuine resolution or merely the mechanism for a more dignified deferral. Canon Chuck Collins and the Reformation Anglican Vision Whereas Ashey's framework is institutional and procedural, Chuck Collins says that such things as councils and synods follow theology, and he sees that the ACNA has not done the harder work of theological reflection in its rush to plant 1000 churches. He is convinced that this early stage of Anglicanism in America is missing an opportunity when it leads with a conciliar vision, like the “Instruments of Unity” failed to do. Instead, he suggests that this time of confusion and turmoil requires a theological renaissance and recovery of what Anglicans have historically believed. Collins, formerly Canon Theologian under Bishop Terry Kelshaw, rector of Christ Church San Antonio, the founding Director for the Center for Reformation Anglicanism, and the author of Cranmer’s Church: Then and Today, represents a stream of ACNA that is begging the church to consider its unique offering to the universal church so that we do not miss this opportunity for theological renaissance and a return to what Anglicans have historically believed and taught. Collins' starting point is unambiguous. He states that Anglicans don’t vote on truth, we submit to it — the truth of God’s Word written as this is upheld and explained in the traditional Anglican “formularies” (Thirty-nine Articles, 1662 Book of Common Prayer, and the two books of Homilies). He argues that the ACNA is asking and answering the wrong question when it begins by talking about a conciliar vision. What is expressed in the Jerusalem Declaration, he says, is “confessional,” and this precedes any constructive discussion about organization. The Articles of Religion, for example, were written at the same time and with the same purpose as the other great Protestant confessions, they have been subscribed to throughout our history, and they state the essentials of Anglican faith. Collins states that The Articles and the Prayer Book are clear about Anglican essentials and “generous” in matters that are not addressed and considered adiaphora - as Anglicans should be today. He reminds us that this is what Oliver O’Donovan calls Anglican’s via media. The English reformers sought to be completely faithful to the catholic and apostolic faith, the interpretation of the Bible over time, but they uniformly agreed about the primacy and perspicuity of Holy Scripture. His critique of the ACNA's founding generation is pointed and important. He notes that Archbishop Bob Duncan's 2006 address at Nashotah House, entitled "The Future of Anglicanism," rightly called the church to reinvest in the authority of Holy Scripture, but unfortunately, he failed to connect this to anything in Anglican history — to the passion of the English reformers, the Elizabethan Settlement, or the Anglican formularies. Such a well-meaning call, Collins argues, could have been delivered by an orthodox Methodist bishop or a Presbyterian superintendent. In other words, the ACNA was formed with a broadly evangelical orthodoxy that lacked specificity about what Anglicans believe — and that gap has never been adequately filled. The call to get as many as possible in this Anglican boat to prove our solvency and viability is putting the cart before the horse. Collins suggests this is a missed opportunity to recover our confessional nature that was completely abandoned by the church that we left. He says that the end result is that neighboring ACNA churches around the country can be teaching distinctly different ideas and even different theologies, and that this will eventually lead to the same path that the Episcopal Church took. For Collins, the solution is Reformation Anglicanism — a deliberate, historically rooted recovery of the theological identity that the English Reformers constructed and defended in our formularies. Reformation Anglicanism is the Protestant tradition of 16th century England that honors the creeds and the church fathers, but distinctly sees Holy Scripture as primary and the norming norm for liturgical reform. On the question of Canterbury, Collins is equally direct. He argues that Anglicans believe that Canterbury's word is only as good as he upholds God's Word, and his authority only as strong as he upholds the Anglican heritage. When Canterbury breaks with the doctrines and practices of the received faith, the Reformers themselves — Cranmer, Jewel, Hooker, Perkins — would have had no hesitation to break with Canterbury, because the identity of Anglicanism does not lie in communion with an historic see, but in the doctrines and practices that adhere to the gospel. This is a direct rebuttal of the institutionalist argument that communion with Canterbury defines Anglican identity — and it places Collins firmly in the GAFCON trajectory. For Canon Collins the important question for the ACNA is clear: even though the history of the Church of England, the ACNA Constitution and Canons, and the Jerusalem Declaration, all state that this church is confessional, why is the heart cry of many of its leaders “conciliar” — “let’s devise more instruments