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

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

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

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

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

Ryan Burge has written the most honest ledger of American religious decline in a generation. His remedy is the disease that produced it. By David W. Virtue, DD I www.virtueonline.org I August 16, 2026 Nine people in a room. That is how Ryan Burge opens The Vanishing Church, and it is where any honest reckoning with the man must begin. He counted them himself, from the front of his own dying Baptist congregation in Mount Vernon, Illinois, at the close of 2023. Seventeen years in that pulpit, and nine souls to show for a Sunday. He does not soften the arithmetic. By the old measures — baptisms, attendance, giving — he calls his own ministry a failure, and he means it. There is no cant in the man, and there is little in the book. That is precisely why it must be taken seriously, and precisely why its conclusion must be refused. Credit Where It Is Owed Let no one mistake this for a dismissal. Ryan Burge is the finest data man American religion has produced in a generation, and The Vanishing Church is his most personal and most searching work. Where lesser commentators traffic in nostalgia or panic, Burge brings charts, and the charts do not lie. He has spent his career puncturing comfortable myths, and he punctures them here with a craftsman's patience: that Christianity and Republican politics were always fused (they were not); that the faithful are fleeing the Religious Right (they are not — the mainline is emptying fastest); that faith is good but religion spoils it (the measurable goods come precisely from the religious practice). Every chapter is built on the data and then explained in plain speech. It is a rare gift, and Burge deploys it honestly. The Diagnosis Is Devastating, and Largely Right The numbers are an indictment of the last fifty years, and they deserve to be read slowly. Mainline Protestantism, which once claimed nearly a third of all Americans, now holds less than a tenth. Evangelicalism reached its numerical summit in 1993, when three Americans in ten wore the label — and that summit, Burge shows, was reached when evangelicals were at their most politically diverse, their votes split nearly evenly between the parties. Then came the rupture. Between 1991 and 1998, in the space of seven years, the share of young adults claiming no religion at all climbed from eight percent to more than twenty, while the share calling themselves Christian fell from eighty-seven to seventy-three. Burge names the mechanism the “Big Church Sort”: Americans filing themselves into congregations that flatter their politics and their class. The result, he argues, is an “all or none” faith — hard conservative religion or no religion whatever — with the old moderate middle hollowed clean out. And he adds a wound that most Anglican commentators miss entirely: church has become, in his phrase, a thing of privilege, its pews filled ever more by the married, the salaried, and the college-schooled, while the poor and the irregular drift away untouched. On the diagnosis, Burge is a physician of rare clarity. Then He Reaches for the Prescription Here the statistician lays down his charts and takes up the chaplain's stole, and here the book fails. Burge's cure for the vanishing church is this: go back anyway. Find a congregation that is “good enough.” Do not wait to believe before you belong. Hold your doctrine loosely, resist the fringes, and darken a church door on Sunday morning — because, he warns, the fate of American democracy may hang upon it. It is a humane vision. It is also a milder dose of the very poison whose effects fill his own pages. For what is Burge describing, when he prescribes a low-doctrine, high-belonging, politically bashful church that asks little and welcomes all — if not the mainline itself? The Episcopal Church, the ELCA, the American Baptists of his own affiliation have practiced exactly this creed for two generations. They lowered the threshold of belief. They preached belonging before conviction. They made a virtue of holding nothing too firmly. And they are the fastest-dying bodies in the country. Burge has assembled, chart by chart, the autopsy of latitudinarian religion — and then recommended the deceased's own regimen to the patient. The Contradiction at the Center The book cannot escape its own findings. If ideological consolidation is what fortified the evangelical churches — and Burge's data says plainly that it did — then by what logic does ideological moderation revive the churches that moderation emptied? He shows that the demanding congregations, the ones that ask everything, retain their people and run on twice the volunteer strength of their tepid neighbors. He shows that where a church asks