"Let the Christians of Africa and their Crusader armies know that there is no security for you except by Islam or jizya." — Islamic State Central Africa Province, in a statement claiming the massacre of worshippers in Ituri, north-eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. COMMENTARY By David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueonline.org | August 7, 2026 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 imprisoned, 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. The Epicenter: Africa Bleeds 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. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Islamic State Central Africa Province — the successor to the Allied Democratic Forces — has claimed more than 800 Christian lives in the northeast since December 2024. Its message is not coded. After butchering worshippers at prayer, it announced that there is "no security" for the Christians of Africa "except by Islam or jizya" — the tax of the subjugated, the ancient badge worn by the conquered dhimmi. This is the oldest demand in the long history of Islamic conquest, revived in our own century and preached with machine guns: convert, submit, or die. Persecution by Statute: India Elsewhere the sword is exchanged for the statute book. In India, Christians have raised an urgent call to prayer as Parliament, in its monsoon session, weighs the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Amendment Bill, 2026. Its now-notorious Clause 16 would empower a government-appointed "Designated Authority" to seize the assets of any organization — churches, schools, hospitals, charitable NGOs — whose foreign-funding registration lapses, is cancelled, or is merely left unrenewed. The confiscated property could then be sold or absorbed permanently into the state, with no court hearing and no judicial review. Institutions built and sustained over generations could be stripped away at the stroke of a bureaucrat's pen. The pretext is drawn straight from the authoritarian playbook: foreign money, national security, the specter of "conversion." The subtext is plainer still — that Christians are agents of alien powers, a fifth column to be dispossessed and disciplined. The Catholic Bishops' Conference of India has already held a national day of prayer, and a delegation of Christian leaders has pressed Union Home Minister Amit Shah to withdraw the bill or refer it to a Joint Parliamentary Committee for genuine scrutiny. As these words are written, the outcome hangs in the balance, and the churches of India are on their knees. Scapegoats: Iran In Iran, a regime cornered by its own failures has found in its Christians a convenient scapegoat. The 2026 report from Article18 — aptly titled Scapegoats — records 254 believers arrested in 2025, nearly double the previous year, the overwhelming majority charged under a penal code that criminalizes "propaganda contrary to the holy religion of Islam." After the twelve-day war with Israel last June, the Ministry of Intelligence fanned out across nineteen cities and hauled in Christians as suspected foreign agents. Their crimes were prayer meetings, baptisms, Holy Communion, and the celebration of Christmas. The Vanishing Church: Gaza Nowhere has an ancient Christian presence been squeezed closer to extinction than in Gaza. Believers have prayed on that strip of land since the earliest centuries of the faith; the Greek Orthodox Church of St. Porphyrius, raised over the tomb of a fifth-century bishop, is among the oldest churches on earth still in use. Yet a community that numbered some five thousand souls a generation ago had dwindled to barely a thousand on the eve of the current war, and by last Christmas to an estimated six hundred, scattered among three surviving congregations. The strangling began in earnest when Hamas seized the enclave by force in 2007 and set about ruling it as an Islamist statelet, with sharia as a source of law and the cross tolerated only on sufferance. Within months the Teacher's Bookshop — the last Christian bookstore in Gaza City, run by the Baptist church — was firebombed. Its manager, Rami Ayyad, a devout young father who had for years refused to be frightened into closing, was abducted in broad daylight and found tortured and murdered in October 2007. A wave of bombings against Christian schools, libraries, and institutions followed. No one was ever brought to account. The pressure since has been quieter but relentless: Christians treated as second-class dhimmi in their own homeland, converts paraded on Hamas-linked television, and, in 2012, a spate of alleged forced conversions that drove hundreds of Christians into the streets to protest, accusing Hamas-affiliated clerics of kidnapping and coercion. Families read the writing on the wall and left. Each departure thinned a church that had endured for nearly two millennia. Now the war that Hamas ignited on October 7, 2023, has brought that remnant to the edge of oblivion. Its churches have become shelters for the starving and the displaced, Christian and Muslim alike, even as the fighting has battered them and the faithful have died. Whatever share of blame the wider conflict must bear, the deeper truth is older than this war: under Hamas, the church in Gaza has been dying by degrees for a generation. What Islamist rule could not convert, it has driven out. Squeezed From Both Sides: Israel and the West Bank The Holy Land is the one place in this survey where Christians are pressed from two directions at once, and where honesty is hardest to come by — for each political camp brandishes one set of grievances and buries the other. The truth is that the dwindling remnant in the land of Christ's birth is menaced by radical Jews and radical Muslims alike, and served faithfully by neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians who claim to speak for it. From one side come the extremists of the Israeli far right. The interreligious Rossing Center in Jerusalem documented 111 anti-Christian incidents in 2024 and 155 in 2025: clergy spat upon in the Old City by ultra-Orthodox zealots, crosses and icons defiled, churches and cemeteries vandalized. In June 2025 settlers assaulted the Armenian Convent in Jerusalem; weeks later they torched the fifth-century Church of St. George and the old Christian cemetery in Taybeh, the last wholly Christian village in the West Bank. A widely shared video showed a Catholic nun shoved to the ground and kicked. To Israel's credit, the state is not the author of these acts: its police have condemned them, formed investigative units, and made arrests, and the Prime Minister himself called the spitting a disgrace. Within Israel's own borders, remarkably, the Christian population has held steady and even grown — an exception in a region where the church is everywhere else in retreat. From the other side, and over a far longer span, comes the slow strangulation of Christians under Palestinian rule. Here the damage is measured not in viral videos but in vanished generations. Bethlehem, the birthplace of Christ, was roughly 85 percent Christian within living memory; today Christians are perhaps a tenth of the town. Across the West Bank they have fallen from about a tenth of the population in 1948 to barely one percent. Behind that collapse, Christian residents and clergy describe a grim machinery: extortion and "protection" rackets, the seizure of land held since Ottoman times, the intimidation of families, the desecration of churches — a Maronite church in Bethlehem ransacked in 2019, Christmas trees put to the torch, worshippers menaced at prayer. The Nassar family, tending their farm near Bethlehem, have been beaten and dragged through Palestinian courts for ground that has been theirs for a century. And here is the cruelest turn. The Palestinian Authority pressures its Christians to keep silent, so that the harassment they endure from their Muslim neighbors goes unreported, while every grievance against Israel is amplified across the world. A frightened remnant learns to blame the safer target. Thus the persecution that has done the most to empty the Holy Land of its Christians is precisely the one least spoken of. Let both truths stand together, and let neither be flattened. A cross defiled by a settler is a cross defiled; a family driven from Bethlehem by an Islamist mob is a family driven out. Yet neither the spitting of a fanatic nor the extortion of a militia is the same as the beheading of a believer in the Congo, and to call them all by one undifferentiated word is to empty "persecution" of its meaning. The honest verdict is narrower and sadder: in the very land where the Church was born, she is being crushed slowly between two stones — and too many who claim to defend her are content to point only at the stone they dislike. The Bible as Contraband: Pakistan and North Korea In Pakistan, the blasphemy laws remain a loaded gun leveled at every Christian in the land; an accusation alone — true or invented — can end a life or empty a village before any court is troubled. And in North Korea, first on the World Watch List for a twenty-fourth consecutive year, a single Bible discovered in a home can consign an entire family to a labor camp for the rest of their days. There the Word of God is contraband and faith itself is treason. It Does Not Stay Overseas And then there is the comfortable West, which imagines itself immune. It is not. In the United Kingdom, the Countryside Alliance recorded 3,809 crimes against churches and places of worship in 2025 — more than ten every single day — theft, arson, criminal damage, and violence visited upon the sanctuaries of a civilization that no longer troubles to guard them. Not every act was ideological. But a culture that will not defend its holy places has already forgotten why they were holy. Not every sign is grim. In Texas, on March 3, some 95 percent of Republican primary voters backed Proposition 10, an advisory measure calling for the prohibition of Sharia law in the state — a blunt, grassroots refusal to let the ideology now devastating Christians abroad take root at home. One may argue over the measure's legal necessity; one cannot mistake its meaning. Nearly two million voters stood up and said: not here. The Law of Christ The lesson of this survey is not that persecution is far away. It is that persecution travels. What begins as a massacre in Ituri or a seizure order in Delhi arrives, in its own time, as a shattered window in an English parish and a warning on a Texas ballot. The same spirit that beheads in the Congo defaces in Yorkshire; it merely changes its clothes. The Western church has grown fat on its freedoms and forgetful of its own family. While our brothers and sisters are shot in their fields, arrested at their prayers, and stripped of their schools, too much of the comfortable church busies itself with the furniture of its own decline — its commissions, its causes, its endless self-examination. Canterbury readily finds its voice for every fashionable grievance and loses it entirely for the martyrs. But Paul did not write to spectators. "Carry each other's burdens," he told the Galatians, "and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ" (Galatians 6:2). That is not a pious suggestion to be filed and forgotten. It is the law of Christ — and the persecuted church is calling in the debt. David W. Virtue, DD, has covered Anglican and Episcopal affairs for over thirty-five years. He is founder and managing editor of VirtueOnline. Some 21,000 stories are archived at Virtueonline’s website: www.virtueonline.org His substack on Israel can be found here davidvirtue2.substack.com

By David W. Virtue, DD www.VirtueOnline.org August 7, 2026 CHARLESTON, SC — The ecclesiastical court that will try ACNA Archbishop Steve Wood next month has slammed the door on his attempt to obtain the confidential files of the Board of Inquiry that recommended charges against him, ruling that the Board's work is sealed — as to both its participants and its contents — and that the court “will not breach that confidentiality.” The order, denying Wood's Motion to Compel Production of Board of Inquiry Investigation Documents, was signed by the Rt. Rev. Ryan Reed, President of the Court for the Trial of a Bishop, and by presiding officer Katherine R. Grosskopf. It leaves the archbishop's six-day trial on track to begin September 7 in Charleston, with each side allotted fifteen hours to present its case, cross-examine witnesses, and argue before the court. The court could have rested on confidentiality alone. It said so plainly. But “in the interests of transparency for the good of the Church,” it chose to lay out its reasoning — and in doing so drew a bright line between two processes that Wood's motion had sought to blur. A Closed System The Board of Inquiry, the court explained, had one job and one job only: to review the accusations and decide whether there was enough evidence that a canonical offense may have occurred. It did that. Its investigation, the order states, “does not overlap with this Court's inquiry. It is its own closed system, and this Court will not second-guess its processes nor with it breach the confidentiality.” The analogy the court reached for is one every reader will recognize. The Board of Inquiry, it said, “is like a Grand Jury proceeding in the secular system.” Grand jury evidence and proceedings are kept secret and stand entirely apart from any trial that follows. So it is here. The trial court does not see the evidence the Board reviewed. It does not speak to the Board's members. It will decide the matter of Archbishop Steve Wood, the order says, “solely on the Presentment pleading, the responses by the archbishop, and the evidence submitted at trial.” The Back Door At the heart of Wood's motion was an insinuation. The Provincial prosecutor has stated that she turned over everything the Board of Inquiry handed her, and Wood conceded — the court was careful to note — that he is not suggesting she withheld anything. Yet the Archbishop pressed on: he had, he said, “been contacted by a witness who submitted exculpatory and/or impeachment information to the BOI through the Director of Safeguarding and Canonical Affairs.” The implication was that favorable evidence had reached the Board, never reached him, and that the province had somehow behaved improperly. The court was unmoved, and it dismantled the argument with a single observation: by his own words, Wood knows who the witness is. That witness knows what he or she submitted. That evidence can be handed to the archbishop directly, and the witness can be called to testify at trial — provided he or she has made himself available for deposition. “Therefore,” the order reads, “there is no need to breach the confidentiality of the Board of Inquiry process, and this Court will not entertain what seems to be a back-door way of casting doubt on the Board of Inquiry process.” It is a sharp rebuke, and a revealing one. The court plainly read the motion not as a genuine discovery dispute but as an attempt to relitigate the very existence of the charges by impeaching the body that brought them. No Surprises The order closes by reaffirming the rules of engagement. The court has already directed that all documentary evidence either side might submit be exchanged between the parties, and that every witness either side wishes to call make himself available for deposition. The conclusion follows with the cadence of a gavel: “There will be no surprise evidence submitted at trial. There will be no surprise witnesses. Both parties have had AMPLE time to review all evidence and prepare their cases.” The trial will run six days beginning September 7, 2026. The Scheduling Order of July 6, 2026 remains in effect. For an archbishop who came to the office as a reformer, the ruling is a setback on procedure that carries a heavier symbolic weight. Wood cannot go behind the Board of Inquiry. He must meet the charges on the trial floor, in the open, on the evidence — the same standard to which the province's clergy and laity have been held. The court has made clear it will not permit the trial of a bishop to become a trial of the process that produced him. VirtueOnline will continue its coverage as the September 7 trial approaches.

