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By Rev. Dr. Christopher Landau Premier Christian News 4 April 2025   Newcastle Cathedral has cancelled a planned speaking appearance by the Archbishop of York Stephen Cottrell, citing concerns over his handling of safeguarding. Rev Dr Christopher Landau argues that instead of resorting to worldly tactics of de-platforming, the Cathedral should heed the New Testament’s radical call for love and unity   These are not normal times for the Church of England.   The resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury last November was unprecedented. Disproportionately ageing congregations, ongoing divisions over sexuality, and the shame and chaos of its handling of safeguarding, all point to an institution facing profound, even existential challenges.   And now, there is a rash of examples of various kinds of disinvitation or de-platforming which, I fear, only risk deepening the wounds which already exist.   The latest example involves the decision of the Dean and Chapter of Newcastle Cathedral to revoke an invitation to the Archbishop of York.   The Archbishop in question - the Most Rev Stephen Cottrell - is an evangelist at heart, and over the coming months is touring the cathedrals of the north of England to share insights about the Lord’s Prayer. It is hardly a contentious initiative. And yet Newcastle Cathedral has decided to de-platform the Archbishop, cancelling his planned appearance in September over his handling of safeguarding.   In a statement to the Church Times, the Dean of Newcastle, the Very Revd Lee Batson, is quoted saying that he was “deeply proud of the Cathedral’s ongoing ministry to those who have suffered abuse in their lives. It was this that informed the unanimous decision made solely by the Dean and Chapter to inform the Archbishop that we will not be hosting him as part of his Lord’s Prayer tour. This decision was made independently by the Cathedral’s governing body and applies specifically to this event”.   END

Florida Diocese Tries 3rd time to elect Bishop // Nigeria Worst Christian Killing Field // 1 in 12 Christians Face Deportation “No man preaches his sermon well to others if he does not first preach it to his own heart.” – John Stott But this is not the purpose of the church. It is not meant to be the whole of life or to meet all our needs in life. The church is not a sugar daddy whose purpose is to meet all our personal, social and vocational needs. – Karen Swallow Prior “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, ‘Mine!’”  -- Abraham Kuyper We are now reaping the fruit of a Charismatic movement that has been so focused on subjective experience and encounter that it is void of some foundational and nonnegotiable doctrines of the faith. Have we idolized freedom from religion to the point of having no viable theological roots? --- Wanda Alger  “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” This is not the battle cry of a movement obsessed with winning. It is the confession of a faith willing to lose everything for the sake of Christ. --- Dietrich Bonhoeffer   The gospel does not promise power, prestige, or dominance—it promises a cross. And that is precisely what makes it so scandalous — teer hardy     Therefore, every shepherd, insofar as he is a shepherd among the sheep of Christ, should stand forth against all those who persecute him for the sake of God and his true word and also for the loyalty he has to his sheep, unmindful as to whether he must speak against the great Alexander, Julius, pope, king, princes or authority. This he should also do, not only when they contradict the word of God, but even if they overload their good folk too much and unreasonably with temporal burdens. – Ulrich Zwingli The family serves as a divinely commissioned institution for the transmission of faith. Families are not social constructs. They are essential vessels for passing down religious beliefs and practices. When family life weakens—due to declining birth rates, increased divorce rates, and cultural shifts away from ­honoring traditional family values—­religious belief also suffers. – Mary Eberstadt With long life I will satisfy him and show him my salvation. -- Psalm 91:16 Dear Brothers and Sisters,                                                 www.virtueonline.org                                                                                         April 4, 2025   We’re living amid the largest and fastest shift in U.S. history, according to demographers.   Forty million Americans have left the church in the last 25 years. Many other Western countries have already seen similar declines, notably the UK, Canada and Western Europe. Furthermore, Islam is on the rise, and if things get out of control in the Middle East with Iran and Israel, we could see World War III. But that’s not the only challenge, according to some. After the fall of Christendom, believers in Western countries now face a strange mixture of apathy and antagonism toward the gospel. Many of our neighbors’ view Christianity as yesterday’s news but also as the source of today’s problems.   There is much truth to this. Hypocrisy now figures large in peoples’ minds when they think of the church. The sexual abuse by Roman Catholic clergy of all ranks with young men, some of them ordinands, and talk of the Lavendar mafia in the Vatican only increases cynicism. Is it any wonder that the RCC is experiencing declining membership in historically Catholic strongholds like Europe and North America and robust growth in specific parts of the world, particularly Africa and parts of Asia.   The same could be said of the Anglican Communion. Western Anglicanism is rapidly declining, while the Global South is exploding with evangelistic zeal and church growth.   The conservative Southern Baptist Convention, America’s largest protestant denomination, reported some 700 pastors caught up in sexual infidelity, mostly with women. A dozen or more mega church pastors have lost jobs, some are going to jail for sexual misbehavior with underage girls. The Episcopal Church has seen a rapid rise in unreported sexual abuse cases. You can read a very comprehensive piece by Anglican Watch on bishop failure here: https://www.anglicanwatch.com/episcopal-priest-richard-losch-goes-to-criminal-trial-on-april-8-while-national-church-continues-its-refusal-to-hold-bishops-accountable/   The list goes on.   Here in the West the church has tied itself to politics, left and right, so why bother with church if you can get it all from The New York Times or social media. Just lie in bed pick up your iPad and listen to some influencer while sipping coffee.   I am involved in a new church plant and it is hard work. People come and go and we never see them again. We write letters, visit, make phone calls, send emails and texts…nothing. I talk to our young Hispanic pastor and while he acknowledges the problem, he refuses to let it get him down. He is full of enthusiasm to make it work. He preaches up a storm each Sunday as though it was his last sermon. He will not be deterred. God bless him.   It is this writer’s belief that the real reason Christianity is dying in America and the West is because of the message. You can blame it on modernity, secularization, wokedom and more, but underneath it all is liberal Christianity and a neutered gospel that has totally failed. Watering down the gospel to fit the culture has not worked. Over time people walk away. One of the biggest mistakes was believing that if the church was gay friendly and theologically accommodating, homosexuals and lesbians would pour into the churches. It never happened. They never came. Churches just emptied faster. Waving flags, using inclusive language achieved nothing. It has shown to be the biggest con job played on the church this century. All the efforts to twist Scripture to make it appealing to a small group of pansexualists has not worked.   Of course, starting a church in upstate New York is not downtown Dallas. The north is not the south. Many do not understand that. The spiritual Mason-Dixon line which separates four U.S. states: Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware and West Virginia, stretches spiritually nationwide. There are dozens of evangelical churches in Dallas. Texas alone has 200 megachurches, there are less than a dozen in Philadelphia and some of those claims are dubious at best.   Efforts to start an ACNA parish to date have not been successful. An evangelical witness in Philadelphia, the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the second-largest city on the East Coast of the United States after New York City, is difficult to find.   Try starting a church in that environment and see how difficult it is. You need the patience of Job, the wisdom of Solomon and the tenacity and stickability of an Abraham. This is a new challenge. A big challenge. And we don’t yet know what to do. It is profoundly ironic that we are living in the best of times with advances in medicine to keep us all living longer, but church wise we are dying on the vine.   One statistic that does come through is that evangelical churches that adhere to sound teaching and demand something of their attendees are stable and growing. That is good news. It is not uniform, but it says something about what a church can do in an age of skepticism if it sticks to the gospel.   *****   Brand new Barna data from their State of the Church initiative suggests that church attendance might be on the rise again in America. Church attendance is rebounding, but don’t uncork the champagne yet. Small improvements amplify over time. But are we out of the woods, probably not. Church attendance in the U.S. has increased to an estimated 32% in early 2025, marking an uptick after declining from 48% in 2009 to 28% in 2024. The average in-person attendance of churches that participated was 938 people. However, there are still challenges and declines in attendance. We should let the data inform us, but don’t let it drive us. You want to look at the numbers and realize God is moving and that there is still ministry to do. Revival is possible, but it’s not inevitable. Wise leaders learn how to manage the tension between naming reality and always holding hope.   *****   The big news coming from across the pond is the selection and election of the next Archbishop of Canterbury. For the moment it all seems pretty chaotic based on numerous reports.   The Church of England is one step closer to appointing its first female Archbishop of Canterbury now that the Bishop of Norwich, Graham Usher, has ruled himself out, said one report.    “Despite speculation in recent months, I have felt no sense of inner calling to be Archbishop of Canterbury. What has remained constant is God’s continued faithful call to serve the people and parishes of the wonderful diocese of Norwich, as well as the national and international environmental roles I have, all of which bring me much joy,” said Usher.   The road to Canterbury is therefore now open for the female front-runner, the Iranian-born Bishop of Chelmsford, Dr Guli Francis-Dehqani. Her chances of being appointed to Canterbury this autumn got a significant boost in January when the Bishop of Dover, Rose Hudson-Wilkin, ruled herself out in a television interview.   Bishop Francis-Dehqani became a diocesan bishop in 2021, seven years after the then new Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, had managed to persuade General Synod to agree to women bishops.   But is she orthodox in faith and morals? In successive votes at General Synod since February 2023, she has consistently backed the introduction of services of same-sex blessings in parish churches.   Are the deep thinkers in the Church of England thinking what the impact this would have on the Global South if they elected a liberal woman archbishop? Probably not, and now you know why GAFCON and GSFA primates are distancing themselves from the Mother Church. This would be the final insult in their efforts to keep the door open to reconciliation.   *****   Welby wobbles again. He is gone but apparently not forgotten, though it is probably best if he had. The former Archbishop of Canterbury gave an interview and dug himself a hole that only confirmed to most of us that his resignation was a good and necessary thing.   In a BBC interview on 30 March, Welby apologised: “I am so sorry for what I failed to do [and] for what the Church did do with John Smyth… I am so sorry that I did not serve the victims and survivors… as I should have done, and that’s why I resigned.”   If the former prelate hoped his self-abnegation might salvage what was left of his reputation, he was wrong. The response to the interview has mostly been anger at what many victims see as an attempt to shift the blame. Some continue to believe Welby is obscuring the extent to which he knew about Smyth’s abuse before 2013, given he had attended camps with Smyth in the 1970s.   All in all, Welby’s reign was a disaster; from pushing women bishops onto the church, to the LLF report ratifying same-sex unions; groveling before ancient shrines and sins; pushing reparations while his own churches couldn’t pay a living wage to its own vicars and so much more, while hammering Global South Primates for their refusal to get on board with sodomy, only weakened both himself and the office he held. It is unlikely to recover. You can read more here:   *****   The Rev. Phil Ashey of the American Anglican Council was consecrated Bishop of the Diocese of Western Anglicans on March 29, 2025. The service took place at the Presbyterian Church of the Master. He was consecrated by three ACNA bishops: the Most Rev. Robert Duncan, Archbishop Emeritus of the ACNA; the Rt. Rev. Dr. Keith Andrews, now Bishop Emeritus of the Diocese of Western Anglicans; and the Rt. Rev. Eric Menees, Bishop of the Anglican Diocese of San Joaquin. Bishops from East Africa joined with ACNA bishops to celebrate the consecration and show the support that Bishop Phil has garnered from ministry partners across the globe. Bishop Onesmus Asiimwe, Bishop of the Diocese of North Kigezi, Uganda, brought greetings from the Church of Uganda. “We are here not just to support Bishop Phil but to strengthen our partnership for the sake of the Gospel,” he said.   *****   The new Archbishop of the ACNA, Steve Wood , told clergy and laity at a mission’s conference that his top priority is an “ongoing, intentional, personal Gospel fidelity” in the clergy and laity of our province. Also critical to the long-term growth and health of the ACNA: personal evangelism and leadership development. The archbishop is passionate to build healthy organizational structures, said one report.   When asked about the growth of his own parish, St. Andrew’s in Mount Pleasant, SC, the Archbishop emphasized sticking to the basics: “We preach Scripture, irrespective of our experience.”   On cooperative ministry relationships with those who’ve rejected historic Christian teaching: “Cooperative relationship is impossible without shared commitment to the Biblical, historical witness of the Christian faith. And   agreement on Biblical anthropology is absolutely necessary, said the archbishop.   Wood reminded his hearers that societal pressures to compromise the Gospel are nothing new. “It is precisely in those moments where we feel the tension that we are especially called to be faithful.”   *****   For those following the news on who is cancelling whom, it will come as no surprise that England is further down the turnpike in political correctness to cancelling and arresting people for views not sympathetic to the government, DEI and free speech.   Two cases in point. Six police offices in the county of Hertfordshire, England, approaching the front door of a house to arrest two parents . And what was their alleged crime?   Did they assault somebody? Did they steal something? Were they shoplifting? Did they ram their car into a crowded market? No. They complained about their local school in a parents’ WhatsApp group. Prior to being arrested by no less than six police officers from Hertfordshire Constabulary —which, like other police authorities across England, is struggling to solve burglaries, stop shoplifting and end a surge of violent crime—the parents had dared to question the process through which their local school was recruiting a headteacher and appeared critical of school governors in a WhatsApp group.   All this, apparently, “upset” a few teachers, governors and parents —all of whom, reflecting a much broader sickness that is now afflicting Western societies, chose to prioritize their ‘emotional safety’ and a few hurty words above the free speech and free expression that are the lifeblood of our supposed liberal democracy.   Allen and Rosalind Levine were then held by police officers in front of their scared and anxious young daughter before they were fingerprinted, searched and dumped in a police cell for eight hours.   They were then interrogated on suspicion of harassment, malicious communications and causing a nuisance on school property —although the police would later conclude no further action should be taken.   Britain, once the home of individual liberty and free speech, or is it some kind of authoritarian regime like North Korea? Because recently it’s become hard to tell the difference between the two.   Britain is losing its way. We can all see it. We can all feel it. And we can no longer tell others we are living in a truly free society.   Then there is the case of a dear friend of mine who was kicked out of his church after 36 years because he preached a sermon on the wedding at Cana in Galilee. He had been a regular member of the preaching team since 1989. In his sermon he affirmed what God created at the beginning - the union of Adam and Eve in the Garden as man and wife.   “At that point, before the sermon ended, three people got up and walked out. At the end of the sermon, the woman leading the service, a lay woman who was the vicar’s right hand lady, said that she wanted to make clear that everyone was welcome at the church - implying gay or straight.  Well, nothing I had said contradicted that - I was just setting out the biblical and Anglican position- that’s all I had said.   “After three days I received an email saying that in view of my sermon I would be paused from the preaching team.   “Well, I took the view that I was called to be a preacher and teacher of God’s word and ordained as such. Though we had been members of that church for over 30 years and both our daughters had been married there, we decided to leave. I transferred my Permission to Officiate as a retired minister to another parish where I have since then preached once a month.”   *****   Just to totally confuse the faithful, the Bishop of Leicester Martyn Snow calls for an intercultural approach to LLF divisions in his new book, 'Can we imagine a future together'? Intercultural lessons for Living in Love and Faith’.   Bishop Snow is the lead bishop for the Living in Love and Faith (LLF) process. Snow said: “Despite the great depths in our disagreements over Living in Love and Faith, I believe there is still a longing for unity among most of us in the Church of England.”   It should be noted that Martyn is an advocate for the LLF report being accepted in the church, even as the CEEC and other groups roundly repudiate any idea that the doctrine of marriage can be changed. This is a non-starter. T he opening analysis is that the booklet ‘offers little hope’ for faithful Anglicans.   An analysis of this book and his report can be found at Anglican Futures here: https://acl.asn.au/bishop-martyn-snow-responds-to-what-kind-of-future-awaits-the-faithful/   *****   The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada has a resource to guide Christian voters on prayer, political engagement, and the legal responsibilities of churches during the campaign period. The general election will be held on Monday, April 28, 2025,read the announcement in the parliamentary speaker’s press release.   Prime Minister Mark Carney assumed leadership following the resignation of former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Jan. 6. Reports indicate the snap election was called to rally public support in response to trade tariffs imposed by U.S. President Donald Trump.   In response, the EFC has published a brochure titled Faith, Voting and Political Engagement, which provides guidance to Canadian Christians in the lead-up to the election and emphasizes the importance of prayer.   “When Christians vote, we actively seek the good of those around us and our country (Jer. 29:5-6),” reminds the EFC brochure. “Voting is one way Christians can contribute to society and the public good. Our participation in discussions about public policy and politics, like our engagement in all of life and community, is part of our witness.”   The EFC encourages prayer for candidates, voters, elected officials, and the nation as a whole, referencing Romans 15:13: “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.”   *****   Almost 3 in 10 Americans identify as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular.” That in itself isn’t news; the proportion has ticked up for decades, though it has leveled off in the past few years. But what has this shift meant for the country – especially its politics?   People often assume that fewer religious voters means more votes for liberal candidates. But that’s not necessarily the case: Nonreligious Americans are diverse, and so are their attitudes toward religion and politics.   David Campbell and Geoffrey Layman, political scientists at the University of Notre Dame, wanted to understand who these Americans really are. Their research found differences between three distinct groups that carry over to activities like volunteering, political giving and voting.   The group they call “Secularists,” for example, are disproportionately young, white and liberal. “Nonreligionists,” too, are often young and white – but more “up for grabs” at the ballot box.   *****   Third time lucky? Maybe . The Diocese of Florida Standing Committee is calling for the election of a diocesan bishop. It is nearly two years after the last election was negated amid divisions within the diocese under the former bishop and church wide concerns about the election process and the bishop-elect. This will be the third effort to elect a new bishop to succeed Bishop Samuel Johnson (John) Howard, who retired in October 2023.   Florida’s standing committee announced March 31 that it has scheduled a special meeting of the Florida Diocesan Convention for June 14 to adopt a nominating process, rules and procedures for seeking and electing the diocese’s ninth bishop. The standing committee’s tentative timeline would allow for an election in late summer or early fall 2026 and the bishop-elect’s consecration in early 2027, reports TLC.   The Rev. Charlie Holt failed twice to get elected as its bishop in 2022, because he failed to pass the smell test over homosexual marriage. Holt, who is conservative on the issue, offered to allow outside bishops to perform the unbiblical same-sex acts. He was deep-sixed both times.   After Holt’s first election in May 2022, objectors made 38 allegations of irregularities in the election, including the absence of a quorum of two-thirds of all canonically resident clergy. A Court of Review  found merit  in some of the objections three months later, and Holt withdrew his acceptance of the nomination shortly afterward, TLC reported. Other objectors said there was evidence of “a pattern and practice of discrimination” against LGBT clergy and those who opposed Bishop Howard’s views in the granting of canonical residency. Florida’s Standing Committee  pushed back  hard against the decision, claiming that the Court of Review misunderstood the canons and did not carefully investigate the claims of alleged discrimination. All to no avail. Now they will try again. As I have said repeatedly nothing will stop the pansexual steamroller and if the laity truly object and don’t roll over, they will have to try again. Usually, the laity grow tried of the fight and cave. Better to have a pro-gay bishop than none at all. We shall see.   *****   PERSECUTION is a global problem.  Jeff King, president of International Christian Concern (ICC), who has spent more than two decades fighting for religious freedom, says the crisis is worsening.   “The main killing ground for Christians isn’t North Korea — it’s Nigeria. Radical Islamists have driven Christians out of the north, pushing them further into the middle belt, which is the agricultural heartland. Militants raid villages, killing and displacing entire communities. It’s a stealth jihad, a massive land grab.”   Despite international condemnation, the Nigerian government’s response has been, at best, lackluster, he said. “They claim they can’t find the attackers, but it’s a deep-state issue,” King explained. “The security apparatus is controlled by radical elements, and the military often turns a blind eye — or worse, intervenes against Christian self-defense efforts.”   Beyond Nigeria, King warned of a broader crisis sweeping across Africa’s Sahel region. Islamist militancy has taken root in the area, rendering entire swaths of territory ungovernable.   “It’s like ISIS has taken over a whole region,” King said. “And because these areas are so remote, there’s little that can be done to stop it.”   Beyond Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has also seen horrific violence against Christians, he said. Recently, the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), an Islamist extremist group linked to the Islamic State, beheaded 70 Christians after days of captivity and terror.   *****   Peirong Lin, a deputy secretary at the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA) , likes to joke that evangelical is the most polarizing word in the world.   “Yet that is exactly what we are trying to unite around,” she told Christianity Today, “the euangelion, the Good News, the gospel, and what it looks like in different countries and contexts.”   Now the global organization of national and regional alliances representing 600 million evangelicals is looking for one person to help bring everybody together. The international council that oversees the WEA is stressing the need for unity as the search for a new secretary general gets underway.   *****   Roughly 1 in 12 Christians in the US are at risk of deportation or live with someone who is, according to a new study by the Center for the Study at Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. More than 1 in 18 of the country’s evangelicals could be impacted by mass deportations.   Among the president’s many executive orders on the first day of his second term, he signed a border-security measure directing agencies to focus on “removing promptly all aliens who enter or remain in violation of Federal law.” The language echoed Trump’s earlier pledges to deport all undocumented immigrants.   Taken to its full extent, that would entail rounding up and shipping off an estimated 14 million people—a population the size of Pennsylvania. – H/T CT   *****   Harvard Divinity School announced it was pausing its Religion, Conflict and Peace Initiative, a program that focused on Israel-Palestine as a case study. On Wednesday (April 2), it cut the last remaining position in the initiative. Hilary Rantisi, the associate director of the program, said she was told her position will not be renewed. She is also the sole Palestinian American staff member at the divinity school. Her last day is at the end of June. She did not comment further.   ***** We end on a high note with a first-class story on the retiring Bishop of the Arctic, David Parsons . It is written by a long-time journalist and friend Julia Duin. She traces the personal and ministerial life of Parsons over several decades. It is a heartfelt tribute to a good and godly man who not only preached the gospel in a very difficult situation but constantly and consistently resisted the liberal and progressive siren call of the Anglican Church of Canada into his diocese. You can read it here: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/a-bishop-of-the-arctic-says-goodbye   *****   I have been given an opportunity to attend the consecration of the new Bishop of North Africa in Tunisia . There will be many archbishops, bishops and clergy attending. I could use some financial support to make this trip possible and to assist the new bishop.   Please consider a tax-deductible donation. A PayPal donation link can be found here: here: http://www.virtueonline.org/support.html   If you are more inclined with old fashioned checks, you can send your donation to:   VIRTUEONLINE                                                                          P.O. BOX 111                                  Shohola, PA 18458   Warmly in Christ, David   My Substack on the Middle East continues to grow. It is drawing a lot of attention across the globe. You can access my Substack here: https://davidvirtue2.substack.com/

(RNS) — Christian Smith’s research shows traditional religion isn’t just declining. It’s culturally obsolete.   “Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America” by Christian Smith.  Jana Riess April 3, 2025   (RNS) — Traditional religion may be destined for the walls of the Cracker Barrel, a space filled with nostalgic advertisements for products of yesteryear, like Victrolas, lace antimacassars or butter churns. All things, in other words, that have been rendered obsolete by modern life.   According to social scientist and author Christian Smith, a professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame, “obsolete” describes the situation facing traditional organized religion in the United States. The title of his new book even puts its cultural expiration in the past tense: “Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America.”   The book, based on research that includes more than 200 qualitative interviews, will be released by Oxford University Press on Tuesday (April 8).   “We almost always use the word ‘decline’ when we talk about if things aren’t going well for religion,” Smith said in a Zoom interview with RNS. “And decline is a good word. But what it’s descriptive of is organizational matters and individual religiousness. Organizations can have decline in membership or adherence, attendance, financial giving. That’s decline — it’s measurable.”   His book, however, chronicles something bigger and harder to pin down. It’s about all the cultural changes that precipitated those declines and made organized religion so much less relevant in people’s lives.   “The culture was formed by these big institutional, technological, economic, geopolitical, military, etc., changes,” he said. Those changes include the rise of individualism, the association of religion with violence after 9/11, the third sexual revolution and more.   Smith is quick to point out that culturally obsolete things can still be quite useful for some people. He has DVDs and CDs in his house that he’s not planning to get rid of. But most younger people rely entirely on streaming services for their movies and music, making DVDs and CDs obsolete for them.   There’s a lesson there. No, religion hasn’t been supplanted by a spiffy new technology — though Smith’s book does detail 10 ways the internet “corroded” religion, including by reducing people’s attention spans and diminishing their willingness to engage in in-person communities that come with significant time demands. Nor was there an intentional plot to derail religion, with secularists setting out to cut it down.   Instead, the social changes that have made religion obsolete were “long-term, highly complex and unintended,” Smith said. Delayed marriage, reduced childbirth and voluntary childlessness have all chipped away at the cultural power of religion, but eroding religion was never the aim of those social changes. People embraced them because they felt their lives were better because of them.   There have also been geopolitical changes, such as the end of the Cold War and the neoliberal economic policies that made people more devoted to their careers in order to stay competitive. Both indirectly damaged religion. The end of the Cold War, Smith writes, “was a jolt that helped to trigger the cultural avalanche that plowed over religion in the next two decades.” Americans who had been brought up to believe that what made us better than the Soviets was that they were godless communists suddenly lost their certainty that being American meant being Christian.   Another factor was the rise of religious scandals, particularly the Catholic Church’s priest sex abuse crisis and the evangelical world’s multiple scandals with pastors who covered up sexual assault and were accused of embezzlement. Even though only a small minority of clergy was involved in those scandals, they “polluted” the name of religion in the eyes of millions, Smith found in his research. In this way, religion has had a hand in digging its own grave.   Smith called this convergence of factors “a perfect storm.” All these elements and more create a zeitgeist that is, if not hostile to religion, not particularly receptive to it.   “It’s very generational,” he said. “This is especially post-boomers, especially millennials. Within the culture for that generation, religion was just kind of discredited or polluted, or it didn’t add up.”   Some people within traditional religion may see the book as being down on religion. That’s not the case though, Smith said. The sociologist’s nearly two dozen previous books have chronicled the highs and lows of religion in America for many years. His National Study of Youth and Religion project researched the religious and spiritual lives of American teenagers into emerging adulthood. His book “Passing the Plate” explored the state of charitable giving in America and considered what might be possible if Christians donated more of their money to worthy causes. And Smith is himself a Christian. He grew up Presbyterian and converted to Roman Catholicism about 15 years ago.   In sum, he’s not pining to see religion on the walls of the Cracker Barrel.   “I don’t have an anti-religious agenda in my scholarship at all,” he said. “I’m a sociologist, so I’m here to describe the world as best I can — what’s happening and why — without cheering it on or without condemning it.”   Now, his job is to explain that shift as best he can using research. While religious people are sometimes defensive or appalled by his message about religion’s obsolescence, other times they receive the news with relief. Presenting his data to audiences, he’s encountered pastors “who just think they’ve failed, like they did a bad job” if their churches aren’t growing, he said.   “I said, ‘It’s not you. There’s something bigger going on here,'” he said. The pastors found it liberating to realize their church’s decline wasn’t only happening to them, or it wasn’t because of something they’d done or failed to do.   “If people don’t have an understanding of those social contexts, it’s very easy for them to personalize it and oftentimes blame themselves,” Smith said.   Smith won’t make a full-on prediction about where religion is headed next, except that just because traditional religion has become obsolete doesn’t mean secularism has triumphed.   “It’s not a binary between religion and the secular,” he said. It’s not the kind of “zero sum game,” but is more nuanced. Most Americans still believe in God, even in younger generations, he added.   Rather, he sees religion morphing into other channels. Interest in the supernatural remains very high in the U.S., which is the topic of another book he’s working on. And he sees an interesting “re-enchantment” happening outside of religious institutions as people explore neopaganism, healing crystals and the like.   “As people left religion, or grew up in a world in which religion was obsolete, they became attracted to this re-enchanted culture. And there’s lots of different entry doors into it,” he said.   VOL: Why have denominations lost their relevance? They jettisoned the Gospel for everything else but the Gospel.