little, its members give it little in return, and eventually give it nothing at all. The mainline did not perish because it was too dogmatic. It perished because it was too accommodating — because, as the older sociology Burge himself cites concluded, it tried to be too many things to too many people and ended as nothing in particular to anyone. Nor will the civic frame bear the weight he puts on it. A church summoned back to save the republic is a church asked to exist for something other than God, and a church that exists for something other than God will not long exist at all. The martyrs did not go to the lions for social capital. Athanasius did not stand against the world for the health of the body politic. The creeds were not hammered out at Nicaea and Chalcedon to lower the temperature of public discourse. The church that converted an empire did so armed with conviction, blood, and a confessed and risen Lord — not with the counsel to find a fellowship that was good enough and keep one's beliefs to oneself. Grounding the faith in its usefulness to democracy inverts the whole order of things. Democracy may indeed need the church. The church does not need democracy, and it must never be recruited into democracy's service as the price of its own survival. What the Anglican Realignment Already Knows The global Anglican story is Burge's thesis run as a live experiment, and it renders the verdict his conclusion resists. Where the Communion moderated — Canterbury, the Episcopal Church, the accommodating provinces of the West — it hollowed out, its cathedrals turned to museums and its rolls to obituaries. Where the Communion confessed — the Global South, GAFCON, the churches of Nigeria and Uganda and the GSFA — it multiplied. ACNA was born not of a search for a church that was good enough but of a refusal to settle for one that had become an abomination. The realignment is the standing empirical rebuttal to Burge's remedy: it is conviction, not moderation, that fills a sanctuary, and costly truth, not comfortable breadth, that holds a people together across every difference of class and color and tongue. Burge's charts, read against his own counsel, are Exhibit A for the case the orthodox have been making for a quarter century. The Word He Would Not Write So let the tribute stand and the dissent stand with it. Ryan Burge has given the church the truest ledger of its decline that we possess, and every pastor and bishop who ignores it does so to his peril. But he has mistaken the coroner's report for a course of treatment. A church with nothing worth dividing over will soon have nothing worth attending for. “Good enough” is not the gospel, and it never filled a pew that conviction had not filled first. The vanishing church will not be recalled to life by Americans returning to save their democracy. It will be recalled to life, if at all, the only way it ever has been — by men and women returning to a crucified and risen Christ, and to a church with the nerve to name Him Lord. Burge has written the autopsy. The resurrection is a different discipline, and it begins where his book leaves off. David W. Virtue, DD, is founder and managing editor of VirtueOnline. His writings can be found here: www.virtueonline.org and at his Substack: davidvirtue2.substack.com

From Anglican Mainstream August 15, 2026 To all who have been supporters of Barnabas Aid: There will be a Thanksgiving Service for the founder of Barnabas Aid the late Dr Patrick Sookhdeo on Wednesday September 2 in Oxford. We apologise that we have not been able to contact those who have been supporters directly but our requests for an invitation to be sent to the 100,000 supporters of Barnabas Fund have been consistently refused. Those wishing to attend and give thanks for Dr Patrick’s life and ministry should please email adminsa@ocrpl.org for details of the time and the place. The service will also be livestreamed. We ask that church pastors and leaders make this known to their congregations many of whom will include those who supported Dr Patrick and Barnabas Aid Thank you Canon Dr Chris Sugden Rev Fr Gavin Mitchell

Press release issued by the Anglican Diocese of Jos August 11 2026 The Anglican Diocese of Jos has noted with deep concern and sadness the circulation of misleading reports and images on social media regarding the recent attempted kidnap of the wife of the incumbent Bishop of the Diocese and the wife of the immediate-past Bishop of the Diocese. While acknowledging that the attempt is true, we wish to state the following for the records and for the benefit of the general public: 1.⁠ ⁠We condemn in the strongest terms the criminal attempt to kidnap the innocent women, and we are grateful to God and to the security agencies for their swift intervention. We continue to uphold them and their families in prayer. 2.