The Church of England Joins the Chorus By David W. Virtue, DD I www.virtueonline.org I August 5, 2026 In July 2026 the General Synod of the Church of England voted to “hear” and engage with a document that accuses the State of Israel of genocide. Set that sentence beside another: this is the Church of Arthur Balfour, whose 1917 declaration gave the Jewish people the charter to a national home, and of Winston Churchill, who as Colonial Secretary became that promise’s unflinching champion. The Church that once helped midwife Israel into being has now lent its chamber to those who would unmake it. The document is Kairos Palestine II, formally titled A Moment of Truth: Faith in a Time of Genocide, published in November 2025. It brands the Jewish state a “colonial enterprise built on racism” and deploys the full lexicon of the age — “apartheid,” “settler colonialism,” “Jewish supremacy,” “genocide.” Britain’s Chief Rabbi, Sir Ephraim Mirvis, pleaded with the Synod to reject it, warning that it erases Jewish identity and experience and imperils decades of painstaking Christian–Jewish reconciliation. The Synod platformed it anyway. Members stopped short of formal endorsement — they swapped the word “receive” for “hear” — but everyone in that chamber knew the damage was done. What makes it beyond comprehension is the reversal. In 2019 the Church of England issued God’s Unfailing Word, its first authoritative statement on Christian–Jewish relations, confessing that Christian teaching had furnished a “fertile seed-bed for murderous antisemitism” and helped pave the road to the Holocaust. In 2022 the same Church knelt in a formal act of repentance for the medieval laws that expelled England’s Jews. Barely a few years later, it lends its pulpit to a text that many British Jews read as asking, in effect, when the last Jew will leave. The conceit that Jerusalem might yet be built on England’s green and pleasant land now curdles into a colonialism of the worst and most cynical sort. It is one of the most hostile postures toward the Jewish people ever struck by the established Church. Antisemitism in Diplomatic Dress To grasp what the Synod has done, one must name the thing it has joined. Antisemitism is the world’s oldest hatred. For two millennia it has mutated — religious, then racial, then political — but it has never died. What is emerging now is newer and more insidious: the delegitimization of Israel as a nation-state. It is the claim that Israel is a non-state, that it does not truly exist, that it never had the right to exist, and that the whole of the land belongs to a Palestine that has never once existed as a sovereign nation. This is not, at bottom, about violence. It is about denial. It is the denial of a people whose presence in that land is traceable across some four thousand years — back to Abraham, through the kingdoms of David and Solomon, through exile and return. The Arab and Muslim claim, by contrast, dates only to the seventh century, when the armies of Islam conquered the Levant in 636–638 A.D. To delegitimize Israel is to declare the Jew a non-person. It is antisemitism dressed in a diplomatic vocabulary — and in July, that vocabulary was spoken from the floor of the mother Church of the Anglican Communion. England Is Not Alone The Synod’s vote did not fall from a clear sky. The latest voices have been rising from unexpected quarters. Ireland — home to fewer than 3,000 Jews — has erupted in a Jew-hatred wholly disproportionate to its tiny Jewish community. Australia has seen synagogues torched and Jews harassed in the street. But of all these, England is the gravest, because England is not merely another nation with a restive street; it is the seat of a Church that helped give Israel its charter and once confessed its own complicity in the Holocaust. When Canterbury joins the chorus, the chorus acquires a mitre. Iran Says the Quiet Part Aloud Behind the theology and the diplomacy stands the hard geopolitical fact: Iran means what it says. This is why Tehran feels no shame in seeking Israel’s annihilation — an Israel that today numbers some 7.7 million Jews living alongside roughly two million Arab citizens, many of whom call themselves Palestinian, in a single democratic state. “Death to Israel” and “Death to America” are not the overheated slogans of a passing mob. They are the settled policy of a regime that has spent four decades and untold billions trying to send Israel to hell — without once grasping that it is Tehran that is dispatching itself there. Physician, heal thyself. October 7, 2023 — the day Hamas murdered some 1,200 Israelis and dragged roughly 250 more into the tunnels of Gaza — is now recast as payback, as resistance, as a justified response to Israeli oppression. This is no longer the language of the old antisemitic trope. It cuts to the core of Israeli identity itself, to the very right of the Jew to defend his life. It is the same denial the Synod flirted with, carried to its logical end. Iran and the Unfinished Task Iran’s hatred of Israel is not rhetorical but programmatic, pursued through Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and above all through the relentless drive for a nuclear weapon — the one instrument that could translate “Death to Israel” from a chant into a mushroom cloud. Israel understood this, and in June 2025 it struck. Operation Rising Lion crippled Iran’s air defenses and its nuclear infrastructure in twelve days; the United States finished the blow when American B-2 bombers dropped fourteen bunker-busters on Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan in Operation Midnight Hammer. In February 2026, when Tehran began quietly rebuilding, Washington and Jerusalem struck again in Operation Epic Fury. The mullahs’ program has been set back by years — but not, the intelligence tells us, destroyed. Iran now regards the bomb not as an ambition but as the guarantor of its survival. That is precisely why the job is not finished. A regime that preaches genocide and pursues the means to commit it cannot be permitted to catch its breath, rebuild its centrifuges, or resurrect the caliphal dream of a Shia empire stretching to the Mediterranean. President Trump was right to strike, and he must now stay the course — denying Tehran’s rulers, whoever they may prove to be, the time and the materials to finish what they have openly promised to start. The Cardinal Sin The delegitimization of Israel is the world’s cardinal sin because it is a rehearsal for the world’s oldest crime. Iran says the quiet part aloud. Too many in the West — now, God help us, from the pulpit of Canterbury — say it softly. The task before Israel, and before every friend of the Jewish people, is to make certain that neither the loud voice nor the soft one is ever permitted to prevail. David W. Virtue, DD, has covered Anglican and Episcopal affairs for over thirty-five years. He is founder and managing editor of VirtueOnline (www.virtueonline.org), where some 21,000 stories are archived. A version of this essay first appeared on his Middle East Substack.