By Donna Birrell PREMIER CHRISTIAN NEWS April 4, 2025   A bishop who was instrumental in drawing up guidelines around women’s ministry in the Church of England has now said the provision helps to “reinforce” the “unequal and iniquitous gendered culture of the current Church of England”.   Rev Dr Rosemarie Mallett, who is the Bishop of Croydon, was speaking at the launch of a campaign by Women and the Church (WATCH). It wants to end the special arrangements which were put in place after the vote to allow women bishops in 2014. The provision, known as the ‘Five Guiding Principles’ includes pastoral and sacramental dispensation for those who, for theological reasons, can't receive the ministry of female bishops or priests.   Bishop Mallett said many female clergy still experience 'gendered micro-aggressions' in the church.   Rev Martine Oborne, Chair of WATCH, agrees. She told Premier: “It's still permissible for churches to say ‘no’ to having a woman as their vicar. It's still permissible for churches to say ‘no they won't have a woman preside over the sacrament’. It's still permissible for church to say that they need a special bishop, someone who's neither a woman, nor a man who has ordained a woman.   “We’re also continuing to teach theology in some churches, which says that God created men to be in authority over women. So all this is still within the spectrum of teaching and practice of the Church of England.”   According to WATCH, one in twelve bishops in the Church of England do not fully accept women as priests or church leaders. Only four out of the last 14 diocesan bishops appointed have been women.   Rev Oborne said WATCH is hoping to bring a motion to the next meeting of the Church’s General Synod in which she hopes a conversation will be had about whether the current arrangements are “fit for perpetuity or whether or not we need to find a good way to bring them to an end."   She added it was a call to bring to an end “the discrimination, sexism, and exploitation of women in our Church”.   Asked whether female clergy are subject to additional challenges within the church, Rev Oborne said: “It’s the experience of every woman in the Church, both lay and ordained. Some of them are micro aggressions and some of them are macro aggressions.   “There are a lot of problems that are being swept under the carpet, and it's time for us to have a frank conversation about this.   “We have effectively a church within a Church. We're not really one Church, because we've got a separate church for those who don't accept the theology of ordaining women. We used to be a Church where all clergy were in communion with each other.   “So I think this affects not just women, but it affects men as well.”   In a message to the 'Not Equal Yet' conference at which the campaign was launched, the Area Bishop of Kingston, Dr Martin Gainsborough, said “It is important that we have this conversation as a Church. The question we need to wrestle with is how do we ensure a future in which women and men can flourish equally in the Church. We have some way to go.”   VOL. Based on what happened in The Episcopal Church, sooner or later, those who hold contrary views on the ordination of women will be told to conform or go. A motion will be presented and passed at Synod that women (and homosexuals and lesbians) be accepted to all orders of ministry and it will then be a done deal. If you don’t like it, you can leave and join another Anglican jurisdiction or simply resign. The consciences of Anglo-Catholics and evangelicals be damned.

Integrated Study Guide   By Bryan Hollon April 5, 2025   This session is part of the multi-post Study Guide titled "Learning to Pray with C.S. Lewis." You may find it helpful to refer to the  introduction and session one to understand the nature of the project as a whole. There will be 10 sessions in all. "The servant is not greater, and must not be more high-minded, than the master. Whatever the theoretical difficulties are, we must continue to make requests of God." - C.S. Lewis,  Letters to Malcolm Primary Readings: ·         Letters to Malcolm , Letters 5, 7, 11 ·        "Work & Prayer" from  God in the Dock ·        C.S. Lewis,  Mere Christianity , Book 3, Chapter 12: "Faith" Theological Context: The Progression of Petition In Letters 5, 7, and 11, Lewis confronts what might be called petition's "scandalous particularity"—the biblical encouragement to make petitions despite God’s omniscience - in other words, asking God for things knowing that God knows what we need before we ask. Rather than dismissing petition as spiritually immature, Lewis insists it remains central to authentic Christian prayer, and he anchors his defense in Christ's own example in Gethsemane. Lewis articulates a vision of petitionary prayer that evolves from passive submission to active participation in God’s own purposes and work, reflecting the Trinitarian pattern of the indwelling Spirit enabling us to fulfill the Father's will through participation in the Son's perfect obedience. Key Concepts 1. The Validity and Necessity of Petitionary Prayer In Letter 7, Lewis challenges the notion that mature Christianity might transcend petitionary prayer in favor of pure adoration and submission. Against this seemingly "high-minded" spirituality, Lewis offers a surprisingly earthy response: "Remember the psalm: 'Lord, I am not high minded'" (Letter 7). This appeal to Psalm 131 gives us insight into Lewis's theological intuition that Christian maturity never transcends childlike dependence - it requires it. As I’ve already mentioned, Lewis grounds his defense of petition in Christ's example and teaching: "The New Testament contains embarrassing promises about prayer... It is maintained primarily on the dominical authority of Our Lord Himself" (Letter 7). This incarnational approach reflects Lewis's distinctive contribution to a theology of prayer—his integration of materiality and spirituality. In the assigned reading from  Mere Christianity , Lewis offers further insight about the perseverance required in petitionary prayer: "Faith is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods." This distinction addresses petition's greatest challenge—maintaining confidence amid divine silence or apparent refusal. Lewis warns that we will never attain eternal life "as long as [we] are trying to get it as a reward." Likewise, we cannot approach petition from a utilitarian perspective; rather it is fundamentally grounded in relationship. We ask because we our deepest needs can be fulfilled only in relation to the God who created and knows us. 2. Personal "Festoonings" of the Lord's Prayer In Letter 5, Lewis shares his personal interpretations (or "festoonings") of the Lord's Prayer, demonstrating how abstract theology becomes personal practice. For "Thy kingdom come," Lewis contemplates three levels of meaning: God's reign appearing in nature's beauty, in the lives of good people, and ultimately in heaven. This multi-layered interpretation connects present experience with ultimate hope. His interpretation of "Thy will be done" reveals evolving understanding: "For there isn't always—or we don't always have reason to suspect that there is—some great affliction looming in the near future, but there are always duties to be done... 'Thy will be done—by me—now' brings one back to brass tacks" (Letter 5). This demonstrates prayer's transformative dimension—moving us from passive recipients to active agents in divine work. Most striking is Lewis's insight about submitting to unexpected blessings: "I am beginning to feel that we need a preliminary act of submission not only towards possible future afflictions but also towards possible future blessings... It seems to me that we often, almost sulkily, reject the good that God offers us because, at that moment, we expected some other good" (Letter 5). This observation challenges our tendency to dictate not only what God should do but how and when He should do it. 3. Prayer as Participation in Divine Causality In "Work & Prayer," Lewis offers perhaps his most philosophically penetrating analysis of petition through comparison with physical causation. He addresses the determinist objection by noting that its logical extension would invalidate all human action: "Why wash your hands? If God intends them to be clean, they'll come clean without your washing them." The essay's central insight is that prayer represents a form of causality analogous to but distinct from physical work: "The two methods by which we are allowed to produce events may be called work and prayer. Both are alike in this respect—that in both we try to produce a state of affairs which God has not (or at any rate not yet) seen fit to provide 'on His own.'" This understanding of prayer as participation in divine causality rather than as an exception to it counters both magical thinking about prayer's efficacy and mechanical skepticism about its objective reality. Quoting Pascal, Lewis suggests  God "instituted prayer in order to allow His creatures the dignity of causality." 4. Biblical Paradoxes in Prayer In Letter 11, Lewis confronts the tension between Jesus's seemingly unconditional promise in Mark 11:24 ("Whatever you ask for... you will receive") and the reality of unanswered prayer, including Jesus's own prayer in Gethsemane. Rather than attempting to resolve this tension through reductive explanations, Lewis acknowledges its difficulty: "How is this astonishing promise to be reconciled with the observed facts?... I have found no book that helps me with them all" (Letter 11). Lewis honors apparent contradictions in scripture and experience as indicative of deeper truth rather than as problems to be eliminated. This reflects the biblical pattern in which both human responsibility and divine sovereignty are affirmed without systematic resolution of their apparent tension. Lewis recognizes that prayer involves genuine paradoxes that cannot be easily resolved but must be faithfully embraced. Questions for Reflection 1.      Lewis shares his personal "festoonings" of the Lord's Prayer in Letter 5, noting that they are his private interpretations rather than authoritative explanations. How might developing your own thoughtful engagement with this prayer enrich your prayer life? What personal meanings have you discovered in the Lord's Prayer? 2.     Consider Lewis's suggestion that we need to submit to possible future blessings as well as afflictions. Have you experienced times when you "almost sulkily, reject[ed] the good that God offers... because, at that moment, we expected some other good"? How might awareness of this tendency transform your approach to God's provision? 3.     Lewis describes prayer as a form of causality analogous to but distinct from physical work. How might this understanding challenge both magical thinking about prayer's efficacy and mechanical skepticism about its objective reality? What implications does this have for how you approach petitionary prayer? 4.     In "Work & Prayer," Lewis writes that "the very act of asking is what God has ordained as a means by which our prayers are fulfilled." How might this understanding of prayer as participation in divine causality rather than exception to it transform your approach to petition? What implications does this have for how you understand apparently unanswered prayer? 5.     Lewis strongly defends petitionary prayer against both philosophical objections and religious over-spiritualization. How might his defense address contemporary skepticism about prayer's effectiveness? How does it challenge approaches to spirituality that minimize asking God for specific things? 6.     In Letter 11, Lewis confronts the tension between Jesus's seemingly unconditional promises about prayer and the reality of unanswered petitions. How have you navigated this apparent contradiction in your own prayer life? How might embracing this paradox rather than resolving it enrich your understanding of prayer? 7.      Lewis suggests that the highest faith in prayer might belong primarily to "the prophet's, the apostle's, the missionary's, the healer's prayer." How might this perspective transform expectations about prayer without diminishing its importance? How might it challenge contemporary emphasis on individual spiritual technique? Practical Exercise: Praying the Lord's Prayer with Personal "Festoonings" (2-3 days) Taking inspiration from Lewis's approach in Letter 5, spend time with the Lord's Prayer over several days, developing your own thoughtful "festoonings" or personal interpretations: 1.       Select a phrase  from the Lord's Prayer each day (e.g., "Thy kingdom come," "Give us this day our daily bread"). 2.      Pray the phrase slowly , allowing its meanings to unfold in your mind. 3.      Consider multiple levels of meaning , as Lewis does with "Thy kingdom come" (in nature, in human lives, and in heaven). 4.      Connect the phrase to your current circumstances , exploring how it might apply to specific situations you face. 5.      Practice prayer as participation , recognizing that in praying these words you are not merely expressing desire but participating in divine causality—joining your voice to Christ's perfect prayer and allowing the Spirit to pray through you. 6.      Journal your reflections , noting how these personal interpretations enrich your understanding of the prayer and how they might reflect your participation in the unfolding of God's purposes. After this period, reflect on how this practice has affected your engagement with this familiar prayer. Has it helped you move beyond rote recitation to more thoughtful participation? Have you discovered meanings you hadn't previously considered? How has it deepened your understanding of prayer as participation in divine reality rather than mere expression of human desire? The Rev. Dr. Bryan Hollon is president of Trinity Anglican Seminary in Ambridge, PA.