⁠ ⁠It is true that one of the suspects is a person who presents himself as a clergyman – having worked in the Diocese of Jos before he was dismissed in 2022 by the former Bishop of the Diocese. However, we categorically state that: a. He was NOT reinstated by the present Bishop of the Anglican Diocese of Jos. b. He is NOT a clergyman in the employment, authority, or jurisdiction of the Anglican Diocese of Jos. c. The Anglican Diocese of Jos has no working relationship whatsoever with this individual. 3.⁠ ⁠It is unfortunate and malicious that the picture of the Rt. Rev. Prof. Ephraim J. Gongden, FSTAN, the incumbent Bishop of the Anglican Diocese of Jos, is being used and circulated in connection with this incident as if he is the suspect. 4.⁠ ⁠To suggest that “the clergyman is from the Diocese of Jos” and to attach the Bishop’s image to the story amount to deliberate blackmail, wickedness, misrepresentation, and an act of hatred. 5.⁠ ⁠It is misleading, sad, and unjust that the victim is now being made to look like the criminal. This is a deliberate attempt to damage the image and reputation of the Diocese, the office of the Bishop, and the Church of God. 6.⁠ ⁠We call on all media houses (electronic and conventional), bloggers, and social media users to desist from spreading unverified information, false images, and defamatory contents. 7.⁠ ⁠We urge the public to verify facts before sharing. The Church is a house of peace and truth, and we will not allow the name of Christ and His Church to be dragged into criminality. 8.⁠ ⁠We have reported this misinformation and cyber-bullying to the appropriate security and legal authorities for necessary action. 9.⁠ ⁠We call on all members of the Diocese and the entire Christian community to remain calm, prayerful, and united. Evil will not have the last word. “When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly.” – 1 Peter 2:23. Signed, Harrison N. Ugwuala Esq., Registrar, Anglican Diocese of Jos.

By David W. Virtue, DD www.virtueonline.org August 13, 2026 This month the Anglican Church in North America removed Archbishop Abraham Elavata an Indian Christian leader based in Patna, Bihar, from the program of its Matthew 25 conference, where he was to speak on the persecuted church in the East. His offense was not heresy, nor scandal, nor any failing of his own. He had attended a worship conference for Kenyan congregations in the Northwest — a gathering sponsored by Archbishop Derek Jones of the ARCC and co-hosted with bishops of the Church of Kenya, who were themselves present. For standing in that room, beside those bishops, he lost his place at a conference named for the mercy of Christ. [For the benefit of VOL readers, the Matthew 25 Conference is a Christian social‑justice and discipleship gathering built around Matthew 25:31–46.] Weigh what was named against what was done. Matthew 25 is the chapter in which the Lord tells us the nations will be judged by how they treated the hungry, the stranger, and the prisoner. The ACNA took that chapter for a ministry, and then struck from it the one man coming to speak for imprisoned Christians — because he had stood in the wrong room, beside the wrong bishop. Elavata is not the only one. The same Kenyan conference, held in Seattle this past weekend, had invited Archbishop Buba Lamido, former Dean of the Church of Nigeria, to attend and speak. He too was threatened and punished by the ACNA — his offense, having provided ministry at the ARCC’s synod in June. Had the Primate, Archbishop Henry Ndukuba, not intervened, Lamido might well have been barred from ACNA churches altogether. And the Kenyan bishops who did travel to Seattle, men whose names sit on GAFCON’s own statements? They have quietly disappeared from GAFCON’s listings. The old articles naming them remain, if you know where to look. The record was not corrected. It was scrubbed. Then there is Dr. A.J. Nolte, among the foremost scholars of Christian persecution and antisemitism, invited to lecture at a coming conference on those very subjects organized by the Anglican theologian Dr. Gerald McDermott. When Bishop Felix Orji learned that Nolte serves under Archbishop Jones in the ARCC, he instructed the organizers to disinvite him. His reason deserves to be quoted in full: “It’s not personal as I don’t even know him. It’s just where things are at this point with the ACNA and Archbishop Derek and I don’t want to be caught in the middle.” Read that admission slowly. No charge of false teaching. No question of character or competence. The bishop grants that he has never met the man. A serious scholar was removed from a conference on antisemitism — a sin that exists precisely because men are condemned for their associations rather than their deeds — for no reason but his associations. The irony would be comic if it were not so grave. The pattern reaches the mission field. ACNA bishops have urged congregations to cut off financial support from a missionary serving the war-torn people of Ukraine — not because the work has faltered, for by every account it is