Across a dozen dioceses, The Episcopal Church has perfected the art of protecting its bishops and abandoning the abused. A single watchdog is doing the work the shepherds will not COMMENTARY By David W. Virtue, DD I www.virtueonline.org I August 4, 2026 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. A labyrinth by design At the center of the failure sits Title IV, the denomination's clergy-disciplinary canon. On paper it is a solemn instrument of accountability. In practice it is a labyrinth — slow, opaque, and, when the accused wears a purple shirt, very nearly inescapable in the complainant's favor. The design flaw is structural and it is not subtle: bishops judge bishops. Complaints against them have historically passed through the Office of Pastoral Development, an arm of the Presiding Bishop's own establishment, before a Disciplinary Board for Bishops composed largely of their peers decides whether any of them will be inconvenienced. Ask a room full of shepherds to indict one of their own and you will get precisely the verdict the Episcopal Church keeps producing. You need not take my word for it. In the autumn of 2023, fifty-five members of the House of Bishops signed a letter conceding what the laity had long suspected — that in case after high-profile case, bishops accused of misconduct had faced “few or no consequences.” It is a rare thing for an institution to confess its own corruption in writing. Rarer still for it to do anything about it. If the second-highest officer cannot get justice Consider the case of Julia Ayala Harris, President of the House of Deputies — the highest lay office in the church. She alleged that in July 2022, on the very day of her election at the 80th General Convention, a retired bishop “physically overpowered” her and made inappropriate remarks as she waited to be presented to the House of Bishops. Two other bishops witnessed enough to file reports; three eyewitnesses figured in the investigation. The accused was later identified as retired Oklahoma Bishop Ed Konieczny, who denied any wrongdoing. And the outcome? As Episcopal News Service and The Living Church both reported, the church attorney referred the matter for a “pastoral response in lieu of disciplinary action” — which is ecclesiastical Latin for dismissal. No finding. No penalty. Ayala Harris called it an obvious abuse of discretion, and asked the question the whole church should have been asking: if the president of the House of Deputies can be treated this way at the very door of the House of Bishops, who in the church is safe? The bishops adopted a statement lamenting the “pain and grief.” Then they moved on. The golden parachute Then there is Prince Singh. In June 2023 his two adult sons and his former wife went public with allegations of years of physical, verbal, and psychological abuse. Singh — then bishop provisional of Eastern and Western Michigan, and before that Bishop of Rochester — was restricted from ministry that September and resigned the following day. He disputed the allegations throughout. Note what followed, because it is the template. There was no trial in any meaningful sense. In December 2024 the new Presiding Bishop, Sean Rowe, announced an “accord” — a negotiated settlement — under which Singh was suspended, but pointedly not deposed. His family, who had begged the church for years to act, were left to plead publicly that Title IV “lends itself to retraumatizing survivors and to protecting offenders.” They are right. And Singh's predecessor in those same Michigan dioceses, Whayne Hougland, had himself been suspended in 2020 for an extramarital affair before being quietly restored. Two bishops, one set of dioceses, the same soft landing. The church calls it reconciliation. The rest of us recognize a golden parachute when we see one. Grooming gets swept under the rug Then we have the case of The Rev. Jonathan Adams, rector of Trinity Episcopal, in Upperville, Virginia, in the Diocese of Virginia the spiritual home of various billionaires, including the late Paul and Bunny Mellon, the church would seem to be a reliably safe place. Yet after a Fauquier County police report concluded that Adams had groomed a boy, and had informed the Diocese of its conclusions, Bishop E. Mark Stevenson did nothing more than issue a secret directive that basically told Adams to stop. Adams is on sabbatical, and has resigned as rector, effective in October. Meanwhile, he remains a priest in good standing and is still on the Trinity Church payroll — despite prior complaints to the Diocese alleging that Adams was bullying staff, including firing one person who questioned the credibility of Adams’ statements about his prior work experience. The gravest case, and the coldest silence But the case that should shame every bishop in the church is that of the Rev. Richard Losch. In 2023 a grand jury in Grafton County, New Hampshire indicted Losch, an Episcopal priest canonically resident in the Diocese of Alabama, on a charge of aggravated felonious sexual assault of a boy under the age of thirteen — conduct alleged to date to the mid-1970s, when a boy from Marblehead, Massachusetts says Losch drove him across state lines to a Boy Scout camp and raped him. Losch denies the allegations. At trial in April 2025 the jury deadlocked, and he was not convicted. As a matter of law, he is innocent until a court says otherwise. But the criminal law is not the church's excuse, and here the record is damning. According to Anglican Watch, whose reporting has been indispensable throughout, the victim pleaded for help from Episcopal officials more than a dozen times over several years — and was met, at every level, with indifference. The intake officer did nothing. The Office of Pastoral Development, then under Bishop Todd Ousley — the man responsible for training bishops in their own disciplinary obligations — refused to get involved. Emails to the Presiding Bishop went unanswered. Anglican Watch has since charged that senior figures, including former Presiding Bishop Michael Curry and Alabama Bishop Glenda Curry, failed in their duty, alleging that the church ignored mandatory reporting laws in multiple states and, in Glenda Curry's case, engaged in outright coverup. And through all of it — indictment, trial, hung jury — Richard Losch remained an Episcopal priest in good standing, well into his nineties. A church that can suspend a bishop for an affair within months, but cannot bring itself to laicize an indicted alleged child rapist in years, has told you exactly what it values. What the church will actually discipline Which brings us to the bitterest irony of all. Comb the church's own transparency page for a bishop it has actually convicted and removed, and you arrive at William Love of Albany. His offense was not abuse, not assault, not the shielding of a predator. In 2020 a hearing panel found that Bishop Love had violated church law by forbidding his clergy to use the same-sex marriage rite. For declining, on grounds of conscience and Scripture, to bless what the church had newly decided to bless, he was disciplined and driven out. Let that sit. The Episcopal Church's clearest, cleanest exercise of episcopal discipline in recent memory fell not on a man accused of harming the vulnerable, but on an orthodox bishop who would not perform a wedding. The institution defends what it truly worships, and its recent record reveals the object of its devotion. It is not the little ones for whom Christ reserved the millstone. The lone watchdog Almost none of this would be public without Anglican Watch and its editor, Eric Bonetti, a retired attorney who has turned an unofficial watchdog site into the one place the abused of this church can be heard. Its Episcopal Accountability Project invites victims to name their abusers and tell the truth in the open. It has been involved, directly or indirectly, in nearly every national-level bishop's case of the past several years. That the work of holding a wealthy denomination to its own canons should fall to a single dogged blogger is itself an indictment — of a General Convention that studies the problem, a House of Bishops that laments it, and a hierarchy that will do almost anything except surrender its own impunity. Ezekiel knew these men. “Woe to the shepherds of Israel who feed themselves! Should not the shepherds feed the flocks?” The Episcopal Church has bishops in abundance and shepherds almost nowhere. Until it is willing to depose one of its own for the sake of a child rather than a rubric, its policies are parchment and its apologies are noise. The abused are still waiting at the door. The bishops, as ever, have moved on. David W. Virtue, DD, has covered Anglican and Episcopal affairs for over thirty-five years. He is founder and editor of VirtueOnline. Some 21,000 stories are archived at Virtueonline’s website: www.virtueonline.org His Substack on the Middle East can be found here: davidvirtue2.substack.com

COMMENTARY By David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueonline.org | August 3, 2026 If you want to know what schism actually costs — not in theory, not in press releases, but in souls — don't read a canon or a court ruling. Look at the Episcopal Diocese of San Joaquin. San Joaquin was the first full diocese to walk out of the Episcopal Church, and it did so in two deliberate steps. In December 2006, its convention voted to strike from the diocesan constitution the language by which it acceded to the Constitution and Canons of the Episcopal Church. The decisive blow came a year later. On December 8, 2007, the Fresno-based diocese, under Bishop John-David Schofield, voted overwhelmingly to sever ties with TEC and align with the Argentina-based Anglican Province of the Southern Cone. Now look at what remains Today the Episcopal Diocese of San Joaquin counts 18 churches and 1,958 members, under Bishop David Rice. The rival Anglican diocese, under Anglo-Catholic Bishop Eric Menees, counts 30 churches and 2,392 members. On the day the diocese divided, it had 8,500 members. Add the two survivors together and you reach roughly 4,350. The Anglicans — the ones who kept the faith — finished with a mere 434 more members than the church they left behind. Do the arithmetic. Between them, the two bodies have lost more than half of what was once a single diocese. More than 4,000 people — better than four in ten — simply walked away and never came back. This is the legacy of Gene Robinson. This is what his 2003 consecration purchased in one Central Valley diocese. Ask it honestly: how has any of this served Christ's Church or advanced His kingdom? It has not. And the man who presided over the wreckage on the Episcopal side — the man who made certain the departing were stripped, sued, and driven out — died this week. His name was Jerry Lamb. He was 85. He died on July 25. Pardon me if I do not pretend to mourn. The Enforcer Let us be precise, because precision is the sharper weapon. Lamb did not start the fire at San Joaquin; Gene Robinson and the General Convention did that. But when the Presiding Bishop needed a man to punish those who left, Lamb answered the call — and he did the work with relish. A former Roman Catholic priest who had served as a college chaplain and camp director, Lamb was ordained an Episcopal priest in the Diocese of Oregon in 1977. He rose through the Diocese of Northern California — rector, diocesan staff, and in 1991 coadjutor to Bishop John L. Thompson — before succeeding Thompson as the diocese's sixth bishop the following year. He led Northern California for fourteen years. His churchmanship, it must be said, was as thin as his institutional ambition was not. Communion for the Unbaptized Consider the doctrine for which Lamb is best remembered. He was among the Episcopal Church's first public champions of communion without baptism — offering the Body and Blood of Christ to men and women who had never been baptized into His death. By his own telling, he crossed that line at a funeral in the 1990s. According to a 2022 account first published in Deputy News, Lamb resolved to invite the unbaptized to the altar while burying the husband of his secretary — a sheriff's deputy killed in the line of duty. With law officers filling the pews, Lamb reportedly said he could not stand there and tell them only the baptized might come forward: “I just can't do that.” Sentiment, however, is not sacramental theology. What Lamb could not bring himself to do was hold a line the Church has held since the apostles. Years later, when his own former diocese moved to repeal the canon requiring baptism before communion, 22 prominent Episcopal theologians rose to condemn it, and General Convention — to its limited credit — took no action. That is the ground Lamb spent a career softening. San Joaquin Then came his true assignment. After Lamb retired from Northern California in late 2006, and after San Joaquin voted to leave, the ultra-liberal Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori nominated him bishop provisional — charged, she said, with serving the clergy and congregations who wished to remain Episcopalian. Delegates from just 19 of the diocese's original 47 congregations elected him. He declared his intentions at once. On taking office, Lamb licensed three women priests into what had been one of only three domestic Episcopal dioceses that declined to ordain women — a calculated affront to the Anglo-Catholic conscience of the place. He spoke, naturally, of reconciliation. The word was hollow. His lawyers were already drafting the suits to seize the property of the congregations that had withdrawn. In the fall of 2008 he deposed 36 priests and 16 deacons of the Anglican diocese, charging them with abandoning the communion of the Episcopal Church — their offense being that they declined to beg release from vows they fully intended to keep. He stepped down in 2011, his work finished. The courts completed it. In July 2009, California's Superior Court ruled that Lamb's body was the true Episcopal Diocese of San Joaquin and the rightful owner of the assets the departing parishes held. Rulings in 2013 and 2014 forced the return of more than 30 properties; the Anglican appeals were exhausted by 2016. The buildings were recovered. The people were not. The Final Accounting Give the man his due: he was efficient. He did precisely what he was sent to do, and he did it thoroughly. But look at what the efficiency bought. He won the buildings and lost the diocese. He got the deeds and left the pews empty. He enforced the canons and emptied the churches. Half a diocese is gone, and no lawsuit will ever bring it back. That is what schism really looks like. ENS contributed to this report.

