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By Dr Campbell Campbell-Jack THE CONSERVATIVE WOMAN May 25, 2026 WATCHING or reading the news in recent days unavoidably fills one with at least a sense of gloom, more likely one of foreboding. It is in the interest of the vast multi-billion pound news media we allow into our homes to create this sense of unease: the worse the headline, the more likelihood that we will come back to check up on the next update – and the next. But there is a growing sense that this time they might have it right. The slow-motion psychodrama of the Labour Party leadership competition, and thus the leadership of the country, is only the visible tip of the iceberg. We just need to look at the latest local and national election results, which have seen a swathe of untried, untested and perhaps unsuitable candidates achieve office. Throughout much of this century, we have seen the infrastructure of the country decline; with housing, transport, health and defence all facing massive problems. Meanwhile British citizens have witnessed what seems like a concentrated and successful effort to reconstruct the nation’s cultural viewpoint. Going, if not gone entirely, in our educational institutions are the standards of literature and history which gave us an idea of who we were as a people. Different yes, depending on our locality within Britain and our own interests and education, but still owing allegiance to a core concept of life together in Britain. Meanwhile our elites in Parliament, universities and the media have been busy promoting ideologies that are alien to the British character and people. The concept of an identifiable Britain, however nebulous, has gone. ‘Diversity, equality and inclusion’ has been employed as a steamroller to grind any opposition into the ground, and especially if that opposition is Christian or Christian-based. As historian Tom Holland has pointed out, we in the West are goldfish swimming in Christian waters, and most of us, whether Christians or not, still cling instinctively to the norms instilled by centuries of Christian morality. As the culture which is being replaced was consciously based upon Christian principles, conflict for the Christian is inevitable. Alongside this, and part of it, is the fact that we have witnessed a horrifying and unrealistic, not to say illusory, support for the spread of Islam. We have seen in too many areas, such as parts of London, the Midlands and North of England, that where the Muslim population grows, any hope of integration disappears. Islam does not seek to integrate but to dominate, yet our cultural and political elites still remain blinded by the forlorn chimera of multiculturalism. As a result of soft-pedalling on Islam, we have the shocking reality of a schoolteacher from West Yorkshire who has been in hiding since 2021 because he offended Muslims by daring to show cartoons of the prophet Muhammad during a lesson on blasphemy. Streets can be blocked by Muslims at prayer, despite there being around 2,000 mosques in the UK. An MP has been stabbed to death by a deranged Muslim. A soldier was beheaded on the street. Young people were murdered at a concert. Tens of thousands of white (and Sikh) girls have been gang-raped. Muslims can drive cars through Jewish neighbourhoods shouting that they will rape their wives and daughters. Synagogues have been attacked, ambulances burned, and Jews murdered. We have seen an exponential increase in anti-Semitism – most of it spawning from Islam. In response, the police, like beggars pleading for a handout, attend mosques and timorously request that Muslims obey the law. Armed Muslim gangs are told no action will be taken against them if they store their weapons in the nearby mosque. Eighty-plus Sharia courts operate in the UK. Pakistani Muslim clan networks decide by-election results. Seventy-five per cent of MI5’s terrorist caseload are Islamic. More than 40,000 Muslims are on terror watch-lists. And what is the result of all this deeply disturbing activity? Our Government drafts laws to make criticism of Islam a crime. You couldn’t make it up. If, as recent election results would indicate, the two-party system is dead, there is a straightforward reason for its demise: the simple fact that both Labour and Conservative have failed the British people. They have been too busy protecting and serving their own interests and as a result have neglected those of the ordinary British public. Political power is there to be used for the good of the people, not for its own sake as a prize for election winners. If the British public has had enough, that is entirely understandable. Ordinary citizens are looking around for leaders who will steer a course towards a vision of what our country should be like. The rise of populist parties – notably the Greens – with their rather radical and entirely unworkable visions of the future of Britain promise further turmoil. We are in a battle for the soul of our nation. Our national churches, meanwhile, are emasculated by adherence to the delusion that aping the world in all its folly, and some of its wickedness, will bring about peaceful co-existence with that which should be shunned (I John 2:15-17). As a result, they have done all they can to bring Christianity into disrepute. The old adage is forever true: ‘Hard men create good times. Good times create weak men. Weak men create hard times.’ We live towards the end of that process. Yet we should not shrink from what we’re faced with, but, rather, remember the words of Mordecai to Queen Esther, ‘For if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place, but you and your father’s family will perish. And who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this?’ (Esther 4:14). We who are Christ’s can no longer retreat into the atheist-inspired ghetto that the Christian faith is something to be confined to church buildings or private conviction. Instead, like Abraham Kuyper, we should recognize that Christianity speaks into every area of human life and culture. There is not an inch of creation of which God does not say, ‘Mine’. There is no area of human endeavor, individually or for a nation or a community, that God doesn’t care about. It is possible that some Christians hesitate to engage publicly on moral or social and political issues on the grounds that it distracts from evangelism and makes believers appear judgmental. Yet believers are called not only to preach salvation through Jesus Christ, but also to demonstrate what they believe is good, just and true. There are times when it really is necessary to speak out. We live in a narcissistic society that is awash with pornography, in which babies can be killed in the womb until birth, where divorce is simplified and marriage redefined, where assisted suicide is coming, and where religious liberty and freedom of speech is under serious threat. All this is an inevitable result of the rejection of our Christian roots. As Dostoevsky warned us in The Brothers Karamazov, ‘If there is no God, all things are permitted.’ We live in a society which is under God’s judgement. This deeply onerous situation behooves us, as children of God, to understand the times in which we live, to turn to Him, and hear from Him, that we might know how we should live and what we should do. This article appeared in Prophecy Today on May 20, 2026, and is republished by kind permission.

By Tommy Sharpe I Premier Christianity I 21 May 2026 The Alpha course pioneer and former leader of HTB has been accused of promoting communism and unbiblical ideas after he called Spirit-filled Christians to fight inequality. Tommy Sharpe says he’s shocked at the comments. Confronting injustice is a deeply biblical mandate, he says. When Nicky Gumbel posted on his Instagram: “Those indwelt by the Holy Spirit should be at the forefront of the fight for gender, racial, and social equality”, it hardly seemed like a controversial statement for a Christian leader to make. We find ourselves living in the midst of an epidemic of violence against women and girls, surges in racially and religiously motivated hate crime, and astonishing growth in the wealth of the ultra-rich. Surely Christians should be making a stand against this sort of inequality and injustice? Yet, as I scrolled through the comments, I was horrified by some of the responses: “What intern posted this nonsense. Do you know what is meant by these terms? The current definitions? This is asinine nonsense.” “Stop conflating Christians with Communists - This is sly guilt-tripping of Christians to work toward Communist goals thinking they work for Jesus.” END

David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueOnline | May 23, 2026 Those of us who have watched the Episcopal Church’s long, self-inflicted decline have seen this film before. We know how it ends. And now, with Professor Helen King’s Private Members’ Motion heading to the Church of England’s General Synod in July, we are watching the Church of England queue up to buy a ticket to the same screening. The parallels are not incidental. They are structural. The Episcopal Church did not wake up one morning and decide to abandon orthodox Christian sexual ethics wholesale. It moved by increments, each step described as modest, pastoral, and theologically careful. Each step made the next one inevitable. In 2003, TEC consecrated Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire — the first openly partnered, non-celibate gay man to become a bishop in the Anglican world. The reaction was immediate: nine provinces declared impaired or broken communion, the Windsor Report was commissioned, and scores of orthodox congregations began the painful process of leaving. But TEC pressed on. In 2009 it formally affirmed the right of gay and lesbian persons to be ordained. In 2012 it approved a same-sex blessing liturgy. In 2015, just five days after the Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples had the legal right to marry, General Convention voted to amend the canons of the Episcopal Church to permit any couple the rite of Holy Matrimony. Twelve years from gay bishop to gay marriage. The progressives called it progress. The pews called it something else — and left. Average Sunday attendance in TEC stood at 856,579 in the year 2000. By 2015 it had fallen to 579,780. By 2019 it was 518,411. Marriages conducted in the Episcopal Church totaled 19,017 in 2003 — the year of Gene Robinson’s