By Jeffrey Walton JUICY ECUMENISM April 4, 2025   I’ve long been critical of the Episcopal Church for effectively resigning itself to the role of a “boutique church.”   Episcopalians, broadly, no longer believe that they offer something unique to the world or that most people would be particularly interested. Instead, they’ve found themselves catering to a caste of highly educated (and increasingly aged) white liberals. The problems are apparent; the group is less likely to procreate and, when they do, their children do not remain within the Church. Data bears this out, and the denomination’s priorities reflect this skewed demographic: caricature of the Episcopal Church as a chaplaincy to lefty professors and a handful of identity categories is deserved.   This is compounded by a form of universalism and religious humanism that has displaced the Gospel of Jesus Christ, sapping evangelistic energy. No kids and no converts, save for a few liberal Catholics and Exvangelicals. Readers of this blog know that this is nothing new.   Left unsaid is that Anglicans outside of the Episcopal Church could very well be painting themselves into another corner.   “Our studies show that the Anglican Church is in growth,” Bishop Derek Jones of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA)’s Jurisdiction Armed Forces and Chaplaincy recently shared in a presentation on religious liberty and traditional Christian values. “But, I believe that what’s going on is a great shift.”   Jones pointed to data from groups like Pew and Barna showing that faithful Christian communities that maintain Biblical teaching are actually growing while denominations that accommodate secular values continue their decades-long decline.   “Right now it is the historic sacramental churches: Orthodox, Roman, and Anglican that are growing, along with Messianic Judaism while all other faith groups are on decline. All.” Jones emphasized. “And I believe that the Anglican Church has simply been the benefactor of those faithful Christians from Protestant denominational groups finding their way to an Anglican Church.”   While I suspect that Jones might be overstating Orthodox growth, and possibly unaware that Roman Catholicism struggles with retention more than any Christian group in the United States, he’s right about the nature of the present growth of Anglicanism. Even an enthusiastic cheerleader of ACNA like me needs only look around in our most vibrant congregations to see that we’re witnessing consolidation, not conversion from unbelief. We also tend to draw disproportionately from the professional class, just as Episcopalians do. But, as a century of Pentecostal growth showed, and a century of Methodist and Baptist growth before that, reaching the working class with the Gospel is essential: the Gospel message is for everyone.   Jones spoke March 1 at the St. Luke’s Anglican Theology Conference in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, where he asked how many present had their origin in a Protestant faith group.   Nearly everyone raised their hands.   “Does that answer your question? We’re coming to the end of that growth,” Jones flatly declared. “It’s time for us as a church to say we have a responsibility to our communities to be a beacon of light of the truth of the Gospel. It’s time for us to be going up and saying ‘do you know Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and savior?’”   Jones wasn’t seeking to lay blame: “I don’t always do the best either,” he acknowledged. But he offered a clear-eyed view that Anglican churches attracting a narrow subset of Protestants (usually Baptists and Presbyterians considering a liturgical expression or Methodists exiting a rapidly liberalizing United Methodist Church) won’t see that same pipeline of new members indefinitely, and the cultural headwinds of secularism will hit Anglicans, too.   Episcopalians and other Anglicans in North America may see themselves as worlds apart, and that’s not without basis. We Anglicans can be grateful that many of these faithful Protestants are deepening their Christian discipleship in our churches and that our rates of procreation appear healthier than within the Episcopal Church (yes, procreation is a form of church growth – it’s how the Amish double in size every generation).   That said, we can learn from the mistakes of the Episcopal Church and not paint ourselves into a demographic corner. God’s view is more expansive than our own: he’s calling us not to recline and wait for others to come to us, but to go to them.   Watch Bishop Derek Jones’ talk, “Legislating Morality in the Midst of Cultural Wars” from the St. Luke’s Anglican Theology Conference here.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWzu-XpMltw&t=2318s

By Angela Tilby THE CHURCH TIMES April 2, 2025 BBC: The Rt Revd Justin Welby is interviewed by Laura Kuenssberg   THERE has been much criticism of the Rt Revd Justin Welby for saying, in a BBC interview with Laura Kuenssberg this week, that he “forgives” John Smyth. In reality, his comments were much more nuanced. Watching the whole interview, I found it impossible not to be moved as he sat still like a prisoner, or at least a penitent, as, for nearly 40 minutes, Ms Kuenssberg politely but firmly hammered in the nails, and, again and again, he expressed profound sorrow at the safeguarding failures that led to his resignation last November.   There has been much tragedy in Bishop Welby’s life: an unhappy childhood, the death of his own child in infancy, and a depressive tendency that runs through the family. Towards the end of the interview, he expressed a longing for the obscurity of private life.   It left me wondering whether the greatest tragedy of his life was to have been appointed Archbishop of Canterbury. It was, after all, an unlikely appointment. He had only recently become Bishop of Durham; he was a late ordinand, having previously worked in the oil industry, and he was initially turned down for ordination.   But he was also an Evangelical with Charismatic leanings, and had worked briefly at Holy Trinity, Brompton. The ever-powerful Evangelical networks chose him as their man, trusting him to promote their particular vision of mission and growth, which he did, as far as he could, setting the Church on a path of rewarding church-planting and innovation over traditional parish ministry. In the interview, rather touchingly, he claimed that the Church was actually growing, a claim for which there is, sadly, limited evidence.   In his years as Archbishop, he gradually outgrew his initial supporters. One of the most moving parts of the interview was when he spoke of conducting the funeral for the late Queen. Suddenly, it was as though he “got it”: he understood what it meant for the C of E to be the national Church. As his archiepiscopate went on, he upset the Evangelical lobbies and a substantial part of the Anglican Communion over gay relationships, greatly overestimating his ability to bring them on board.   For all his well-earned reputation as a reconciler, he never really had the bandwidth to cope with the demands of those who had promoted him and expected him to toe the line. But then this was the central dilemma of his episcopate. He is a product of the Iwerne camps, with their repressed homo-eroticism and, in some quarters, disregard for the wider Church of England. It was his misfortune to have come from the same stable as the serial abuser Smyth.   Plain Bishop Welby, in his blue open-necked shirt, has carried the can not only for safeguarding errors, but for the whole theology that has been used to mould the C of E into its image and is now exposed as theologically and morally bankrupt.   END

By Sue Careless THE LIVING CHURCH April 4, 2025   The Anglican Church of Canada has announced four nominees for the office of primate: the Most Rev. Christopher Harper, the Most Rev. Greg Kerr-Wilson, the Rt. Rev. David Lehmann, and the Rt. Rev. Riscylla Walsh-Shaw.   In the church’s polity, bishops choose the nominees for primate, but the election is made by clergy and lay delegates to its General Synod, which will meet in London, Ontario, in late June. The election is scheduled for June 26.   The Nominees   Chris Harper has been the National Indigenous Anglican Archbishop since 2003, overseeing Indigenous ministries in the Anglican Church of Canada. He is also the Presiding Elder of Sacred Circle, a gathering of Indigenous Anglicans. Traditionally Sacred Circles are held every three years, usually ahead of General Synod.   From 2018 to 2023 Harper was the Bishop of Saskatoon. Harper is Plains Cree, and the son of a residential school survivor. He spent much of his younger life on a reserve of the Onion Lake Cree Nation, which straddles the Alberta-Saskatchewan provincial boundary.   Harper was an emergency medical technician before preparing for the priesthood at Wycliffe College in Toronto. He was ordained to the priesthood in 2005 and served in the Dioceses of Saskatchewan, Algoma, and Toronto, both on and off reserve. He is also Chancellor for the College of Emmanuel and St. Chad, an Anglican theological college affiliated with the University of Saskatchewan, in Saskatoon.   Greg Kerr-Wilson is the Metropolitan of the Ecclesiastical Province of Northern Lights (formerly Rupert’s Land) and Bishop of Calgary. As one of the church’s four metropolitans, he oversees ten dioceses within a regional area that covers the Arctic and stretches across Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and parts of Ontario.   Kerr-Wilson is a graduate of the University of British Columbia and Nashotah House Theological Seminary. He was ordained to the priesthood in 1990, beginning his ministry as curate of St. Paul’s, Bloor Street, in Toronto, the Anglican Church of Canada’s largest congregation. He served as a rector in Ontario and as dean of All Saints’ Cathedral in Edmonton before becoming Bishop of Qu’Appelle, a diocese in southern Saskatchewan, in 2006.   Kerr-Wilson was elected Bishop of Calgary in 2012, and in 2015, he was elected metropolitan. Kerr-Wilson is also a member of Communion Partners, a group of church leaders within the Anglican Church of Canada and the Episcopal Church devoted to maintaining traditional teaching and fostering the unity of the Anglican Communion.   David Lehmann has been the Bishop of Caledonia, a diocese that covers the northern half of British Columbia, since 2018. He is also chair of the Council of the North, a group of nine jurisdictions, including eight dioceses that receive financial assistance from General Synod for their ministry to largely Indigenous and geographically isolated communities across Northern Canada.   Lehmann was born in Toronto and raised in Fort Smith, Northwest Territories. He earned degrees from Camrose Lutheran College in Alberta (now the University of Alberta’s Augustana Campus) and Wycliffe College, and was a naval reservist.   After ordination, he served in Fort Simpson, an isolated and mostly Indigenous village in the Northwest Territories, and in the Diocese of Edmonton. Throughout his parish ministry, he was involved in community initiatives, heritage projects, and Fresh Expressions, a movement focused on creative evangelism. He is also chair of the Board of Governors for Vancouver School of Theology, an ecumenical divinity school affiliated with the University of British Columbia.   Riscylla Walsh-Shaw is a suffragan bishop in the Diocese of Toronto. She was elected in 2016, and is responsible for 57 parishes in the Trent-Durham area.   