By David Straw Special to Virtueonline www.virtueonline.org August 3, 2026 This is the third piece in a series. In A Palace Built on a Slope I described a closed theological system that many Roman Catholic apologists have constructed. I called it the Mind Palace. In The Unfalsifiable Church I tested that system against history and watched it absorb every objection I raised. This essay asks a different question. Why do systems become closed in the first place? I do not think they usually begin that way. More often they are the corruption of something that was once open. What an Open System Looks Like Classical Anglicanism makes a claim that sounds modest but is anything but. Holy Scripture is the final authority because it contains all things necessary to salvation. In the language the Reformers used, Scripture is the norma normans, the norming norm. It judges everything else and is itself judged by nothing. The Fathers and the ancient Church are a norma normata, a normed norm. Their authority is real but derivative. They carry weight because they bear faithful witness to Scripture, not because they stand beside it as an equal source. Scripture’s supremacy does not mean private judgment. Scripture is read within the consensus of the ancient Church, not against it, and not against private opinion, whether that opinion comes from a Roman magisterium or a Reformer’s own conclusions. Where the Fathers agree, that agreement carries real weight. Where a reader, however learned, breaks from that consensus on his own authority, he has not appealed to a higher court. He has simply become his own. That is the hinge the whole system turns on. The Church has real authority, but it is ministerial, not magisterial. A ministerial authority serves the Word. It cannot bind the conscience beyond what Scripture warrants, and it cannot declare itself infallible. A magisterial authority claims the opposite power: the right to settle, finally and without appeal, what Scripture means. Rome claims that kind of authority for itself. Anglicanism, at its best, has refused to claim it, for itself as much as for anyone else. The Anglican Reformers did not throw out the Fathers. They went back to them. Scripture remained the supreme judge, but it was meant to be read alongside the ancient Church, not against private opinion or later invention. This produces real messiness. An open system is not simply one that tolerates disorder. It takes work to sustain, and the work is spiritual before it is intellectual. It asks for intellectual humility, because we might be wrong. It asks for patience with questions that may never resolve in our lifetime. And it asks us to stay receptive enough that the right answer might come from outside our own tradition or century. These are the virtues that separate an open system from mere untethered vagueness. Vagueness refuses to commit to anything. Anglican Christianity, as an open system, commits fully to Scripture and stays humble about its own reading of Scripture. Those look similar from a distance. Up close they are not the same thing at all. The Caroline Divines are a good example of what this looked like in practice. Men like Lancelot Andrewes and Jeremy Taylor read the Fathers carefully, not to decorate conclusions they had already reached, but as witnesses whose testimony had to be weighed against Scripture and against each other. They disagreed with some of the early Church Fathers when Scripture required it. They disagreed with Rome when Scripture and the ancient Church did not back Rome’s claims. They disagreed with the Puritans when the ancient Church stood against a narrow biblicism that threw out the Church’s first several centuries. They argued in every direction. That willingness to argue in every direction is what an open system looks like from the inside, and it is not comfortable. It was never supposed to be. The Fathers did not agree about everything. There was no golden age when every bishop spoke with one voice on every question. Anyone who has read them for long enough knows this. That disagreement is not proof the system failed. It shows the system was still in contact with reality. Real wrestling is messy. A system that never produces genuine tension has usually decided its answers in advance. I lived through what I think of as one of the last stretches when much of the Episcopal Church still assumed that Scripture and the catholic tradition stood above the surrounding culture. Others older than I am remember it even more clearly. They describe a church that was deeply rooted in Scripture and ancient church tradition, intellectually serious, and confident enough to shape the culture instead of being shaped by it. That confidence did not come from having every question settled. It came from staying answerable to something outside itself. Why Closed Systems Are Tempting A system closes when it can no longer stand an authority outside itself. Instead of staying accountable to that authority, it quietly becomes its own referee. Every objection gets processed by the very system under examination, and the system always rules in its own favor. Why does this happen? Partly because uncertainty is hard to live with. Partly because institutions want stability. Partly because our identities get bound up in systems we have spent our lives defending. The pull is deeply human. We all want a place where the hardest questions finally stop. Reality, though, has a stubborn habit of refusing to cooperate. The Mechanism of Closure It helps to name the mechanism plainly, because once you see it, you cannot unsee it. A closed system takes evidence that should count against it and quietly recounts it as evidence for it. It treats its own internal consistency as if that consistency were proof from outside, when consistency only shows a system holds together, not that it is true. It puts the interpreter beyond correction, since the interpreter now decides what counts as a valid objection in the first place. And it turns criticism into confirmation. The objection is never actually answered. It gets absorbed and relabeled as more evidence for the very thing it was meant to challenge. I described one example of this in Roman Catholic apologetics. Newman’s theory of doctrinal development gives the system a remarkably flexible way to absorb historical discontinuities. What looks like contradiction becomes clarification. What looks like innovation becomes the unfolding of something that was supposedly present all along. The system cannot lose, because it has quietly redefined what losing would even look like. Once that framework is in place, walking a development back becomes extremely difficult. Any proposed reversal must be justified inside the same interpretive authority that certified the earlier movement. Change is continually narrated as deeper fidelity, so the possibility of genuine external correction is structurally limited. The Assumption of Mary is a clean example of the pattern at work. The teaching appears nowhere in Scripture and shows no clear consensus among the early Fathers. It surfaces centuries later, gains devotional traction, and in 1950 is defined as dogma binding on every Catholic. The warrant offered is not Scripture as final norm and not early consensus. It is fittingness, the judgment that this is what the deposit of faith was always tending toward, certified by the very authority that alone gets to decide what counts as legitimate development. A late, extra-scriptural teaching becomes irreversible doctrine. Discontinuity is reclassified as continuity. And the system that made the call is the same system no one outside it is permitted to correct. The same mechanism shows up in very different settings. Certain forms of critical theory treat disagreement itself as confirmation. An objection stops being evidence against the theory and becomes evidence that the objector has been shaped by the very structures the theory describes. Freudian orthodoxy often worked the same way. Rejecting the analyst’s interpretation became evidence of psychological resistance, and the resistance confirmed the interpretation. Conspiracy thinking runs on the identical pattern. No evidence surfacing just proves the cover-up is especially good. The content is different in each case. The underlying structure is not. This is not a claim that Roman Catholics are secretly Marxists or that activists are secretly Freudians. Their beliefs share almost nothing. What they share is a self-sealing habit, a system built so that no conceivable evidence is allowed to overturn its central conclusions. That is what makes a system closed. Where Anglicanism Has to Answer the Same Question If I am going to hold Rome to this standard, I have to hold my own tradition to it too. What would actually count as evidence against classical Anglicanism? The honest answer is: quite a lot. If the ancient Church, read broadly and where the Fathers substantially agree, turned out to teach something Anglicanism denies, that would count against it. If Scripture itself, read plainly, through the lens of the early Fathers, and in its own context, contradicted the Anglican reading, that would count against it too. Anglicanism does not get to declare its own conclusions unfalsifiable the way a closed system does. It has to keep answering to Scripture and to the ancient Church, and it has to be willing to lose that argument if the evidence runs the other way. That willingness to lose is not a weakness in the system. It is the thing that keeps it honest. Two Directions, One Flight I do not think most people set out wanting certainty at any cost. I think they simply grow tired. Scripture, tradition, and reason do not always fit together neatly. Anglicanism asks us to stay faithful to all three while letting unresolved questions stay unresolved. That is a hard discipline, because it asks for real humility. Some people eventually tire of the tension. They move toward systems that promise a final answer. Sometimes that means Rome. Sometimes it means one variety of fundamentalism or another. The details differ, but the pull is the same. The wrestling is over. The answers are settled. Certainty has arrived. I do not think most of these people are dishonest or looking for an easy way out. Most of them are simply tired, and looking for rest. That desire is not itself a sin. But the system they have joined demands constant defense, and defending a system that cannot be questioned will eventually harden even a gentle and sincere person. Others move the opposite way. Unable to bear the same tension, they replace Scripture and the ancient catholic witness with the surrounding culture. The referee changes. Instead of asking whether the culture conforms to the faith once delivered, the Church starts asking whether the faith conforms to the culture. That is how churches slowly lose the ability to resist the changing spirit of the age. The Episcopal Church did not abandon historic Christianity overnight. The process was gradual. As the surrounding culture became the practical standard by which Scripture was judged, the Church lost its independent point of reference in Scripture. Once that happened, there was little left to slow the drift. These two paths look opposite, heading toward Rome on one side and toward the culture on the other. Both still claim, in different ways, to submit to something outside themselves. Rome does not abandon the claim to stand under Scripture and the ancient Church. It relocates the deciding voice inside a magisterium that determines, unappealably, what Scripture and tradition mean, so the submission is real in name and closed in function. Once doctrinal development is the working rule, every shift can be narrated as fidelity, and genuine reversal becomes nearly impossible. Progressivism does not bother with the pretense. It simply swaps Scripture for the will of the age and drops the claim to an independent check altogether. Because the age itself keeps changing, the theology must keep changing with it. The mechanisms differ. The outcome does not. In both cases, nothing outside the system’s own judgment is left standing that could actually correct it or walk a drift back. This is why I have often said Anglicans make excellent conservatives, and especially good traditionalists, but very poor fundamentalists. Faithful Anglicans have disagreed with each other for centuries. Evangelicals, Anglo Catholics, and Prayer Book churchmen have argued for generations. Those arguments stayed possible because everyone still agreed that Scripture, read within the received faith of the ancient Church, stood above all of them. The collapse comes the moment someone decides the tension itself has to end. That is the moment the via media disappears. The via media was never about splitting the difference or finding a comfortable middle point. It was about staying accountable to an authority none of us has the right to redefine on our own terms. A Failure of Trust, Not Just a Failure of Logic Here is what I think is the deeper problem, and it is not mainly intellectual. A person who cannot live with unresolved tension is often not really making an argument. He may be telling you something closer to a confession, whether he realizes it or not, that he no longer feels confident God speaks reliably through Scripture and the ordinary life of the Church, and he wants a human guarantee to stand in for that confidence. I say this carefully. I cannot see another person’s heart, and I could be wrong about any one person in front of me. But as a pattern, this is often less a failure of reasoning than a failure of trust. It belongs more to the territory of spiritual formation than to the territory of logic. That is why closed systems rarely get argued out of their positions. You are not correcting a syllogism. You are speaking to a wound, and wounds do not usually respond to better arguments. The Ground Beneath Every Palace Certainty is not the enemy. Christianity makes claims that are true or false. The Creeds are not suggestions. The problem was never confidence. The problem is becoming immune to correction. Healthy confidence stays answerable to God’s Word as received in the faith of the ancient Church. A closed system slowly loses that accountability until nothing is allowed to count against it anymore. Once that happens, defending the system and defending yourself become the same act. If you find yourself talking with a Catholic apologist who has an answer for every historical difficulty, or with an activist who has already diagnosed your motives before you have finished a sentence, you may not be talking with a dishonest person. You may simply be talking with someone who has decided the wrestling has to end, someone tired in the same way we all get tired, who has mistaken a closed system for rest. You will not talk such a person out of it by being cleverer inside their system. Instead, try asking what evidence would actually change their mind. Not as a trap, and not expecting a tidy answer. Ask it the way you would ask a friend, because underneath the system he is defending, that is probably still what he is. His answer, or his failure to give one, will tell you whether you are talking with someone who holds convictions or with someone a system has swallowed whole, a system that no longer lets any conviction of his be tested. Classical Anglicanism was never meant to end the struggle. It was meant to give us solid ground to stand on: Holy Scripture, read within the received faith of the ancient Church, always open to correction by God’s Word, and honest enough to admit some questions, like our differences in churchmanship, will stay unresolved this side of glory. Because that standard stands outside the present interpreters, the tradition retains the capacity, at least in principle, to check or reverse a drift that has already begun. The palace next door may look more finished. It may have a well-kept garden and grand halls inside its walls. But a house built to stand permanent inspection is safer ground than one built to survive by never being questioned. It costs something to keep standing there. Mostly it costs the willingness to still be wrong. The Rev. David Straw is Rector of Trinity Anglican Church (ACNA/REC) in Evansville, Indiana. A church planter, he has helped plant three Anglican congregations. He was ordained to the diaconate in 2007 and to the priesthood in 2008. He is a graduate of Wesley Seminary.