of unity that essentially vote on truth rather than submit to the essentials as we have received them.” Confessional Anglicanism means that theological content determines institutional boundaries. Conciliar identity means the institutional process determines the theological conclusions. These are not merely different emphases — they are different understandings of what a church believes and what this church offers the unbelieving world that is dying to know Jesus Christ. The Crisis Now: Wood, Dobbs, and Institutional Credibility The leadership crisis of 2025 has given both Ashey's and Collins' visions an acute urgency. The province’s credibility is being shaken to the core at precisely the moment when it needs stable and authoritative leadership to navigate the women's ordination question. For Collins, the leadership crisis is inseparable from the theological crisis. A province that has not settled what it believes about Scripture's authority, holy orders, and Anglican identity will inevitably struggle to form and sustain the kind of leadership character that orthodox Anglican ministry requires. The institutional is downstream of the theological. For Ashey, the leadership crisis makes the conciliar solution more urgent, not less. The College of Bishops, properly convened and properly accountable, is precisely the mechanism by which a province weathers leadership failures at the primatial level. Conciliarism is not dependent on the virtue of any single archbishop — it distributes authority in a way that makes the institution more resilient to individual failure. So, we have two visions of one province. Both are committed to scriptural authority. Both are committed to orthodox Anglican identity. Both understand that the ACNA's founding compromise on women's ordination cannot be indefinitely sustained. Both write and speak with the seriousness of men who understand what is at stake. The future of the ACNA, if it has one, must shortly be decided or its priests and parishes will define it for them. Many will walk out the door. ACNA stands at the crossroads: Will ACNA be built on the rock of Scripture or the sand of consensus? David W. Virtue is the president of Virtueonline, a global orthodox Anglican online news service. He has been writing about Anglican issues for over 35 years and he is still trying to figure it out. You can read more here: www.virtueonline.org More than 21,000 stories can be found in his archives for readers to consider. END

“I should not have offered a prediction about the outcome of a matter that is properly before the Court for the Trial of a Bishop” By The Rt. Rev. Dr. J. Philip Ashey, I 8 May 2026 Dear brother Bishops in the ACNA, Grace and peace to you in Jesus’ name, Dean Julian Dobbs has brought to my attention the concerns some of you have raised to him regarding the lectures I gave May 1–2 through our Diocesan Anglican Center of Theology and Formation, our Spring Lectures on “Ecclesiastical Justice.” Specifically, some of the things I said regarding the pending trial of His Grace Archbishop Steve Wood. I have reviewed the lectures and write you to set the record straight and clarify any things I could have said differently or perhaps not at all. The purpose of these lectures is educational. They were offered at a level that would be understood by lay and clergy leaders alike. I believe with all my heart that transparency builds trust, and it is in that spirit that I offered my comments in response to questions posed in person and to an online audience. Nevertheless, I have relistened to the relevant portions of the lectures. In several places I spoke imprecisely, and in two places I said things that, on reflection and on the record, I should not have said. What follows is not an attempt to recharacterize what I said but to withdraw and correct it where correction is owed. The sequence of the Presentment against Archbishop Wood: On relistening, I did say that after the Washington Post publication, the bishops decided they had to “catch up with the Washington Post” and sign the accusation. I, myself, was contacted by a bishop and asked to sign a Presentment. I declined because I was already preparing to volunteer as a canonical advisor to Archbishop Wood. Nevertheless, my statement regarding this College in the plural was not only imprecise but incorrect. For the record, no bishops have signed this presentment, and I should not have spoken in a way that suggested otherwise. I withdraw the statement and apologize to every bishop whose integrity I impugned by that remark, and I ask their forgiveness. My use of the word “exonerated” with regards to the outcome of the trial of Archbishop Wood: I said in the lecture that I personally believed there was a “good chance” Archbishop Wood would be exonerated. Despite the qualifications I attached to that comment, I should not have offered a prediction about the outcome of a matter that is properly before the Court for the Trial of a Bishop. I withdraw the speculation and apologize for it. The nature of my role with Archbishop Wood: I have said to the College, to individual Bishops who have asked me