With Red River Métis family roots, Walsh-Shaw grew up on a small farm. She studied at the University of Toronto and earned a Master of Divinity from Wycliffe College in 1999. She worked in youth ministry, and after her ordination in 2011, served in several parishes in the Diocese of Toronto.   Walsh-Shaw has been involved in reconciliation work with Indigenous communities, and was a witness and an ambassador to Canada’s national Truth and Reconciliation Commission. She represents the Anglican Church of Canada on the World Council of Churches’ Central Committee and the Anglican Consultative Council. She served on the Primate’s Commission on Discovery, Reconciliation, and Justice.   The Issues   There will be enormous challenges ahead for the next primate.   Except in the Diocese of the Arctic, membership numbers have been dropping precipitously in the Anglican Church of Canada for decades. The church faces a financial crisis, and is considering several options for restructuring to adjust to a future with fewer resources.   Last September, a commission appointed by former primate Linda Nicholls released a report, Reimagining the Church: Proclaiming the Gospel in the 21st Century, which proposes several options for structural change.   Some of the proposals, like eliminating one level of church structure (either General Synod or the ecclesiastical provinces); restructuring the work of Church House, the national headquarters in Toronto; or having the primate continue to serve as a diocesan bishop have prompted considerable discussion.   Kerr-Wilson told TLC he supported returning to an earlier model in which the primate also retained oversight of a diocese. “I think it can be done, and it would also assist in the needed downsizing and reorganizing of General Synod—which means I am also in favour of revisioning Church House,” he said.   A proposal to dismantle the Council of the North, and to redistribute the funds to parishes across the entire church, has been much more controversial. Lehmann criticized the proposal, saying that Council of the North funding is “a response to the disparity that exists in north-south ministry. This disparity remains today. Travel across the north is more expensive, along with utilities, housing, and groceries.”   The church also remains divided on proposals to change its canons to permit same-sex marriage. The last time a vote was held, at General Synod 2019, a canon change was narrowly defeated in the House of Bishops. Walsh-Shaw and Harper voted to change the canon, while Lehmann and Kerr-Wilson voted against it.   The Process   Anne Germond, Archbishop of Algoma and Metropolitan of the Ecclesiastical Province of Ontario, has been Acting Primate since Archbishop Linda Nichols retired in September 2024, at the denomination’s mandatory retirement age of 70.   Video interviews of the nominees will be released after Easter, and General Synod will be held June 23-29 in London, Ontario. It usually meets triennially but this year is meeting after a two-year gap.   During the primatial election, the bishops do not vote, but are sequestered while the clergy and laity vote separately. To become primate, a nominee must obtain a majority in both orders. The primate does not serve a fixed term, but usually leads the church until retirement.   The election is “a profound moment of spiritual discernment in the life of our beloved Church,” said the Ven. Alan Perry, general secretary. “Please pray for those who [are] nominated, their families and dioceses, and for the person who will be elected—whom God has already chosen to be our next Primate.”   He also asked for prayers for Germond “as she steers us through the next few months.” She only agreed to accept the office of Acting Primate on the condition that she would not be a primatial candidate.   The installation of the 15th Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada is planned for the last day of General Synod, June 29.   Sue Careless is senior editor of The Anglican Planet and author of the series Discovering the Book of Common Prayer: A Hands-On Approach. She is based in Toronto.

If the former archbishop of Canterbury hoped his self-abnegation on the BBC might salvage what was left of his reputation, he was wrong.   By Tim Wyatt THE NEW STATESMAN April 3, 2025   Overwhelmed. When Justin Welby looks back on the early months of his tenure as archbishop of Canterbury, that is the word that comes to his mind. In his first interview since his resignation, Welby told the BBC that he was shocked by the torrent of safeguarding cases that flooded across his desk when he entered Lambeth Palace in 2013: historic cases, recent cases, disputed cases; bishops, deans, archdeacons and priests accused or suspected of abusing choirboys, parishioners, even their fellow clergy. “Safeguarding was the crisis I hadn’t foreseen – I didn’t realise how bad it was,” Welby said. The scale of the problem was why, Welby now says, he failed to adequately respond to the case that would ultimately bring his tenure to an end 11 years later.   An independent investigation into the abuses of John Smyth – which were first reported to the Church of England (C of E) in summer 2013, months after Welby took office – was published last November. The Makin review criticised Welby for not ensuring those early allegations reached the proper authorities. Within days of its publication, Welby resigned, becoming the first ever head of the Church to step down in disgrace.   In the BBC interview on 30 March, Welby apologised: “I am so sorry for what I failed to do [and] for what the Church did do with John Smyth… I am so sorry that I did not serve the victims and survivors… as I should have done, and that’s why I resigned.”   He attempted to explain, if not justify, his failures. He was new and inexperienced in the job when the accusations came across his desk. The national Church then had a single, part-time staffer for safeguarding (under Welby, the team grew to almost 60). The rules said it was the local bishop in Ely, not Canterbury, who should take the lead. The police asked him to hold off while they looked into the case themselves. He was distracted by another scandal that was going through the courts and seemed more pressing. “It was an absolutely overwhelming few weeks,” Welby said. “That’s not an excuse… The reality is, I got it wrong. As archbishop, there are no excuses for that kind of failure.”   If the former prelate hoped his self-abnegation might salvage what was left of his reputation, he was wrong. The response to the interview has mostly been anger at what many victims see as an attempt to shift the blame. Some continue to believe Welby is obscuring the extent to which he knew about Smyth’s abuse before 2013, given he had attended camps with Smyth in the 1970s.   Smyth was perhaps the most prolific abuser in the modern history of the Church of England. Around 130 teenage boys, many of them groomed while attending evangelical summer camps co-led by Smyth, were sexually, psychologically and physically abused by him. After this was discovered in 1982 by the trust that ran the camps, Smyth was quietly pushed out. But the trust chose not to pass on what they knew to the Church authorities or the police. Smyth went on to set up camps in Zimbabwe, where he began abusing boys again.   The Makin report concluded that Smyth’s crimes were an “open secret” among many in the conservative-evangelical wing of the C of E. But it took a Channel 4 News documentary in 2017 to expose him. Survivors continue to demand every clergy member named in the report resigns or be disciplined. The Church has identified ten – including a former bishop of Durham and George Carey, archbishop of Canterbury from 1992 to 2002 – whose involvement in the “cover-up”, as the report calls it, warrants formal disciplinary proceedings.   There has also been outrage over Welby’s admission to the BBC that if Smyth were still alive, he would forgive him. The former archbishop went on to say that it was up to victims to decide for themselves if they wished to extend the same grace to Smyth, who died in 2018 shortly after the TV exposé of his abuse. One victim told the BBC that, never mind Smyth, he could not even forgive Welby for continuing to “blank” survivors.   While the Church reeled in the wake of the Makin report, other dark secrets were forcing their way to the surface. Weeks after Welby’s resignation, the Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, now the de facto interim head of the C of E, was implicated in a scandal over an Essex vicar known to have a history of sexual offences against children. In January, the bishop of Liverpool, John Perumbalath, was forced from office after it emerged two women – one of them now a bishop herself – had made complaints against him for sexual harassment and misconduct. Then, Channel 4 revealed that the evangelical vicar who led the cover-up of Smyth’s abuse in the 1980s, David Fletcher, was also an alleged abuser himself. Fletcher’s brother, Jonathan, a prominent church leader in London for decades, is awaiting trial for indecent assault and grievous bodily harm during his ministry.   What is it about the C of E that allows – perhaps even enables – such cases to proliferate? No doubt some abusers deliberately infiltrate the priesthood knowing it grants clergy ready access to vulnerable potential victims. There is also a powerful culture of deference to the dog-collared elite. Even more pervasive is the fear that exposing abuse will harm the mission of saving souls; this is lofty, eternity-minded work too important to be threatened by bad press. In truth, abuse scandals have afflicted a panoply of other institutions: the BBC, the NHS, parliament, too many schools to count. But, rightly, none is held to moral standards as high as its the nation’s established church.   In an attempt to halt the onslaught, in February the C of E’s governing body, the General Synod, considered radical reforms to Church safeguarding. Independent safeguarding had long been demanded by many in the survivor community, who do not trust the Church to “mark its own homework”. Indeed, Welby told the BBC he had been in favour of such a reform for years. But to the surprise of many observers, the Synod instead voted for a pared-back version of independence: the national team was transferred to a new, independent employer, but local safeguarding was kept within dioceses. Unwilling to defend the status quo but not yet ready for radical reform, the C of E is caught in a messy compromise that will please few.   Welby’s successor, due to be announced in the autumn, will be under no illusions about the scale of the crisis facing Lambeth Palace. Speedily implementing the outsourcing of the national safeguarding team, a legally and logistically complex task, must be apriority. The Church must also begin to rebuild trust with both survivors and the wider public. Yet the archbishop of Canterbury does not have the executive powers of the pope; they are not CEO of C of E plc. “I would have loved to be able to wave a magic wand and get it all right,” Welby told the BBC regarding the Church’s struggle to introduce gay marriage. “But that isn’t the reality, and I didn’t have the votes.” Without friendly majorities in the Synod, archbishops can only achieve so much.   Many of those angered by Welby’s tenure are placing their hopes in a fresher, more modern next resident of Lambeth Palace. A change of tone at the top would no doubt help the Church begin to regain the nation’s trust. But the 106th archbishop of Canterbury will be just as constrained – by millennia of tradition, by complex internal systems and cultures, and by ordinary human weaknesses – as Welby.