www.virtueonline.org • July 31, 2026 “The Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time.” — C.S. Lewis “We need to repent of the haughty way in which we sometimes stand in judgment upon Scripture and must learn to sit humbly under its judgments instead. If we come to Scripture with our minds made up, expecting to hear from it only an echo of our own thoughts and never the thunderclap of God’s, then indeed he will not speak to us and we shall only be confirmed in our own prejudices. We must allow the Word of God to confront us, to disturb our security, to undermine our complacency and to overthrow our patterns of thought and behaviour.” — John R.W. Stott “Mrs. Mullally’s casuistry isn’t as sophisticated and polished as Sir Humphrey Appleby’s, but she’s getting there. Perhaps watching a few episodes of Yes, Minister or Yes, Prime Minister might help?” — Canon Dr. Jules Gomes “For the glory of God is the living man, and the life of man is the vision of God.” — St. Irenaeus Dear Brothers and Sisters, LOYAL TO THE INSTITUTION, NOT THE FAITH How wide is the political divide between mainline clergy and the people in their pews? Very wide indeed. The Public Religion Research Institute’s landmark survey of mainline Protestant clergy — including Episcopal and United Methodist ministers — found that mainline clergy are markedly more liberal, and more Democratic, than their congregants. Some 45 percent of mainline clergy are liberal Democrats, against just 24 percent of those sitting in the pews. The laity, for their part, are roughly three times more likely than their pastors to be conservative Republicans. This raises an obvious question: why do politically conservative Episcopalians remain in parishes where the priest may be not only openly gay but well to their left? The answer is loyalty. Aging boomers want to be buried in their parish’s cemetery — or, failing that, its columbarium. Their loyalty extends to writing the checks and attending the meetings, because what matters is the institution. Absent that loyalty, the whole edifice would come tumbling down. They love the Prayer Book, the liturgy, the creed and the ancient hymns. By the time they reach coffee hour, they have forgotten what the priest preached. The deeper question is what happens when the boomers are gone. There is no loyal generation coming up behind them. None. For all his insistence that it is “a lie from the pit of hell” to say The Episcopal Church is finished, the Most Rev. Sean Rowe — the church’s chief grandstander and poobah — has produced no visible evidence that TEC will survive beyond the next generation. He is whistling Dixie. A BISHOP TELLS THE TRUTH To make the point, I wrote a piece headlined “Western New York’s Bishop Admits His Diocese Is in Decline.” The national numbers say he was describing the whole church. The Rt. Rev. Stephen T. Lane, Bishop Provisional of the Episcopal Diocese of Western New York, has done something bishops in his church rarely do. He has told his people the truth. In a pastoral letter, Lane laid out — without spin or evasion — why there are no priests coming. Not why there might be a shortage. Why there are none. “The Boomer generation has now largely retired, and the flow of aspirants has slowed to a trickle. We need about twice as many candidates for the priesthood. At the same time, more than half of our congregations cannot afford a full-time priest.” Give the man his due. That is a bishop describing an institution in liquidation, doing it in his own name, over his own signature, to the people who will pay the price. Most of his colleagues prefer the language of “adaptive change” and “new expressions of ministry” — the ecclesiastical equivalent of a hospice brochure written by the marketing department. Lane’s letter is a short, unsentimental history of how his church arrived here, and it deserves to be read on its own terms. He admits that the Church Pension Fund’s “55/30” offer — retire at fifty-five with thirty years of service, on full benefits — never really caught on, functioning as a safety valve rather than a solution, because the Social Security retirement age kept clergy in post. In plainer English: the richest pension fund in American Protestantism could not persuade its own priests that they could afford to stop working. Valued at some $19.1 billion, the Church Pension Group has zero ability to put a single new parishioner in a pew. The real kicker is that Lane was describing the whole church. Think about that. Read the full report: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/western-new-york-s-bishop-admits-his-diocese-is-in-decline FIFTY YEARS OF ‘FULL AND EQUAL CLAIM’ — AND WHAT IT COST Episcopalians across the country have been invited to commemorate fifty years of pansexual inclusion in The Episcopal Church — an event affirming “that homosexual persons are children of God who have a full and equal claim with all other persons upon the love, acceptance, and pastoral concern and care of the Church.” The truth is that fifty years of “full and equal claim” has produced schism, loss and disharmony — and little else. The Office of Public Affairs has invited Episcopalians back to Minneapolis, September 3–5, for “Full & Equal: 50 Years in Pursuit of a Promise,” a three-day gathering of worship, workshops and storytelling marking the milestone. Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe will join a panel discussion and preside at the closing Eucharist at St. Mark’s Cathedral. The event has been organized by the church’s Task Force on LGBTQ+ Inclusion, chaired by the Rev. Susan Russell, a longtime advocate for LGBTQ inclusion and former president of Integrity USA. By any measure the campaign for full inclusion has been wildly successful. But the price has been very high. From the moment the Anglican Communion passed Lambeth Resolution 1.10 in 1998 — declaring that sexual intimacy belongs within the marriage of a man and a woman, and that homosexual practice is incompatible with Scripture — The Episcopal Church set its face against the Communion. The consecration of Gene Robinson in 2003, the approval of same-sex marriage rites in 2015, Resolution B012 in 2018 forcing those rites into every diocese, the steady ordination of gay and lesbian clergy, and the consecration of at least six openly homosexual and lesbian bishops all tell the same story: the church forced homosexuality on a laity that largely, if privately, disagreed — but went along, out of loyalty to the institution, the pension board, and the future occupants of the parish columbarium. It has been a remarkable ride. The cost has been heavy. In the decade after Robinson’s consecration as the first openly homosexual Bishop of New Hampshire, the church lost more than 400,000 baptized members — from some 2.3 million in 2003 to fewer than 1.9 million by 2013 — along with hundreds of priests and roughly 700 congregations. Many of those priests watched their pensions cut short. Fifty years ago, in Minneapolis, The Episcopal Church made its choice. Fifty years from now, there will be no one left to commemorate it. Read the full report: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/50-years-of-full-and-equal-claim-for-lgbtq-people-has-produced-schism-loss-and-disharmony TWO BOATS, NOT ONE SHIP Globally, the Anglican Communion continues to roil in deep waters. For months, orthodox Anglicans who long to see the fracture lines of realignment healed have nursed a single hope: that GAFCON and the GSFA — the two great orthodox bodies that between them speak for the overwhelming majority of the world’s practicing Anglicans — might at last converge into one instrument, one fellowship, one voice against the collapse of the Canterbury-centered Communion. When the bishops of the Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches gathered at the Lweza Training and Conference Centre in Uganda this month, they came not to negotiate a treaty but to be formed. From July 14 to 20, under the theme “Rooted in Christ, Renewing the Church, Reaching the Nations,” bishops and their wives from Burundi, South Sudan, the Indian Ocean and the Ghanaian Diocese of Sunyani sat under seasoned teachers to learn the unglamorous disciplines of the episcopal office — delegation, accountability, retirement, and the health of a marriage stretched thin across the demands of a diocese. It was, on its face, a modest affair. But modest gatherings often disclose more than grand communiqués, and this one discloses something the headlines have missed. Lweza quietly buried the hope of convergence — not with a slammed door, but with something more eloquent. The GSFA is building its own house. Read the full report: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/two-boats-not-one-ship GAFCON EUROPE As if to make the point about the growing irrelevancy of the Church of England, GAFCON Europe is holding an Evangelism Today, Reaching Europe for Christ 12-15th Nov 2026 gathering in The Stormont Hotel Belfast, Northern Ireland. “It's our prayer and longing that the breadth of Orthodox Anglicanism in Europe will avail of these special days of coming together, to gather under the word of God, to worship and be equipped to better reach Europe for Christ. It is our longing that we would see many people reached for Christ in every nation throughout Europe in the years that lie ahead and that Anglicans would play a full part in the task of the great commission given to us by Christ himself,” say its leaders. THE DIOCESE THAT CAN’T FIND A BISHOP The Anglican Diocese of the Western Gulf Coast — our little Red Riding Hood, lost in the woods — cannot seem to find a bishop who wants the job. Two candidates with similar views on the ordination of women failed to make it over the finish line, so Clark Lowenfield, the sitting bishop, was asked to stay on. He demurred. So did former ACNA Archbishop Bob Duncan, when the job was floated to him. He said no. Now the Anglican Bishop of Fort Worth, the Rt. Rev. Ryan Reed, has agreed to step in. This flailing diocese would do well, for its own good, to be absorbed into a neighboring jurisdiction. The nearest see is Fort Worth; to the west lies the Anglican Diocese of the Southwest under Bishop Steven Tighe. The question of women’s ordination will likely split the diocese either way. ACNA, meanwhile, still faces the ecclesiastical trial of its inhibited Archbishop, Steve Wood, and unresolved lawsuits involving the diocesan dean and Bishop Julian Dobbs, who serves as ACNA’s temporary leader while Wood is inhibited. The JAFC debacle remains unresolved. THE END-TIMES INDUSTRY RIDES AGAIN Over the years — and again just now — I have watched End Times stories resurface as the world roils: a Middle East war that looks as though it could become a world war, along with earthquakes, fires, famine and much more. People are fearful, and the fundamentalist speculators are out in force, stoking that fear with books (which they want you to buy, and which chiefly enrich themselves), with prophetic charts, and with fresh predictions of when Jesus will return. Much of it descends from the dispensational teaching of John Nelson Darby, the former Irish Anglican priest who became a founding figure of the Plymouth Brethren, and whose views were later popularized by Hal Lindsey of “The Late Great Planet Earth” fame. Among the distortions the system spawned was the notion that we ought not to help the poor or our neighbor, since doing so would only delay Christ’s return — the perverse logic being that the faster the world goes to hell, the sooner the Lord comes back. I took the gloves off on this, and you can read it in full below. I have also set out what a properly Anglican theology of the end times looks like. The End of the End Times: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/the-end-of-the-end-times An Anglican View of the End Times: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/an-anglican-view-of-the-end-times FREE AT LAST: THE VINDICATION OF BERNARD RANDALL Free at last. The Rev. Dr. Bernard Randall, a godly Church of England chaplain, has finally been cleared after a seven-year ordeal — his “crime” being that he preached, in a Church of England chapel, at a school with a Church of England ethos, a sermon rooted in Church of England doctrine on human sexuality. He encouraged pupils to think, to debate and to love their