thriving, but because the missionary remains under Archbishop Jones and the ARCC. Ministries to the pro-life cause, to children, to the marginalized have been told to sever ties with Jones or forfeit their funding and access. The severity is selective. The same communion that cannot abide a scholar or a missionary standing near Archbishop Jones has proved willing to share platforms, dialogues, and partnerships with leaders whose theology it claims to reject. Courtesy is extended across genuine doctrinal chasms. It is withheld from fellow Anglicans who confess the same creeds, hold the same orders, and preach the same gospel. That contrast tells you what the real objection is. It is not theological. It is territorial. The ACNA will call this church discipline — a matter of order and jurisdiction. The evidence says otherwise. Churches must guard their order, and disputes over the reception of congregations are as old as the church itself. But discipline addresses the party to the dispute; it does not hunt the bystander. What has taken hold here is retaliation against a whistleblower, and it reaches past the dispute to punish those who had no part in it: an advocate for the persecuted church, a scholar of antisemitism, Ukrainian families in a war zone, ministries to the least visible. When the instrument of discipline falls again and again on the least of these, it has stopped being discipline. It has become leverage — power exercised for its own sake, with the vulnerable and the faithful left as collateral. The gospel is not abandoned in a single vote or a press release. It is abandoned one disinvitation at a time, one defunded missionary at a time, one scrubbed name at a time, one slander at a time — until a communion that claims to preach Christ crucified no longer seeks Christ first, nor knows Him in the stranger it has turned away. David W. Virtue DD is president and Managing Editor of Virtueonline, the Anglican communion’s longest running Anglican online news service. His Substack on the Middle East can be viewed here: davidvirtue2.substack.com Please consider becoming a paid supporter.

A church cannot summon the world to Christ while it summons its own to court COMMENTARY By David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueonline.org | August 12, 2026 Attorneys for Archbishop Derek Jones and his Jurisdiction of the Armed Forces and Chaplaincy filed a motion on August 6 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama, Southern Division, to dismiss the defamation complaint brought against him by Bishop Julian Dobbs, the acting archbishop of the Anglican Church in North America. It is a sad state of affairs, and it did not have to come to this. These suits should never have been filed. Bishop Dobbs, of all men, knows his New Testament. He knows what the apostle Paul told a quarrelsome congregation that had taken to dragging its disputes before pagan magistrates — that believers are to settle their grievances within the household of faith, for the sake of the Church's unity, her honor, and her witness, reserving the courts for the rare cause where justice truly requires them. What Paul actually said “Dare any of you, having a matter against another, go to law before the unjust, and not before the saints?” (1 Cor. 6:1). Paul's concern is twofold. There is the witness of the church before a watching world — every believer hauled before a secular court is a sermon preached against the Gospel. And there is the maturity of the church before her Lord — a people schooled in forgiveness, reconciliation, and the long-suffering of Christ ought to be able to settle a quarrel without a docket number. Paul does not soften it: “Now therefore there is utterly a fault among you, because ye go to law one with another. Why do ye not rather take wrong? why do ye not rather suffer yourselves to be defrauded?” (1 Cor. 6:7). To win such a suit, he says, is already to have lost. And here is the hard part for Bishop Dobbs, and I say it as a friend of the ACNA. He may well be in the right. Bishop Jones charged that Dobbs “absconded with” some $48,000 in chaplaincy funds; the disputed sum turns out to have been $3,750 misdirected into the wrong account back in 2019, tracked in the books and spent as intended. A provincial investigation under then-Archbishop Foley Beach in 2020 found no impropriety, and that very report now sits as an exhibit in Dobbs's own suit. On the merits, a court may vindicate him entirely. But Paul's counsel is not addressed to the man in the wrong. It is addressed precisely to the man in the right — the one who could win — and it tells him to rather be wronged. The higher ground is available to Bishop Dobbs at this moment. It will not be available forever. What the world sees The rest of the world does not follow the canonical fine print. Bishop Jones has separated himself from the ACNA and formed his own jurisdiction; rightly or wrongly, the die is cast, and there seems to