As Canada’s Anglican church dwindles, its most remote (and most expansive) diocese has shown growth. One bishop responsible for that trend is retiring, leaving his successor to find clergy willing to take on the Arctic’s challenges. Anglican Bishop David Parsons poses in the village of Puvirnituq, Quebec, in northern Canada . (Photo by Julia Duin) By Julia Duin April 2, 2025   INUKJUAK, Quebec (RNS) — Outside, on the banks of a chilly river flowing into the blue-black waters of Hudson Bay, it was only 10 degrees.   Inside St. Thomas Anglican Church, in the northern Canadian hamlet of Inukjuak, about 70 people were gathered — one of them an imposing, 6-foot-1 man with a thatch of white hair, a full beard and the long, sweeping red, black and white robes of an Anglican bishop.   Bishop David Parsons, holding up a red paper heart to signify the blood of Jesus, a black one to signify sin, a Bible and a flashlight, said: “This Bible is a light to show us where to go. For 12 years, I’ve worn the robes of a bishop. The robes remind me that I am a sinner.”   Parsons had recently turned 70, the mandatory retirement age in the Anglican Church of Canada, and was taking a farewell tour after a dozen years heading the Diocese of the Arctic. Covering Canada’s northern third, it is the largest Anglican diocese (by area) in the world. Inukjuak, population 1,821, is in Nunavik, a region at the diocese’s far eastern end in the remote northern reaches of Quebec.   Translating for Parsons was his predecessor and mentor, Andrew Atagotaaluk. Wiry and compact, with bushy eyebrows and silvery-black hair, and standing almost a foot shorter than Parsons, Atagotaaluk was the diocese’s first Inuit bishop and one of four translators of the first Inuktituk-language Bible.   Together, the two bishops had created an evangelical outpost with 34,171 members and still growing amid the more liberal ACC that is dropping numbers so fast, the entire denomination may not last beyond 2040.   Anglican Bishop David Parsons, left, preaches about the need for redemption while his translator, retired Bishop Andrew Atagotaaluk, holds a yellow paper heart as a sermon prop, during a service at St. Thomas Anglican Church in Inukjuak, Quebec, in late November 2024. (Photo by Julia Duin)   The diocese’s bishops have consistently voted throughout the years against same-sex unions, gender transition liturgies and other liberalizing trends in the ACC. “The South doesn’t want to support us because we’re too biblical,” the bishop mused. “We believe Jesus is Lord, we’re not interfaith and we don’t have the intelligence to run things on our own without the Holy Spirit.”   If its congregations are growing, however, Parsons’ successor, who will be elected May 9 in Edmonton, will grapple with the never-ending problem of how to attract priests to the Arctic. Only 16 full-time clergy serve the diocese’s 49 parishes, recruited from around the world to serve in 13 hamlets ranging from Kugluktuk to Kuujjuaq. Parsons has used a patchwork of retired clergy, deacons and laity to lead another two dozen churches, leaving 10 parishes with no clergy or lay leader.   Meanwhile, climate change, geopolitics and tourism bring the world farther north every year. The Anglicans, who have been in the region since the late 17th century, and the Catholics, who’ve been there a century, are seeing a bit of competition. Jehovah’s Witnesses and Muslims have established footholds in the Arctic, and independent Baptists and Seventh-day Adventists have also moved in.   To meet that challenge means a constant search for new blood, which is tremendously draining. The onetime corps of missionary Anglican clergy from the U.K. eager to minister in the Arctic no longer exists. Many non-Inuit clergy leave after a few years due to the isolation of the Arctic and easier career opportunities elsewhere.   Add to this the simple wear and tear on the body from constant travel in subzero cold. Born in Labrador, Parsons is used to living up north, but his first post as a lay minister in 1989 in Aklavik was truly remote. Only reachable by plane or ice road, the village, near the Alaskan border, was a trading post for the Hudson Bay Co. and the site of the diocese’s first cathedral.   Dioceses and provinces of the Anglican Church of Canada. The Diocese of the Arctic is highlighted in blue. (Image courtesy of ACC)   Parsons adored his four years there, he said, as there were several clergy within a day’s journey to mentor him. “It was like a party for me,” he said. “I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. These were high-caliber people who treated me if I were one of them.”   One of them, Atagotaaluk, ordained him and sent Parsons to head a parish in Inuvik, a town on the Mackenzie River Delta near the Arctic Ocean. Parsons served happily there until Atagotaaluk announced his retirement in 2012, and Parsons was nominated to replace him. Parsons dithered on whether to keep his name on the ballot.   “Dad,” said Davey Parsons, the bishop’s youngest son, then 30, “how long are you going to run away from everything?”   Parsons’ name stayed. He was elected after several ballots. “The next morning,” he remembered, “a member of the Nunavut government asked me what I was going to do about all the suicides.”   In 2012, after he prayed about how to answer the government official’s question, he realized the key was hiring a youth coordinator for the at-risk teenagers dying by suicide. He hired one and got a $45,000 grant to help train parish leaders in suicide prevention. Then COVID-19 hit. Meanwhile, the youth coordinator married, got pregnant and quit.   The question of suicide came up at the bishop’s next stop, in Puvirnituq, the largest town on Hudson Bay’s eastern coast and home of the new $4 million (Canadian) St. Matthew’s Anglican Church. Its priest, Esau Tatatoapik, and his wife, Mary, a deacon, met him at the airport and took him to their home beneath skies green with the northern lights.   Just before Parsons’ plane pulled in, the couple had presided at a funeral for a woman who’d been killed by her drunken grandson. Esau averages three funerals a month, but this past week he’d had four. Parsons asked what was killing everyone, and the couple — along with their youth group leaders — responded that the causes were alcohol-related, drug overdoses or cancer. “Mary and I are so tired,” the priest said. “There have been so many funerals. So many of the clergy have had suicides.”   Parsons had been going all day, but somehow, he had to encourage this dispirited group. “I am soon going to be gone,” he said. “It will be you guys who will need to look for an answer. We need to get people in their 20s. We need to empower a crowd of teenagers. Instead of killing themselves, they need to come alongside each other and build each other up.”   He repeated a prophecy that Anglicans across the north have talked about for years: Through the Arctic, God will revive the South. There have been prophets among their own people, he said, that have said the dying southern half of the Canadian church will be awoken by a resurgent, evangelical, spiritually powerful North.   He repeated this message at an evening confirmation service whose Pentecostal-style hymns were led by a six-piece band. Parsons asked the youthful crowd of 70 how many teens were present without their parents. At least 10 raised their hands.   “Where are the elders?” he asked. “They are home drunk … with busyness.”   His 40-minute sermon reassured his listeners they have a destiny despite their remote locale. “God wants to send the people of the North to the whole world.”   The irony was maddening; here he had plenty of people but not enough leaders, while dioceses in the South have plenty of clergy, but no people.   The next day, Parsons was off for Ivujivik, a scenic village in a tiny fjord off Digges Sound, at the very northern tip of Quebec. The local priest, Peter Ainalik, who would turn 80 in a few days, was one of the men Parsons has talked out of retirement to staff the tiny St. Columba Anglican Church. He met with Parsons for several hours before the service to pray and reminisce.   Ainalik told the bishop that church members wanted a prayer time for all the suicides in town. Thirty-two people — mostly women — made their way through the falling snow for an evening service where one person was confirmed. When Parsons invited people up for prayer afterward, the floodgates burst open. A petite dark-haired woman named Piellie asked for prayer for a broken heart: Her 32-year-old son, Lucassie, died by suicide the year before, she said between sobs. Many others wept as well.   “Some of them cannot heal after suicide,” Parsons reflected afterward. “So many young people are doing it. Many have been lost. It’s hard to find the answer why.”   The next day, Ainalik, engulfed in a mustard-yellow parka, saw Parsons off at the tiny airport. The priest and the bishop shook hands.   “See you in heaven,” Parsons said.