neighbors. He did not bully. He did not harass. He did not incite hatred. He did what a Christian minister is called to do. For that, he was treated as dangerous. He was forced out of his job, reported to Prevent for “religious extremism,” referred to safeguarding authorities, dragged through years of litigation, and blacklisted by his own church from the ministry he loved. Had he preached in a Church of England place of worship during those years, he could have faced disciplinary action. This is not merely the story of one man wronged, grave though that is. Randall’s case exposes something deeper: the rot that has taken hold in Britain’s institutions. The tragedy is that Bernard said nothing radical. His sermon — on competing ideologies — was pastoral, careful and Anglican. It came after Trent College had brought in Educate and Celebrate, an outfit whose stated aim was to “smash heteronormativity” and embed Queer Theory throughout school life. (The group later collapsed amid scandal, including the imprisonment of one of its patrons for child sex offences.) Staff were encouraged to chant slogans. Children, including those in nursery, were drawn into a program promoting a highly contested vision of identity and human nature. When a pupil asked why this was being taught in a Christian school, Bernard answered as a Christian chaplain should. He told the pupils they were free to think critically. He said they should treat everyone with dignity. He explained that Christians believe human beings are made male and female in the image of God. That should have been unremarkable. Instead, it was treated as a safeguarding concern. The Church of England’s own reviewer found the safeguarding allegation “unsubstantiated.” Randall — who holds, as his church’s own Canon B30 requires, that marriage is the lifelong union of one man and one woman — told pupils that nobody should be forced to accept an ideology about sex and marriage. For that, the school reported him to Prevent, the government’s counter-terrorism program. The officer who assessed the referral found no counter-terrorism risk. The Teaching Regulation Agency found no case to answer. The Disclosure and Barring Service cleared him. Trent College was ordered to pay £20,000 in costs and then settled out of court. “Seven years have been taken from me,” Randall says, “for doing my duty as a CofE chaplain.” Not a word of apology has come from the Archbishop of York or the Archbishop of Canterbury. Read more: https://thecritic.co.uk/a-chaplains-vindication/ TRUMP AND THE EVANGELICALS: A FRAYING LOYALTY White evangelicals remain Trump’s most loyal religious bloc — but through 2026 that loyalty is fraying. Pew put white-evangelical approval at 69 percent in late January, down from 78 percent in early 2025; NPR/PBS/Marist had it at 64 percent by late April, with net approval sliding from +50 to +30 across the year; and a June Reuters/Ipsos poll found just 52 percent among evangelical voters, down from 61 percent the previous August. For a group that broke for Trump 82 to 17 in 2024, that slide is politically consequential heading into the midterms. The driver is not a moral awakening but the economy and the Iran war that began at the end of February. In that same June poll, 54 percent of evangelicals said Trump’s use of the military in Iran did not square with their understanding of Christianity, against 41 percent who said it did. The quietest number is the most telling. Pew found only 40 percent of white evangelicals extremely or very confident that Trump acts ethically in office — a 15-point drop since early 2025. Approving a president’s performance is one thing; trusting his character is another, and among the faithful it is the latter that has fallen furthest and fastest. The bloc has not broken, but the terms of its allegiance are narrowing from conviction toward mere transaction — which, for a movement that once cast him in providential terms, is a downgrade worth marking. EVANGELICALS AND ISRAEL: THE TIDE GOES OUT The share of white evangelicals with a favorable view of the Israeli people has fallen ten points since 2024, to 74 percent; their view of the Israeli government has slipped further — to roughly 57 percent favorable, down from 71 percent in 2024. Even the older, still-supportive core is eroding, not just the young. The generational gap that alarmed Israeli analysts is the backdrop. The Inbari–Bumin study (Oxford University Press) documented the collapse among under-30 evangelicals: support for Israel fell from about 69 percent in 2018 to roughly 34 percent by 2021, while support for the Palestinians quadrupled from about 5 percent to 24 percent, with some 42 percent now backing neither side. No poll tracks young evangelicals specifically past 2021, but an August 2025 Harvard-Harris poll found that a majority of Gen Z overall — 60 percent — would let Hamas remain in power if it released the hostages, which suggests the evangelical youth number has not recovered. What is genuinely new since late 2025 is that the erosion is now being driven from the right, not merely from progressive “deconstruction.” The fracture runs through MAGA itself. Tucker Carlson has publicly attacked evangelical pastors for giving “theological cover” to the Gaza war, and the Carlson–Owens axis is now openly contesting Christian Zionism on the podcasts and TikTok feeds where younger evangelicals actually live. Charlie Kirk, before his assassination in September 2025, was himself said to be feeling “the pull of his generation” — which, across party lines, is critical of the Gaza war — and the right has been fighting over his true views ever since. Israel clearly sees the threat. Its government has announced a 2026 public-diplomacy budget of nearly $750 million, much of it aimed at evangelicals, and has begun lobbying them directly rather than only through AIPAC. On the ground, groups such as the Philos Project’s “Generation Zion” are trying to train young evangelicals and Jews as advocates, recruiting at Turning Point’s AmericaFest — a defensive posture that tells you which way the tide is running. The old dispensationalist framing — “bless Israel and be blessed,” still voiced by operatives like David Lane — is losing its grip on two fronts at once: progressive deconstruction on the left and America First realism on the right, with the Gaza war as the accelerant. 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 contribute. We have proven ourselves over more than thirty-five years of writing about Anglican affairs. 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By David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueonline.org | July 30, 2026 Some 20,000 volumes of Christian books and ministry resources — many of them written by the late Barnabas Aid International founder and director Dr. Patrick Sookhdeo — have been summarily destroyed under the charity's incoming chief executive, Colin Bloom. In a full interview with Dr. Chris Sugden, subsequently summarized on the Anglican Mainstream website, Bloom — the new Chief Executive of Barnabas Aid International/NEXCUS — confirmed that approximately seventeen pallets of books had been pulped because they were regarded as occupying costly warehouse space. Questions were immediately raised as to why it was necessary to destroy these publications which included the second volume of the autobiography books by former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey, a personal friend of Dr. Sookhdeo. Many of the destroyed works were written by Dr. Sookhdeo himself, internationally recognized for his scholarship on religious freedom, Christian persecution and Christian-Muslim relations. His writings have shaped discussions of religious freedom, persecution, Islamic studies and Christian witness for more than four decades and continue to be cited internationally. New evidence now indicates that the books were not destroyed immediately. Photographs taken during August 2024 show the systematic removal of books from the St. Michael's, Pewsey bookroom, after those involved in the removal stated that the books were being taken to Swindon for archiving. That explanation was subsequently confirmed by senior staff, who indicated that the archiving operation was being managed by Mr. Jayson Quivetto. The books were later transported to a warehouse in Swindon before ultimately being destroyed. The existence of this intermediate “archiving” stage raises important questions about how — and when — the decision to pulp the books was ultimately reached. Far More Than One Author's Books The loss extends well beyond one scholar's legacy. Destroyed alongside Dr. Sookhdeo's works were ministry resources donated for Christian education, evangelism and the support of the persecuted Church. Collectively they represented decades of charitable investment and the generosity of many individual supporters. Even where individual titles remain obtainable elsewhere, the destruction of so large an archive constitutes a significant loss to Christian publishing and ministry heritage. According to contemporaneous inventory records and eyewitness accounts, the stock included: • Isaac Publishing publications; • Barnabas Fund books and printed ministry resources; • Christian books from the former River Centre bookshop; • donated theological works for OCRPL students; • approximately twelve boxes of new King James Version Bibles donated for ministry use; • Arabic Scripture portions donated specifically for distribution among persecuted Christians; • publications by other Christian authors and publishers, including works by Robert Hicks. The destruction therefore appears to have involved not simply commercial surplus stock but a substantial body of Christian literature accumulated over many years for ministry, education and charitable distribution. Were Authors and Donors Consulted? As far as can presently be established, neither Dr. Patrick Sookhdeo's estate nor other authors whose works were destroyed were consulted before the books were pulped. Equally important questions arise concerning the donated materials. Supporters who generously gave Bibles, Scripture portions and theological resources for Christian education, evangelism and the support of persecuted Churches may reasonably ask whether those gifts were ever intended to become waste paper — at a time when many churches, seminaries and Christian ministries around the world continue desperately to need such resources. Questions of Stewardship Regardless of legal ownership, the destruction of approximately 20,000 books represents the irreversible loss of resources accumulated through decades of charitable ministry and donor generosity. Many supporters will naturally ask: • Why was destruction considered preferable to donation to other organizations? • Were theological colleges, seminaries, universities or Christian libraries invited to receive the books? • Were mission partners and persecuted churches overseas offered the Bibles and Christian literature? • Were authors or their estates informed or consulted? • Were donors consulted where donated materials were involved? • Was the Board fully informed before the decision was taken? • How does this course of action accord with the stewardship responsibilities of Christian charities? • Who ultimately authorized the destruction? These are questions of stewardship rather than of mere administration. A Call for Transparency These questions are raised in the interests of accountability and good stewardship. The Christian community deserves a clear explanation for the destruction of some 20,000 books and ministry resources. This is not simply an operational matter. It concerns the preservation of Christian scholarship, the faithful stewardship of charitable assets, and the honoring of the generosity of authors, donors and supporters whose contributions helped create these resources in the first place. The destruction of these books raises serious questions as to the motives and intentions of Colin Bloom — and as to what purpose was served in erasing the memory of the man who founded the ministry he now leads. David W. Virtue, DD is the founder and editor of VirtueOnline, an orthodox Anglican online news and commentary website. He writes on the culture wars as they impact the church and on Middle East issues as they have erupted causing harm and distress to the state of Israel.