be no going back. One bishop may frame all this as a matter of church discipline. The man in the pew reads a newspaper headline, sees a suspended archbishop, sees clergy suing clergy, and quietly wonders what became of the church that was supposed to be different. Across the aisle, Episcopal Church leaders watch and murmur that perhaps the schism was not worth it after all. And it is about to get worse. Next month — September 7 through 12 — Archbishop Steve Wood, suspended from ministry since last November, goes to trial before the Court for the Trial of a Bishop on three charges: violation of his ordination vows, conduct giving just cause for scandal or offense, and sexual immorality. Whatever the verdict, none of it will leave him, or the province he led, looking anything but wounded. The harder, better road So let me say plainly what many are thinking. Bishop Dobbs should withdraw his defamation suit now — before a trial he might lose, before compensatory and punitive damages are argued over in open court, before the whole miserable arithmetic of it is printed in the papers. And Archbishop Wood should spare the church the spectacle: step down, own what is his to own, offer the apology the body of Christ is owed, take his pension, and go. A resignation is a wound that heals. A public trial is a wound that scars. If they do not, the Washington Post will be all over this again, and again, keeping every unhappy detail before the public eye. So ask the only questions that finally matter. How does any of this advance the kingdom of God? How does it make one disciple for Jesus Christ? How does it commend the Anglican way to a single soul weighing whether to walk through the door? The ACNA already carries the strain of its unsettled debate over the ordination of women; it does not need these self-inflicted encumbrances heaped on top. There is still time to choose the harder, better road — the road of the wronged man who lays down his right for the sake of the Body. But the window is closing. End it now, brothers, before the damage is done that cannot be undone. Paul told us how this story ends when the saints go to law against one another. He called it a defeat. Let us not prove him right. David W. Virtue, DD, is founder and editor of VirtueOnline.

The Church of England will spend £100 million to atone for a sin its own ledgers may not record By David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueonline.org | August 12, 2026 Give the Church of England its due. When it resolved to repent, it did so with the full apparatus of the modern conscience — forensic accountants, an oversight group, an archbishop's tears, and a hundred million pounds laid on the altar of history. The instinct behind Project Spire is not, in itself, contemptible. A church that discovers blood in the foundations of its wealth ought to be troubled by it. Penitence is a Christian reflex, and the Commissioners reached for it. The trouble is that penitence without truth is not repentance. It is theatre. And the longer one examines the fund the Church now calls Healing, Repair and Justice, the more one suspects that the sin being atoned for was, in the crucial particular, misread. The American precedent VirtueOnline has watched a version of this play out in The Episcopal Church for more than twenty years, and the American experience is worth setting beside the English one — if only because it exposes how loosely the word “reparations” is thrown about. It is often said that The Episcopal Church seeded reparations with $1.7 million. It did not. The national church's contribution was a resolution, not a cheque. At the 2006 General Convention, Resolution A123 apologized for the Church's complicity in slavery and directed every diocese to document that complicity — but it moved no money. The dollars, when they came, came piecemeal and from below: from seminaries and dioceses, not from any churchwide fund. The $1.7 million was Virginia Theological Seminary's, established in 2019. Unlike England's still-unspent commitment, it has actually paid out. The seminary began issuing cash payments in February 2021 — roughly $2,100 a year to each identified descendant of the Black laborers, enslaved and free, whose work built the institution. More than two hundred descendants have now received payments, the endowment has grown to $2.8 million, and the money is structured to continue in perpetuity. The Diocese of Maryland took a different road. Its $1 million seed, voted in 2020, made its first disbursement in 2022 — but $175,000 to six community organizations, not a penny to individual descendants. That contrast, cash-to-descendants versus grants-to-institutions, is precisely the design quarrel now surfacing in England, where £100 million has been promised and no one can yet say who is to receive it, or how. The Americans, whatever one makes of their theology, at least settled that question before they wrote the checks. The ledger