By Gavin Ashenden                                                                                                                                             CATHOLIC HERALD                                                                                                                                                          April 2, 2025   Being interviewed by a skilled journalist can be a high-risk event. This weekend just gone, Bishop Justin Welby, former Archbishop of Canterbury, submitted to a long in-depth interview at the hands of the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg.   It may not have been the softest of soft-ball interviews that the BBC has conducted, but it came close. Kuenssberg pitched some unusually gentle questions.   The overwhelming response to the interview has been to ask why Justin Welby chose to do it?   There was a kind of quantum element to it: contradictory streams of thought within a single conversation. At one and the same time, there was an air of self-pity and victimhood running under the surface as an implicit sub-motif; while at the same time the questions and answers on the surface displayed an ineptitude and incoherence that were more likely to result in serious criticism than sympathy.   In answer to what went wrong, he claimed he had been overwhelmed by a torrent of safeguarding issues. The implication was that it wasn’t his fault if the Church he was leading was so corrupt that the scale of the reporting of abuse took his office aback.   It seems odd for someone who was responsible for running a multi-billion-pound organisation to claim that he lacked the resources to manage the daily business that came to his office. It was not a question of lacking resources, so what was lacking?   Rebecca Chapman, a member of the Church of England’s General Synod, writing in the Spectator immediately afterwards, thought she might have the key to Welby’s early difficulties in managing his daily business. She suggested that his unhelpful and possibly overly egocentric global travel plans had dominated his daily schedule.   She wrote of her astonishment that “much of the diary juggle seemed to be his own making as he kicked off a self-imposed plan to visit every single primate of the Anglican Communion over the next 18 months”.   Similarly, despite the gentle interview treatment Kuensberg offered to the former archbishop, she herself wrote of her difficulty in making sense of his responses after the interview:   “For many of the victims of serial abuser John Smyth, and likely many of you reading this, Welby’s confessed failures are not just mystifying but deeply alarming.   “He wasn’t ‘curious’ enough to pursue allegations of child abuse in the Church of England. He says now that when he took the job in 2013 he was too overwhelmed by the scale of the problem to check what had happened with Smyth, a man he had known for years, even though he believed the allegations were probably true.”   In fact, critics have insisted that despite Welby’s protestations, he had known there were problems with Smyth long before 2013.   In the early 1980s, Welby was sharing accommodation with the Rev Mark Ruston, a vicar in Cambridge who authored the first secret report of Smyth’s abuse. Furthermore, Welby had an official position in helping run the Smyth camps. Not only is it unlikely he knew nothing of the alarm and talk behind the scenes – which led to the authoring of the report by his landlord in whose house he lived – but witnesses have claimed they overheard conversations involving Welby in which concerns over Smyth were being discussed.   But even if they are mistaken, the reports about Smyth, whom he knew well, should have provoked an immediate response, since both abuser and victims were people that Welby knew personally. It was this personal connection that played its part in moving this tragedy from a failure of the institution to a personal failure also of the Archbishop.   Like the Baskerville hound that failed to bark in the night, it was what was not said in the interview with Kuenssberg that had the most powerful effect. There was no acknowledgement of how during the ten years it took for the Makin report to be commissioned and published – which basically required being leaked – Welby had made promises to talk and listen to the victims, which he had not kept.   During the second half of the interview, Bishop Welby was asked about the state of the relationship between the state Church and society. As with all questions, the preconception that lies behind the question aims to determine the answer. Ms Kuenssberg put it to the bishop that because there was still no automatic right for a woman to be appointed as a clergy person to an Anglican parish, and because homosexual couples could not yet demand marriage by right in the C of E, to what extent was the Church actually mirroring society?   Any theologian, any bishop, any thinking lay Christian might have drawn breath, then offered a couple of poignant examples from the excesses of Western culture in the early decades of this century before asking Ms Kuenssberg if she was confident that it was a good thing for the Church to mirror society; to wonder if perhaps the Church might have a role to play in curbing excesses, challenging and redirecting appetites and addictions, questioning the value of hedonism, and reflecting on the incoherence of ill-formed notions of equality.   But these were not questions that Welby thought to address.   One of the strangest elements in the interview was the lack of any spiritual, theological or moral perspective that you might expect a senior Church leader to offer when presented with the complex relationship between post-Christian society and the Christian state Church. Welby spoke more as a frustrated managerial executive than as a retired bishop offering help to interpret the opposing values of two conflicting world views.   One can sympathise as well as criticise. The issue of when the state Church becomes so hostage to anti-Christian ideology that it raises questions about the legitimacy of its attempts to remain faithful to Christian values, tradition and philosophy is becoming an increasingly painful and fraught one. But ignoring it does not make it go away. And one could argue that a recently retired Archbishop of Canterbury is in the very best position to offer some kind of perspectival discernment on the presence of the elephant in the room.   From a Catholic perspective, there has always been a hope that the leader of the state Church in England might act as a mouthpiece for the other Christian elements in the country. Welby’s failure to do so leaves the vacuum that the Catholic bishops increasingly feel the need to fill.   Given recent weeks in which social commentators have been deeply struck by the emergence of what appears to be a new world order emerging as both Trump and the Catholic vice-president in the US have appeared to threaten sanctions on the United Kingdom government – for its refusal to guarantee freedom of speech and conscience, in particular to Christians over abortion – it was odd for Welby to appear to be so afflicted with self-pity on the one hand and with concerns over feminist and gay rights on the other, that the issue of free speech and totalitarian government passed him by.   Perhaps his disavowing of clerical dress and adoption of shirt and jacket were intended to send a signal of more than just a preference for informality in a well-lit TV studio.

Staff Writer CHRISTIAN TODAY 31 Mar, 2025   PHOTO: Justin Welby with the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg. (BBC)   Justin Welby has spoken of a “deep sense of personal failure” over how allegations of horrific sexual abuse by the late John Smyth were handled.  The former Archbishop of Canterbury also said he was "profoundly ashamed" of a farewell speech in the House of Lords in which he appeared to make light of the safeguarding failures that led to his resignation.  Welby stepped down in the wake of the Makin Review which concluded that he could have and should have done more to stop Smyth's abuse. Smyth died in South Africa in 2018 while still under investigation by UK police.  Speaking on the BBC's  Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg  programme, Welby said that he should have stepped down sooner.  “What changed my mind was having been caught by the report being leaked and not really thought it through enough, to be honest,” he said. “Over that weekend, as I read it and reread it and as I reflected on the horrible suffering of the survivors which had been, as many of them said, more than doubled by the institutional Church’s failure to respond adequately, it increasingly became clear to me that I needed to resign.” He said he had failed to properly handle allegations of historical child sex abuse because they were on an "overwhelming scale" with more cases arriving every day.  Asked if he would forgive Smyth, Welby said, “Yes, I think if he was alive and I saw him. “But it’s not, it’s not me he has abused. He’s abused the victims and survivors. So, whether I forgive or not is, to a large extent, irrelevant.” Asked if he wanted to be forgiven by abuse survivors, he said, "Obviously, but it’s not about me. When we talk about safeguarding, the centre of it is the victims and survivors. “I have never, ever said to a survivor, ‘you must forgive’, because that is their sovereign, absolute individual choice. Everyone wants to be forgiven, but to demand forgiveness is to abuse again.” He said that after taking up office as Archbishop of Canterbury in 2013 he was not as "pushy" as he could have been, and that he "didn’t realise how bad it was".  “I’d been in post 11 weeks and safeguarding had been the crisis I hadn’t foreseen," he said. “I should have pushed harder because I knew enough to know that people, very rarely, almost never abuse once.” Welby came under fire for his farewell speech in the House of Lords given shortly after announcing his resignation in which he suggested that a head had to roll.  "And there is only, in this case, one head that rolls well enough," he said.  The speech was met with dismay not only by victims but senior clergy in the Church of England.  Looking back on his words made him "profoundly ashamed", he told Kuennssberg, adding that he "wasn't in a good space at the time".  "It's one of those moments where, when I think of it, I just wince.  It was entirely wrong and entirely inexcusable," he said.  During the interview, he repeated an apology to victims: “Just for the avoidance of doubt, I am utterly sorry and feel a deep sense of personal failure both for the victims of Smyth not being picked up sufficiently after 2017 when we knew the extent of it, and for my own personal failures.” END