Eschatology without dogmatic uniformity By David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueonline.org | July 29, 2026 FULL DISCLOSURE. I did consult AI for much of the information in this piece. It is not all my own work. It is this writer's contention that the church's primary mission is to disciple the nations; to make Christ known, not to speculate on the End Times, about which we know very little. Reticence, Not a Timetable An Anglican view of the end times is not dispensationalism revisited in the American evangelical sense, or as it functions for a swath of American evangelicals—there's no chart, no rapture timetable, no house eschatology. If anything, the distinctively Anglican trait is reticence. The tradition commits firmly to the creedal minimum and declines to dogmatize the rest. The Creedal Floor The floor is the creeds and formularies: Christ “shall come again with glory to judge the quick and the dead,” the resurrection of the body, the life everlasting. The Articles touch eschatology only glancingly—Article XXII repudiates the “Romish doctrine concerning Purgatory,” and that's about the extent of the prescription. Worth remembering that the 1553 Forty-Two Articles included Article XLI condemning the Millenarii—the chiliasts who expected a literal earthly reign—and though that article was quietly dropped in the 1563 revision, the suspicion of literalist millenarianism stuck. The classic divines, Hooker included, were broadly Augustinian: amillennial or (in the older optimistic key) postmillennial, never chiliast. Millenarian enthusiasm in the Anglican orbit—Irving, the Albury prophecy conferences, Drummond and the Catholic Apostolic experiment—always ran at the eccentric margins, never the center. A Piety of Hope and Vigilance What actually forms Anglican eschatological instinct is the Prayer Book more than any system: the Advent collects holding the two Advents in tension, the burial office and its “sure and certain hope of the resurrection,” the emphasis on readiness and judgment rather than decoding. It's a piety of hope and vigilance, not prediction. The Breadth Reasserts Itself Then the breadth reasserts itself across churchmanship. Anglo-Catholics sit close to Catholic eschatology—the intermediate state, prayers for the dead retained even after Purgatory was formally jettisoned, and periodically the flirtation with the “larger hope” (Maurice, and the Victorian universalist current). The broad and liberal wings have tended toward universalism or a frank agnosticism about the furniture of the last things. Evangelicals, the Most Divided Evangelicals are the most internally divided: some absorbed Scofield-era dispensationalism, but the heavyweight Anglican evangelicals—Stott, Packer—were amillennial or historic premillennial and pointedly cool toward the dispensational scheme. Stott's own late move toward conditional immortality, aired in the 1988 exchange with David Edwards, is itself a marker of how far an Anglican evangelical could probe the doctrine of hell without leaving the reservation—and how much controversy it still generated. The Recovery of New Creation The most consequential recent shift is Tom Wright's recovery of new-creation eschatology in Surprised by Hope: bodily resurrection and a renewed cosmos over against a Platonized “going to heaven when you die”— “life after life after death.” That framing has become something close to the working default among thoughtful Anglicans now, quietly displacing the older disembodied-heaven picture in the pews. The Reticence Is the Position So, the honest answer is that Anglicanism offers a settled hope—resurrection, judgment, new creation—held with disciplined agnosticism about the mechanics, and a spread of schools filling the silence in different directions. The reticence is the position. David W. Virtue, DD is the founder and managing editor of VirtueOnline, an orthodox Anglican online news and commentary website. He writes on the culture wars as they impact the church and on Middle East issues as they have erupted in Anglican circles causing harm and distress to the state of Israel.

Why the Last Days Began at Pentecost — and Why God Is Not Consulting America’s Prophecy Charts By David W. Virtue, DD I www.virtueonline.org I July 28, 2026 It is time to end the nonsense peddled by the “end times” prophets who insist we are living in the last days. We are living in the last days. We have been for two thousand years, and we may go on living in them for decades or centuries more. That is precisely the point these hucksters miss. What they are selling — for the price of a book that makes them richer — is not that we are living in the last days, but that we are living in the end of the end times, with themselves as the anointed reader of the clock. The Last Days Began at Pentecost Start with Scripture. The Bible has a great deal to say about the last days. Peter said we entered them at Pentecost: “this is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel” (Acts 2:17). Hebrews says God has spoken to us “in these last days” by his Son. Paul, John, and Peter all wrote as men who knew the ends of the ages had already come upon them. The last days are not a coming attraction. They are the age we have inhabited since the Spirit fell. What Scripture never mentions — not once in your English Bible — is a secret rapture, and not one syllable of an American prophetic timetable bolted onto it. Go to Young’s Concordance and hunt for the pre-tribulation rapture the peddlers describe. You will not find it. You will find the Lord returning in power and glory, for every eye to see — not a vanishing act staged to spare comfortable Americans the indignity of suffering for the name of Christ. Jesus himself shut the door these men keep trying to pry open. He said plainly that he did not know the day or the hour — only the Father knew, and the Father was not telling (Matthew 24:36). If the Son declined to set a date, what manner of prophet claims to have found one in a chart? So, ninety percent of what is served up by the men who think they can locate the United States in the book of Daniel or the Revelation of St. John is tommy rot. God has never operated on an American prophetic timetable cooked up by Tim LaHaye or any other vendor of end-times snake oil. And let us be fair: these are not stupid men. That is the trouble. They are able, industrious, and confident — and they are getting rich being wrong. A Gospel Bigger Than America Here is the question that never seems to occur to them. Has it not entered their calculations that God might intend to save millions of unbelievers — in Iran, in Indonesia, in Japan, in North Korea, even in Israel — before his Son returns? Muslims are turning to Christ by the hundreds of thousands. Whole peoples who have never heard the gospel are hearing it now. Is all of that to be halted on a dime because some prophecy salesman wants the church raptured out before the hard part begins? This is the rotten core of it: an American fundamentalism so enamored of itself that it has made the consummation of all things about us. Who cares that God might be pleased to save two hundred million Chinese, or a hundred million Indonesians, or tribe after tribe that has never once heard the name of Jesus? On this accounting they are consigned to outer darkness — to the weeping and the gnashing of teeth — while a comfortable throng of Western believers is whisked to glory, having risked nothing and lost nothing for the Lord they claim to serve. That is not the gospel. That is narcissism with a study Bible. The Harvest Is Not Yet In God is not consulting the charts. He is not waiting on a timeline drawn in Dallas or keyed to the evening news out of Washington. The Spirit was poured out at Pentecost for one purpose — witness, to the ends of the earth — and that work is not finished. The Lord is not pacing the floor of heaven waiting for an American preacher to tell him when to wrap up history. He is gathering a people from every nation, and he will return when that harvest is in, and not one hour before. The end times do not need another chart. They need a church — awake, unafraid, and busy about the Master’s work until he splits the eastern sky. That is where the end of the end times begins. David W. Virtue, DD is the founder and editor of VirtueOnline, an orthodox Anglican online news and commentary website. He writes on the culture wars as they impact the church and on Middle East issues as they have erupted in Anglican circles causing harm and distress to the state of Israel.

Why the GSFA Bishops’ Retreat in Uganda Signals Divergence, Not Merger By David W. Virtue, DD www.virtueonline.org July 25, 2026 LWEZA, UGANDA — When the bishops of the Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches gathered at the Lweza Training and Conference Centre this month, they came not to negotiate a treaty but to be formed. From July 14 to 20, under the theme “Rooted in Christ, Renewing the Church, Reaching the Nations,” bishops and their wives from Burundi, South Sudan, the Indian Ocean, and the Ghanaian Diocese of Sunyani sat under seasoned teachers to learn the unglamorous disciplines of the episcopal office — delegation, accountability, retirement, and the health of a marriage stretched thin across the demands of a diocese. It was, on its face, a modest affair. But modest gatherings often disclose more than grand communiqués, and this one discloses something the headlines have missed. A Hope Quietly Buried For months, orthodox Anglicans who long to see the fracture lines of realignment healed have nursed a single hope: that GAFCON and the GSFA — the two great orthodox bodies that between them speak for the overwhelming majority of the world’s practicing Anglicans — might at last converge into one instrument, one fellowship, one voice against the collapse of the Canterbury-centered Communion. Lweza buried that hope. Not with a slammed door, but with something quieter and more eloquent. The GSFA is building its own house. Formation Is a Statement of Permanence Give the Fellowship its due. The retreat was no exercise in vanity. Archbishop Stephen Kaziimba Mugalu of Uganda, who hosted the gathering and serves as the Fellowship’s treasurer, preached servant leadership from Galatians 1:10, pressing his brother bishops to seek the approval of God rather than of men, to delegate rather than to hoard, to build systems of accountability rather than to rule by exhaustion. Bishop Alfred Olwa of Lango, who chairs the Ministerial Formation Track, set before them a curriculum most Western dioceses would envy: Christian leadership, healthy ministry relationships, retirement planning, and dedicated sessions for the bishops’ wives on boundaries and mutual support. This is wisdom. It is also strategy. A fellowship that trains its bishops before and after consecration, that plans for their retirement, that tends to their marriages, is not a fellowship preparing to dissolve into a larger body. It is a fellowship digging foundations. You do not build a seminary in a house you intend to vacate. Read the Guest List The surest tell at any Anglican gathering is not what is said but who is in the room — and who is not. At Lweza the cast was unmistakably GSFA. Archbishop Justin Badi Arama of South Sudan, the Fellowship’s chairman. Archbishop Mouneer Anis of Alexandria, retired, one of its founding fathers. Bishop Danald Jute of South East Asia on the daily expositions. Canon Charles Raven of the GSFA secretariat. The provinces represented — Burundi, South Sudan, the Indian Ocean, Sunyani — belong to the Fellowship’s own orbit. And the absences? Louder still. There was no Nigeria. There was no Rwanda. There was no mention of the Jerusalem Declaration, no invocation of the Global Anglican Communion that GAFCON proclaimed from Abuja in March. The formularies, the language, the power centers of GAFCON were nowhere on the program. Uganda and South Sudan carry leadership in both camps, as they have since Kigali; but a retreat convened by the dual-badge provinces, in the absence of GAFCON’s engine rooms, is not a merger in embryo. It is a fellowship keeping its own house in order. The Kigali Bargain Has Broken Down To grasp why, one must return to Kigali in 2023, where GAFCON and the GSFA struck a bargain: the GSFA would take responsibility for faith and order — the harder, slower work of ecclesiology — while GAFCON would give itself to evangelism, church planting, and the care of the alienated. Two boats, in Archbishop Badi’s own memorable image, rowing alongside one another toward the same shore. That bargain has broken down. In October, on Martyrs’ Day, GAFCON announced unilaterally that it would “re-order” the Communion and launch a Global Anglican Communion — a faith-and-order move of the first magnitude, made without consulting the very body to whom faith and order had been entrusted. GAFCON’s primates gathered in Abuja in March to consummate it. But the gathering was thin: the primates of Alexandria, Chile, Congo, Kenya, Myanmar, and South Sudan stayed away. Archbishop Steve Wood of the ACNA was absent, inhibited pending his ecclesiastical trial. The GSFA’s answer has been the most articulate silence in recent Anglican memory. Its primates met and reaffirmed that they are staying within the Anglican Communion, committed to reform it from within. Their communiqué did not so much as name GAFCON’s Global Anglican Communion. A Fellowship spokesman declined to comment on GAFCON’s plans at all. When men who share a pulpit decline to share a paragraph, the distance between them is no longer merely theological. It is structural. Convoy, Not Fusion So where does Lweza leave us? Precisely where Archbishop Badi’s metaphor placed us: two boats, not one ship. The orthodox may yet sail in convoy — sharing the same charts, hailing the same enemy, bound by the same Gospel — but they will not, for the present, sail under one keel. GAFCON has chosen to build a communion. The GSFA has chosen to build bishops. Each is doing what it believes the hour demands, and each is doing it apart. I had hoped for more. Many of us had. But hope is not analysis, and the evidence at Lweza is plain. The Fellowship is not folding its tent to join GAFCON’s caravan. It is teaching its bishops to delegate, to age, and to endure. That is the posture of a body that intends to be here in twenty years — on its own bottom, under its own flag. No merger, then. Not this year. Perhaps, as the machinery now stands, not for a generation. The two great orthodox fleets of the Anglican world will keep station within sight of one another, signaling across the water — and each, for the foreseeable future, will answer to a different captain. David W. Virtue, DD, has covered Anglican and Episcopal affairs for over thirty-five years. He is founder and editor of VirtueOnline. Some 21,000 stories are archived at Virtueonline’s website: www.virtueonline.org His Substack on the Middle East can be found here: davidvirtue2.substack.com