that wasn’t The whole English edifice rests on Queen Anne's Bounty, the fund founded in 1704 to relieve impoverished clergy, and on its eighteenth-century holdings in the South Sea Company. The Commissioners' researchers concluded that the Bounty had grown fat on the slave trade. Archbishop Welby apologized for it. The Bishop of Manchester likened the Church to a burglar who cannot in conscience keep his loot. A hundred million pounds followed the apology out the door. Then the historians arrived. Professor Richard Dale — a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the author of a study of the South Sea Company — pointed out what the accountants had missed. The enterprise had two distinct parts. One traded in human beings. The other was a vehicle for government debt. Queen Anne's Bounty put its money in the second: South Sea annuities, which were in plain terms gilts — loans to the Crown. To confuse the two, Dale wrote, was an elementary error. And the trade the Church now weeps over was, in cold fact, a chronic loss-maker; no investor grew rich on it, least of all one who never bought the trading shares. As Dale summed it up, the Bounty's investments, in stock or in annuities, earned nothing from the slave trade. This is not the grumbling of a partisan. Even the Commissioners' own historical advisers have conceded, in print, that the annuities and the trading securities were two separate instruments. When your own witness concedes the point, the case is in trouble. The parish left in the cold Set the history aside and a second scandal remains. The endowment the Commissioners are dipping into exists, by law and by intent, to keep parish clergy in post and parish roofs from falling in. Twenty-seven members of the Commons and the Lords reminded the incoming Archbishop of exactly this. At a moment when churches across the country are struggling to keep their doors open, they wrote, it is wrong to divert £100 million to a project entirely separate from the Church's core obligations. They called it what much of the pew already suspects it to be: a legally dubious vanity project. The pew agrees. In a poll of Anglican churchgoers, eighty-one per cent said the money should go to the parishes; sixty-one per cent said they might close their own wallets if Spire proceeds. Meanwhile the meter runs: the Church has confirmed that more than £1.15 million has already been spent on the project — on research, consultancy and legal advice — before a single grant has been made. A church that cannot fund a curate in a dying market town has found a hundred million pounds for a fund whose historical premise its own scholars cannot defend. One struggles to imagine a parable that flatters the arrangement. Repentance as performance What is most revealing is the Church's conduct under scrutiny. Faced with detailed, sourced, scholarly objection, the Commissioners have not answered it. They have closed ranks. At a Synod fringe meeting in July, Project Spire's own research co-ordinator, Charmaine Simpson, accused the critics — named historians of standing — of “deliberate misinformation.” That is not the language of a body confident in its evidence. It is the language of an institution that has committed itself publicly and cannot now afford to be wrong. And still it presses on, though it cannot yet press far. The Fund for Healing, Repair and Justice cannot even be registered with the Charity Commission; a legal challenge has seen to that. Yet from the slave fort at Cape Coast, Archbishop Sarah Mullally renewed the pledge, insisting that “part of the Christian belief in repentance is about action.” Action, yes — but repentance for what, precisely, and on whose reading of the books? A harder word There is a true repentance available to the Church of England, and it is not this. It would begin with the humility to let the historians finish their work before the cheque is written. It would remember that the endowment in question was given to feed shepherds, not to burnish the reputation of their managers. It would treat the eighty-one per cent not as an obstacle to be managed but as the faithful to be served. Scripture is not silent on offerings made to cover a fault the offerer will not honestly name. The prophets had a word for sacrifice brought in place of obedience, and it was not a word of comfort. If the Church of England wishes to repent of slavery, let it do so on the ground of what actually happened — no more, and no less. A fund built on a footnote, defended by anathemas against its critics and paid for out of the parish collection plate, is not justice. It is a mirror the institution holds up to admire its own contrition. And the God who sees in secret is not deceived by mirrors. David W. Virtue, DD is the founder and managing editor of VirtueOnline, an orthodox Anglican news and commentary website read by Anglicans in more than 100 countries. Some 21,000 stories are archived at www.virtueonline.org.