directly, and to others that I am a volunteer “Canonical Advisor” to the Archbishop. Period. I was not appointed nor was I approved by the College to serve in this way. I serve entirely at the pleasure of Archbishop Wood as a friend and colleague. With regards to my comment in passing about a “ruckus” with the College, my comment was solely in regards to those Bishops who called me directly and expressed their concerns that my service as a canonical advisor to the Archbishop created a “conflict of interest,” and that my very presence in the College would introduce a point of view that would taint the “objective neutrality” of the College pending the outcome of the Board of Inquiry and the Trial and sentencing of Archbishop Wood. For the record, I responded at once with an offer to recuse myself from all further meetings of the College of Bishops—in response to those concerns that my presence would “taint” the College. At that time, Dean Julian declined my offer. In light of the distress my comments in the lectures have caused, I renew my offer to Dean Julian and to this College to recuse myself from all further meetings of the College until after all procedures with regards to Archbishop Wood are concluded. The Inhibition of Archbishop Wood and the five senior Bishops who signed that Inhibition: One question that came to me online was “why was Archbishop Wood inhibited when he had already voluntarily taken a leave of absence?” In reviewing what I said in the lecture, please note that I said it was due to the seriousness of the charges and the desire of the bishops that the College not appear to give “special treatment” to one of its own members, and especially an Archbishop. I did not mean to leave an impression that the five senior bishops who signed the inhibition did so under pressure from social media, or that they in any way acted in bad faith and not on the merits. I ask their forgiveness for leaving such an impression. Who is responsible for making sure Archbishop Wood complies with the Inhibition: My comments about my counsel to Archbishop Steve were not intended to say that I am an authority on whether he has in fact complied. My advice is simply advice. Any determination about His Grace’s compliance with the inhibition will be made by the Dean and the College. Not by me. The status of the Complainants: On relistening, I did refer to certain complainants as having been “terminated as employees.” That was inaccurate, and I should not have characterized their separation in those terms. I withdraw the statement and apologize to the individuals concerned and to the College for my imprecision. Motive of the College in approving new Title IV: On relistening, there was a point where I framed the discussion of Title IV in terms of bishops’ fears and nervousness about being subject to presentment. I should not have ascribed that motive to fellow bishops. The College’s deliberation on Title IV deserves to be described on its merits, not through the lens of fear. I acknowledge publicly and personally that our deliberations as a College are driven by the merits of the inquisitorial paradigm to which we are now turning in new Title IV. So, I am deeply grieved that I have left any other impression than that, and I withdraw those comments and ask forgiveness for impugning the motives of this College. A Note on the Letter: I write this letter to the College, but I recognize that questions about the lectures have travelled beyond the College, and that some of you have been asked about them by clergy, lay leaders and others in your dioceses. You have my permission to share this letter where you judge it pastorally appropriate, in whole and not in excerpt, so that the corrections and apologies offered here are received in the same context in which I offer them. Finally, I am grateful to Dean Julian for bringing your concerns about these imprecisions and misstatements to my attention, and for the opportunity to correct them with apologies and requests for forgiveness. The corrections are owed and I make them gladly. I offer this College my apologies. In the future, I will focus my teaching on canon law with more precision and attention to the facts. I continue to stand on the promise of unity, fellowship and cleansing promised in I John 1:7–9. I apologize to any person, named or unnamed, complainant, bishop, or member of the faithful, who has been grieved or wounded by what I said or how I said it. The Rt. Rev. Phil Ashey is Bishop Ordinary of the Diocese of Western Anglicans