The national numbers say he is describing the whole church By David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueonline.org | July 23, 2026 The Rt. Rev. Stephen T. Lane, Bishop Provisional of the Episcopal Diocese of Western New York, has done something bishops in his church rarely do. He has told his people the truth. In a pastoral letter to the diocese, Lane laid out, without spin or evasion, why there are no priests coming. Not why there might be a shortage. Why there are none. "The Boomer generation has now largely retired, and the flow of aspirants has slowed to a trickle. We need about twice as many candidates for the priesthood. At the same time, more than half of our congregations cannot afford a full-time priest." Give the man his due. That is a bishop describing an institution in liquidation, and doing it in his own name, over his own signature, to the people who will pay the price. Most of his colleagues prefer the language of "adaptive change" and "new expressions of ministry" — the ecclesiastical equivalent of a hospice brochure written by the marketing department. The bishop's own account Lane's letter is a short and unsentimental history of how his church got here, and it deserves to be read on its own terms. Forty percent of Episcopal churches, he notes, were built in the 1950s, '60s and '70s. Postwar demand for clergy outstripped a recruitment system that depended on bishops, so the church shifted recruitment to congregations and clergy. Then, especially after the approval of women's ordination, came the flood. Lane himself was one of thirteen men and women at his 1975 ordination conference in the Diocese of Rochester. Only two were accepted. That is the hinge of the whole story, and Lane names it plainly. With aspirants to spare, the church went into what he calls "selection" mode. Ordination conferences became screening conferences. Applicants were told to go get some life experience and come back later. "They did as they were told — got educations, spouses, families and careers — and never came back." Read that again. A generation of vocations was turned away at the door by a church confident there would always be more. There were not. The average age of ordinands climbed until, by the 1990s, new ordinands were as old as the clergy already in orders. The priesthood became a Boomer occupation with no one behind it. To loosen the logjam, The Church Pension Fund offered a 55/30 plan — retire at fifty-five with thirty years of service, on full benefits. Lane's verdict is that it never really caught on, functioning as a safety valve rather than a solution, because the Social Security retirement age of sixty-five kept clergy in post. In plainer English: the richest pension fund in American Protestantism could not persuade its own priests that they could afford to stop working. By the early 2000s the church saw the dependency on aging clergy and tried to open the pipeline. The diaconate was redefined as a separate and equal order. Commissions on Ministry were told to nurture rather than screen. Too late. By then, Lane writes, the collapse in institutional trust, the clergy sexual abuse scandal, and the two-income household had already taken effect. The arithmetic of collapse This is where the national numbers matter, because Western New York is not an outlier. It is a preview. Church Pension Group tracks every ordination, transfer, retirement and death in The Episcopal Church, and its figures are unsparing. Active priests — those whose employers are still paying into the clergy pension fund — peaked in 2004 at 7,886. They have since fallen to about 5,614. Retired priests passed active priests in number in 2011 and now stand above 8,300. There are roughly 6,700 congregations and fewer than 6,000 active priests to serve them. The traffic runs one way. Speaking to the Episcopal Parish Network's annual conference in Charlotte this March, Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe put the flow at roughly five hundred priests retiring each year against something near two hundred ordained. That is not a shortage. That is a demographic bleed-out. The transition data says the same thing from the other end. In spring 2024, diocesan transition ministers covering eight of the church's nine provinces counted an estimated 527 open priest positions. The estimated pool of candidates for them was 122. Half those openings were part-time. Two years earlier, 54 percent of Episcopal priests were already serving part-time — more than double the 26 percent of 2010 — and one congregation in eight was being kept alive by a retiree. The Rev. Marshall Jolly, an Episcopal rector who has written on the shortage, reports that a full-time rector's post that drew a dozen applications in 2012 now draws three to five. When he advertised a full-time children and youth minister position in 2024 — competitive salary, benefits, housing available, healthy parish, low cost of living — he received exactly one application. The pews behind the pulpit None of this is happening in front of full churches. Episcopal membership peaked in the 1960s at about 3.4 million. It stands today near 1.5 million. In-person average Sunday attendance across the entire denomination was 413,034 in 2024 — essentially flat against 2023, which church officials have taken as encouraging news. Set against the long arc, 413,000 worshippers is what remains of a church that once counted its members in millions. The median Episcopal parish now draws 38 people on a Sunday morning into a building with a median seating capacity of 165. Ninety-two percent of Episcopal churches have an average Sunday attendance under 150. The church's own general convention officer has conceded the obvious: most Episcopal churches look empty on a Sunday morning. And they are old. Political scientist Ryan Burge, whose work surfaced at that same Charlotte conference, found that two-thirds of adult Episcopalians have passed sixty, while just six percent are under thirty. Anglican Watch, working from the 2024 parochial data, puts the average Episcopalian at sixty against a national median age near thirty-nine. There is a further tell in the 2024 report. For the first time, the church published no churchwide membership figure at all. Revised questionnaires produced numbers so inconsistent that the topline was unusable. A denomination that has counted its members without interruption since the eighteenth century could not say in 2024 how many members it had! Congregations, meanwhile, close at a steady drip: 6,754 parishes and missions in 2023, 6,707 in 2024. That is roughly one Episcopal church closing every week of the year — which is precisely how it feels in rural New York, rural Nebraska, and rural everywhere else. Western New York in miniature Now put Lane's diocese against that backdrop. Western New York reported 9,336 members in 2015 and 6,014 in 2023. In 2024 its 51 filing congregations recorded an average Sunday attendance of 1,646 — an average of about 31 souls per church — on plate-and-pledge income of $4.48 million. This is the diocese founded in 1838, the first ever divided out of another, whose cathedral still stands in downtown Buffalo as a monument to an era when Episcopalians in that city commanded real cultural authority. Until 2024 the diocese shared a bishop and staff with Northwestern Pennsylvania under a cost-cutting partnership. That bishop was Sean Rowe. When Rowe was elected Presiding Bishop on the first ballot in Louisville, the architect of the arrangement went to New York and the logical endpoint of the partnership — merger — went with him. Lane, who was Bishop of Maine from 2008 to 2019 and Bishop Provisional of Rochester from 2022 to 2024, now holds the diocese while it searches for a successor. Three provisional arrangements in seven years. That is not a diocese. That is a receivership. Money was never the problem Here is the fact that should end the conversation about resources. As of March 31, 2026, The Church Pension Fund's investment portfolio stood at an estimated $19.2 billion. Churchwide congregational income in 2024 came to $2.5 billion. Nearly three-quarters of Episcopal congregations report holding an endowment or investment account. Nineteen billion dollars cannot manufacture a single aspirant. It cannot fill a single pew. The Episcopal Church is not dying of poverty; it is one of the wealthiest religious bodies per capita in the United States. It is dying of something money has never been able to buy. What the bishop does not say Lane's letter is honest about mechanism and silent about cause. He gives us demography, economics, cultural distrust, and the abuse scandal — all real, all documented. What he does not ask is why anyone should give his life to this particular institution. The whole business of being a priest is no longer a career, let alone a ministry. And if a man has no gospel of God’s grace to pronounce from the pulpit — only a rotating liturgy of the causes of the age — he will not fill a church, and he will not persuade his son to follow him into the work. Eulogizing same-sex marriage has not filled a single pew. Two decades of experiment have established that with the finality of a laboratory result. The evidence for this is not mine; it is the church's own. Jolly, writing from inside The Episcopal Church, says decades of denominational data show that the parishes which grow share four traits, and he lists Jesus-centered strong preaching first. Not inclusion statements. Not building-use partnerships. Preaching. The Anglican Church in North America is the control group. Its 2025 Mission Index reports attendance up 38 percent since 2022; in 2024 it counted 1,027 congregations, 130,111 members, and average attendance of 96,148, its highest ever. ACNA has its own severe troubles — 73 percent of its congregations run under 100 on a Sunday, burials outpace marriages, and its archbishop faces trial — and I have written about them here without pity. But no one in ACNA is being told to get some life experience and come back in a decade. Men are being ordained because there is something for them to preach. The withered vine The deeper truth is that Western New York is every diocese, and every diocese is the national church. Rural churches close by the week. The new mission, long since departed from the Great Commission, is housing. Add a saloon, a hair salon, an art co-op in the undercroft, and in time the church simply disappears into the neighborhood it was meant to convert. In March, Presiding Bishop Rowe told 850 clergy and donors in Charlotte that the story of terminal decline is a lie from the pit of hell. He is right that the Body of Christ will not perish. He is wrong if he imagines that the promise attaches to this institution, on these terms, with this message. This is not a Samson moment, pillars coming down in one great crash. It is the withered vine. Being the richest church in America will not save it. Lose the message, or keep a thoughtless orthodoxy with no repentance in it, and you may as well be the Lions Club at prayer. No gospel, no future. David W. Virtue, DD, has covered Anglican and Episcopal affairs for over thirty-five years. He is founder and editor of VirtueOnline. Some 21,000 stories are archived at virtueonline’s website. His Substack on the Middle East can be found here: davidvirtue2.substack.com