Three independent reasons necessitate dismissal they argue Bishop Derek Jones Bishop Julian Dobbs David W. Virtue I www.virtueonline.org I August 10, 2026 BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – Attorneys for Archbishop Derek Jones and the Jurisdiction of the Armed Forces and Chaplaincy filed a motion Aug. 6 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama, Southern Division, to dismiss a defamation complaint by Julian Dobbs, the acting archbishop of ACNA. The motion also seeks “all such relief as the Court may deem just and proper.” In his complaint, Dobbs alleged Jones defamed him in comments Jones made to his own clergy during a closed, confidential, intra-church meeting held to discuss the events leading to a pending federal lawsuit. Dobbs also claimed Jones defamed him in statements that were part of a sworn declaration and a verified amended complaint filed in that lawsuit in South Carolina, as well as in a national newspaper article covering the South Carolina litigation. Jones’ motion to dismiss is first based on constitutional limitations on the authority of secular courts to intervene in ecclesiastical disputes, which are at the heart of Dobbs’ defamation complaint. Truth is the ultimate defense against defamation, but to determine the truth in this case, the court would have to resolve contested questions of canonical authority, ministerial discipline and church financial accountability – all of which is outside the court’s authority. Thus, permitting Dobbs’ “defamation claims to proceed would establish a dangerous precedent under which any ecclesiastical dispute could be recharacterized as a tort claim and subjected to judicial review,” the motion says. “Religious leaders would be deterred from defending their ecclesiastical authority, communicating with their congregations about church governance, or exposing what they believe to be ecclesiastical wrongdoing for fear of civil liability,” it continues. “This chilling effect would violate the Free Exercise Clause and undermine the autonomy of religious institutions. “The First Amendment protects not only the right of religious organizations to govern themselves according to their own rules, but also the right of religious leaders to speak freely on matters of church governance and discipline without fear that their statements will be subjected to judicial scrutiny in tort actions.” Furthermore, Alabama law provides an absolute litigation privilege that bars defamation claims made in, or preliminary to, judicial proceedings. That privilege extends to all the statements Dobbs is challenging, the motion says. Not even malice can undo the privilege, it adds. As for the newspaper article, the motion notes that Dobbs conflated independent journalism with a statement by Jones. “Bishop Jones did not author the article, select its subject, determine its contents, or serve as the source of most of the information it contains,” the motion points out. Additionally, Dobbs’ complaint does not identify any false, defamatory statement Jones made to the reporter. “Instead, it alleges generally that the statements ‘need not all be specifically listed’ and treats the article as another dissemination of accusations Bishop Jones had previously made elsewhere. … That intentional formulation avoids the central relevant question at hand: What false statement did Bishop Jones actually communicate to [the reporter] that was subsequently published? The Complaint cannot establish that, because no such statement exists,” the motion says. Also, in reference to the newspaper article, the motion argues that since Dobbs is a public figure, he must show actual malice in making a defamation claim. “Bishop Dobbs has thrust himself into the vortex of this public controversy and sought to influence its resolution. He is therefore a public figure for purposes of the JAFC-ACNA dispute and must prove actual malice by clear and convincing evidence,” the motion says, adding that Dobbs “cannot meet this standard” as the statement attributed to Jones is consistent with the factual record. Another issue with Dobbs’ claims about the newspaper statement is that they infringe Jones’ free speech rights. “Because the statement addresses a matter of public concern, is based on disclosed and substantially true facts, and does not contain a provably false assertion of fact about Bishop Dobbs, it is entitled to full First Amendment protection,” the motion asserts. The motion to dismiss concludes by returning to the ecclesiastical argument: “The federal courts and the Supreme Court of Alabama could hardly be more clear: church defamation cases, especially those intrinsically connected to ecclesiastical discipline, simply cannot be adjudicated in a secular court. … Bishop Julian M. Dobbs subjected himself to a life of ministry and to its consequences and sacrifices, including, poignantly, the tensions surrounding church discipline. He cannot now come to this Court and ask it to subvert the very process he chose to live by.”