On Bishop Phil Ashey’s May 4 Video Concerning Archbishop Stephen Wood’s Trial By A Concerned Anglican www.virtueonline.org May 9, 2026 On the eve of Archbishop Stephen Wood’s ecclesiastical trial, the Right Reverend Phil Ashey, styled by The Living Church as one of the original architects of the Anglican Church in North America’s canons, has released a video predicting that Archbishop Wood will be exonerated. Summarized in VirtueOnline on May 4, 2026, the video presents itself as the measured reflection of a canonical lawyer concerned with due process. Read against the documentary record now established in the Wood matter, and against the ACNA’s recent history of episcopal discipline, it reads as something else: an institutional defense in the dignified register of canonical jurisprudence, offered by the man who helped build the very canons whose selective enforcement is the substance of the present scandal. That this would happen is, regrettably, not surprising. It is the pattern. What Bishop Ashey Said — and What He Did Not Bishop Ashey addressed only the sexual misconduct charges, setting aside the additional allegations of misuse of church funds, plagiarism of sermons, and bullying of clergy and staff that the Board of Inquiry found probable cause to send to trial. He raised the question of how anyone could fairly respond to allegations from an unnamed accuser, recounted that the complainants “went to the Washington Post” after bishops declined to sponsor the presentment, and questioned why Archbishop Wood was formally inhibited after voluntarily stepping aside. He predicted that, in light of press coverage, there is “a good chance” Archbishop Wood will be exonerated, and described himself as a canonical volunteer who may be at the Archbishop’s side during the proceedings. What he did not say is at least as significant. He did not address the sworn affidavit of the Reverend Andrew Gross, the ACNA’s former director of communications, alleging that Archbishop Wood and the then‑Dean of the Province had previously discussed appointing a “bishop‑friendly” Board of Inquiry should charges ever come, or Mr. Gross’s further allegation that the Archbishop offered to “secretly contribute” ten thousand dollars to send a priest on sabbatical out of fear that priest would file. He did not address the Provincial Office’s two‑week refusal to accept the original presentment on a procedural pretext found nowhere in the canons, the complainants’ documented yearlong effort to secure episcopal sponsors, or the invention of a “new provincial policy” referring complaints to a Director of Safeguarding whose office has no canonical standing, canons Bishop Ashey himself helped draft. Bishop Chip Edgar of South Carolina has publicly called for the College of Bishops to apologize for “disparaging statements” about the complainants. None of this appears in the canonical analysis offered on the eve of trial. Its omission is not neutrality. It is curation. The Architect Defends the Architecture Bishop Ashey drafted Title I, Canon 11, the Special Jurisdiction provision under which the ACNA insisted that the Jurisdiction of the Armed Forces and Chaplaincy could not lawfully disassociate from the province, and under which the Archbishop continued to claim jurisdiction over Bishop Derek Jones after that disassociation. The canon Bishop Ashey drafted is the canon the institution turned, in 2025, against the bishop who criticized its leadership. The man who built the discipline machinery is now offering, in advance of trial, the institutional argument for why its application to the Archbishop will be unfair, even as the same machinery, applied to a critic, was unfair in ways the institution has not acknowledged. The architecture is being defended by the architect at precisely the moment it is failing in the direction the architect would prefer it not be observed to fail. Title IV as Directional Weapon The pattern is visible in three cases. In the Diocese of the Upper Midwest, Bishop Stewart Ruch’s presentment arose from his diocese’s mishandling of clergy abuse disclosures. Survivors and advocates waited years for canonical engagement; when the trial came, its defensive institutional posture was widely received, even within the ACNA, as functioning to insulate the institution rather than deliver accountability. Bishop Derek Jones, having publicly criticized the Archbishop’s office and having declined, on the canonical advice of the JAFC chancellor to submit to an investigation that violated Title IV’s own requirements, was met with what JAFC has called an unlawful and extracanonical process. Bishop Jones resigned from the College of Bishops. JAFC, a corporate entity older than the ACNA itself, with its own federal nonprofit status and endorsing authority, voted to disassociate from the province. It was after that disassociation that the Archbishop purported to inhibit Bishop Jones. There is no canonical theory under which a province’s Archbishop retains jurisdiction over a bishop whose endorsing body has departed; the inhibition was, on its face, institutional retaliation rather than ecclesiastical discipline. JAFC has filed federal litigation. Bishop Ashey has not been heard publicly raising due‑process concerns on Bishop Jones’s behalf. In the Wood matter, the institutional response to sworn affidavits and a documented chronology of credible complaint was a yearlong refusal at the level of individual bishops to sponsor the canonical complaint, an invention of a “new provincial policy” referring it to an office with no canonical standing, and a procedural refusal at the level of the Provincial Office to accept the resubmitted complaint on a pretext. Only after sustained external pressure did the canonical process engage. Now, weeks before trial, the canonical architect of the province offers a public prediction of exoneration. Title IV moves slowly or not at all when allegations point upward toward the institutional center. It moves swiftly and aggressively when allegations, or critiques, or the mere fact of departure, point outward toward the periphery. The canons function not as an even instrument of discipline but as a directional weapon. That is the meaning of wagons in a circle. Whose Suffering Counts? Across these proceedings, from the survivors in the Diocese of the Upper Midwest, to Claire Buxton and the second complainant in the Wood matter, to the chaplains and their families harmed by the inhibition of their endorser, a consistent feature of the institutional response has been the centering of bishops’ reputations and the marginalization of those whom bishops have wronged. Bishop Ashey’s framing—the trial as primarily a question of damage already done to the Archbishop’s reputation by press coverage—is itself an artifact of that pastoral inversion. The complainants appear in his analysis only as procedural irritants whose decision to involve a journalist has now created a fairness problem for the accused. This is not how a church grounded in patristic consensus understands the moral weight of accusation. It is, however, how an institution under reputational threat speaks when its central concern is institutional survival. The Predictable Defense The ACNA was formed, in part, on the conviction that the Episcopal Church’s discipline mechanisms had become instruments of partisan and institutional control rather than instruments of moral accountability. That critique was not wrong. The tragedy is that the province built to remedy it has, in its first generation, replicated precisely the pattern it was constituted to repudiate, differing only in the direction of the bias. The canons can be read either way; the institutional culture determines how they are enforced. And that culture, as the Wood matter illustrates, is one in which the architects of the system rise to defend the system’s most senior figures at the moment of greatest exposure, while the same architects were silent when the system was deployed punitively against bishops who criticized those figures. The trial begins July 20, 2026. Faithful Anglicans should refuse the framing Bishop Ashey’s video has begun to establish. The central question is not whether press coverage has compromised due process. It is whether the conduct alleged occurred, and if it did, what the canonical and pastoral consequences must be. The Anglican tradition rests on on what the church has always confessed, everywhere, by all. The pattern of the ancient and undivided church is one in which discipline runs in every direction, including upward, and in which the protection of the vulnerable is not subordinated to the reputation of the great. The ACNA’s present moment falls measurably short of that standard. Wagons in a circle protect what is inside them. They also enclose. The question for the wider Anglican world, watching this trial approach, is whether to remain inside the circle, or to recognize that the circle was drawn to keep some things out and some persons in, and to look elsewhere, at last, for a more honest expression of Anglican faith and discipline. Submitted under pseudonym to protect the author and those they serve.

By Elizabeth Woning, Op-ed contributor THE CHRISTIAN POST May 09, 2026 This week’s news of Sam Allberry’s fall sparked a question among our team at CHANGED: How might things be different today had the Stonewall activist movement of the 70s failed to pressure the American Psychiatric Association (APA) to reform its position on same-sex sexuality? That might seem like an odd tangent when discussing the moral failures of a favored Christian leader, but it is an important one for our current cultural moment because the rhetoric and dogma of the 1970 and 80s LGBT activist movement continue to dictate what we believe today and how people respond to those of us with these feelings. Activists have given us our understanding of a “unique people group” that only finds satisfaction and peace in same-sex sexuality and the subculture around it. It wasn’t primarily scientific research that changed medical perspectives around same-sex sexuality; it was activist pressure. Charles W. Socarides, M.D., a psychiatrist during the 1970s, said: “Those of us who did not go along with the political redefinition were soon silenced at our own professional meetings. Our lectures were canceled and our research papers turned down in the learned journals … mainstream publishers turned down books that objected to the gay revolution.” The ultimate determination that homosexuality could offer satisfaction and healthy functioning was a conflict-ridden conclusion. Today, the medical establishment continues to embrace the ideals of the LGBT subculture while also steadfastly refusing to accept scientific evidence out of step with its dogma, e.g., the harms of surgical interventions to treat adolescent transgenderism. But it’s the LGBT “community” that is paying the price for their freedom from the APAs. In the decades following Stonewall (1969), and despite significant advances in legal and social recognition over the last 50 years, LGBT-identifying populations continue to experience disproportionately high rates of depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and suicidality relative to national population averages. We are told that bigotry and discrimination are the cause; however, similar disparities exist in European nations that provide even greater acceptance than the U.S. in civil protections for LGBT-identifying individuals, including the Netherlands (which legalized gay marriage in 2001). Current public health data consistently indicate that LGBT-identifying youth remain at significantly elevated risk for suicidal ideation and self-harm compared to their heterosexual peers. The APA is failing this population despite its wholehearted embrace of LGBT. In 2019, Science Magazine published the largest genome-wide association study (GWAS) on same-sex sexual behavior, which analyzed data from nearly 500,000 individuals. Researchers found no evidence for a “gay gene.” Instead, the researchers found genetic correlations between same-sex sexual behavior and several psychiatric or mental-health-related traits, including major depressive disorder, schizophrenia, anxiety, bipolar disorder, ADHD, autism, and addiction. Genes do not dictate behavior, and the science of epigenetics is still exploratory, yet the study shows that social stress alone is not causing suicidality. And for me, the study reshapes my perspective on same-sex sexual attraction (SSA). Returning to our opening question, “What if activism had not reframed the experience of SSA for medical professionals?” The LGBT population is at risk for mental illness, and the medical establishment currently fails to link SSA to emotional distress, something many of us at CHANGED experience. Consider this thought experiment comparing SSA to clinical depression. When a person seeks a psychologist for severe depression, the psychologist is not going to promise a joy-filled life free of depression. No, she will likely suggest that biological factors and temperament may be involved. The professional will explore life pressures and may revisit family systems and attachment issues before turning to a modality of talk therapy for relief, such as cognitive behavioral therapy. This gives the individual comfort and life strategies, as well as a deeper self-understanding of the formative and developmental factors involved. Perhaps there is overall emotional relief, even a diminishment of the life-dominating attraction. The individual may move on and live several years without issue, using life strategies and growing healthy. CHANGED co-founder Ken Williams is an example of a man who worked through issues in his life with Jesus and a counselor, ultimately marrying his wife, Tiffany, and forming a family. They are very healthy and happy together. Neeza Powers became an Instagram sensation when he published his day-by-day journey reading the Bible to discover Christ, documenting his path of detransition. But recently, Powers made an abrupt retreat into his alt-identity as a trans woman. Some are saying his priest had denied him the opportunity to be baptized. Perhaps Allberry experienced some similar kind of life pressure, leading him into an illicit relationship. I’ve seen this reaction time and again. Does this mean once gay, always gay? Well, perhaps only in the same way as once depressed, always depressed. We easily silo ourselves into groups that share our life-dominating issues for comfort. It happens among those suffering from autism, ADHD, depression, alcoholism, and same-sex attraction. People live meaningful lives married to their same-sex spouses, raising families, etc. However, they have also given themselves over to their primary mode of comfort and coping rather than pressing against the underlying issues. That is a personal choice all of us at CHANGED have had to grapple with. But we have chosen to move on from LGBT to embrace the biblical anthropology. It is far easier to give in. Our shared societal failure to think more deeply and creatively about the lived experiences of those who identify as LGBT pushes people unnecessarily into these identity categories based on progressive, activist premises. Today, we need new answers, new approaches, a better understanding, and a different narrative for all of us with this condition. Please, as you pray for Sam Allberry and others like him, remember that God’s Kingdom will bring full restoration to men and women of body, soul, and spirit. Maranatha. Elizabeth Woning is co-founder of the CHANGED Movement, an international network of men and women who have left the LGBT subculture and identity to follow Jesus. She earned her master’s degree from a PCUSA seminary while openly lesbian and ministered within the LGBT-affirming church movement. A radical revelation of Jesus led her to a different path. Today, she is a licensed pastor at Bethel Church in Redding, California, where she lives with her husband, Doug.

Sam Allberry, a British born pastor, apologist and author who admitted to an inappropriate relationship with another man, is not the only narrative on same-sex attraction. Thousands of men and women have renounced the gay lifestyle, married, and now live with spouses and children. Here are some of their stories. COMMENTARY By David W. Virtue, DD www.virtueonline.org May 8, 2026 Elizabeth Woning "Today I am fulfilled, joyful, and feminine — all things I never was while living as a lesbian. I am no longer sexually attracted to women." Throughout most of her life, Elizabeth Woning never felt she belonged. She questioned both her sexuality and her gender identity, rejecting femininity as foreign to her experience. Her first deep emotional bond was with another woman in her mid-teens — an intimacy so formative it set the standard for her relationships for years afterward. Though she occasionally dated men and was briefly married in her early twenties, those relationships never took hold. She came out as a lesbian after that marriage ended, believing lesbianism finally explained her life. She adopted masculine dress and mannerisms and found community in the gay neighborhoods of large cities. She went on to attend seminary as one of a handful of openly gay students, then worked with youth — but over time began questioning her faith. That season of doubt became a season of re-evaluation. She revisited her beliefs about God, Scripture, and herself, and concluded that some of her foundational assumptions might have been wrong. She resolved to follow her faith sacrificially, which required rethinking her understanding of Christian sexual ethics. She had long believed she was born gay; eventually, she no longer held that view. She pursued pastoral care and counseling that addressed childhood wounds and what she came to recognize as a deep rejection of her own womanhood. She did not set out to change her sexual attractions — but they changed nonetheless. She fell in love with a man, an experience she describes as among the most unexpected and disorienting of her life, given how fully she had identified as a lesbian. They married in 2005 and have maintained a strong marriage since. Woning is co-founder of the CHANGED Movement (changedmovement.com). Dawn McDonald Dawn McDonald served as rector of Holy Cross Japanese Canadian Anglican Church in the Diocese of New Westminster before publicly identifying as an ex-gay Christian. She now lives in Sanford, Florida, with her husband, where she teaches, counsels, and speaks on sexual wholeness, gender wounds, and pastoral care for same-sex-attracted individuals. She holds advanced theological degrees, is a Certified Pastoral Sexual Addiction Specialist, and is a founding member of The Zacchaeus Fellowship, which supports those holding to the church's historic sexual ethic (oslregion8.org). McDonald experienced her first same-sex attraction at thirteen. She entered a lesbian lifestyle at twenty and lived within it for more than thirteen years. She describes what she calls a profound spiritual healing through faith, after which she says she was freed of same-sex attractions. At the time of her public testimony, she had been married to a man for nearly eight years and expressed no doubt that her sexual orientation had genuinely changed. She is candid about the cost of her position. "Being an ex-gay is even more difficult than being gay," she has said. "To many in the Anglican Church, my story is 'politically incorrect,' and there is opposition from every corner." Darryl Darryl, now in his forties, first experienced same-sex attractions at fourteen. Raised as a lifelong Anglican in Winnipeg, Manitoba, he valued the church's sacramental and apostolic traditions — and felt profound shame that his desires seemed to place him outside them. For years he cycled through fantasy, pornography, guilt, and desperate prayer. "Only God knows how often I prayed and begged Him to change my unwanted orientation," he recalls. At twenty-two he moved cities to study psychiatric nursing, using pornography as a pressure valve and eventually making contact with other men who shared his attractions — though fear kept him from acting on them. He approached his parish priest, found him empathetic but uncertain how to help, and did not return. Back in Winnipeg at twenty-six, he began cruising gay areas and eventually acted out with another man. "It was a very dark day for me," he says. What followed was a rapid descent into compulsive anonymous sexual encounters, a secret life that deepened his anguish. The turning point came when the public health department contacted him as a possible exposure to chlamydia. All tests were negative. "I made a promise to myself: if I'm clean, then I'm going to get help." He went to his priest, entered an extended period of counseling, and was referred to New Direction for Life Ministries, an Exodus North America affiliate. The hardest day of that journey, he says, was telling his girlfriend about his struggles — and giving her the choice to stay or leave. She stayed. They have now been married for ten years and have two daughters. "Never have I felt so whole or complete," he says. He believes change is possible and says he has personally witnessed hundreds of people find release from same-sex attraction. Don Don, now a priest in his fifties, grew up largely without his father's presence and came to equate homosexual desire with the longing for male affirmation. He pursued that longing into university, graduating in Los Angeles during the emergence of the AIDS crisis. "A few moments of sexual pleasure did not touch my deepest needs," he reflects. He drifted from the Anglican faith. In 1989 he had what he describes as a born-again experience. He came to see that he had spent years assigning blame — to God, to his father, to circumstance — rather than taking ownership of his own choices and healing. He found the liberating power of that realization transformative and believes that ideologically driven theology, which removes the possibility of change, denies people access to that same liberation. These are not stories of sudden, blinding conversions. They are accounts of gradual, often painful reckoning — the slow recognition that something was wounded within, and the long road toward healing with God's help. They are stories of love, forgiveness, wholeness, and grace. They are not Sam Allberry's story or Gene Robinson. But they are real, and they deserve to be heard. END