consecration. By 2019 that figure had collapsed to 6,484, a decline of 66 percent. By the late 2010s TEC had fallen to 1.7 million members, down from 3.4 million in 1992. This is not a church experiencing the general cultural drift away from religion. This is a church that traded its theological birthright for cultural approval and got neither in sufficient quantity to survive. Now look at the Church of England and the King motion. Professor King, a lay member of Synod for Oxford Diocese and vice-chair of its Gender and Sexuality Group, has brought a motion that reads: “That this Synod affirm that there are no fundamental objections to being in a committed, faithful, intimate same-sex relationship, and that such a relationship can be entirely compatible with Christian discipleship.” The TEC playbook is recognizable in every line. TEC also began not with marriage but with affirmation — affirming the dignity of gay persons, affirming their place in the life of the church, affirming that their relationships deserved pastoral recognition. Each affirmation was carefully worded to stop short of doctrinal revision while making the next step feel not only natural but obligatory. If there are “no fundamental objections” to a same-sex relationship, on what grounds does the Church subsequently refuse to bless it? Marry it? Ordain those in one? The King motion is not an endpoint. It is a ratchet. The differences between the two churches are real but they are differences of pace and procedure, not of trajectory. TEC moved through its General Convention by majority vote; the Church of England’s canons require a more complex process involving the Houses of Bishops, Clergy and Laity. The CofE has the additional anchor — or dead weight, depending on one’s view — of its established status and the involvement of Parliament in doctrinal change. These are genuine speed bumps. But TEC had its own procedural obstacles and navigated around every one of them. The revisionists are patient. They have demonstrated, across decades and across denominations, that they are willing to wait, regroup, and try again with cleverer wording. John Dunnett of the Church of England Evangelical Council has put his finger on the strategy precisely: the King motion “shows that the revisionists will find new and different ways to continually push their agenda — away from Scripture, away from our Church’s doctrine and towards liberal change — even when the House of Bishops is not doing so.” That is exactly what TEC’s revisionists did for thirty years. They worked around resistant bishops, around procedural obstacles, around every orthodox countermotion, until the institution itself was reshaped in their image. The tragedy is that the Church of England has the evidence of TEC’s experience directly before it. It has watched a once-great church hemorrhage members, close parishes, and lose its theological coherence in real time. It has received refugees from that wreckage into ACNA and other orthodox bodies. It has debated, studied, and produced the vast LLF process, which after years of costly work concluded that consensus cannot be reached — meaning the orthodox position cannot simply be voted away. And yet here comes Professor King’s motion, and here comes General Synod preparing to debate it in July as though the last twenty years of Anglican history had not happened. The July General Synod vote on the King motion is not a procedural footnote. It is a kairos moment — a point of decision that will reveal whether the Church of England has learned anything from watching its American cousins dismantle orthodoxy one carefully worded resolution at a time. A Synod that votes to affirm Professor King’s motion will have placed itself, whatever legal fictions it maintains about doctrine, on the same road TEC traveled — and will deserve the same destination. The bishops, clergy, and laity who will cast those votes should understand what is at stake: not a gesture of pastoral warmth, not a mild expression of synodical opinion, but a repudiation of Scripture, of the Church’s historic teaching, and of the Global South Anglicans who have staked their communion on the conviction that the Word of God is not subject to revision by committee. If the Church of England will not learn from TEC’s catastrophe theological and moral error, it has chosen, with open eyes, to repeat it. And those who engineered that choice — with their clever wording, their strategic ambiguity, their patient incrementalism — will own the consequences. History will not be kind to them. More importantly, neither will God. As the apostle Paul reminds us in Galatians 6:7, "God is not mocked; for whatever a person sows, this he will also reap.” The same goes for the church. David W. Virtue, DD is the founder and managing editor of VirtueOnline, a global orthodox Anglican online news service.

Mouneer Anis, Barbara Gauthier, and Gerald McDermott The NORTH AMERICAN ANGLICAN i May 22, 2026 Global Anglicans have been congratulating themselves ever since their 2023 Ash Wednesday Statement declaring they would no longer recognize the leadership of the Archbishop of Canterbury because of the Church of England’s decision to bless same-sex couples. Their recent Abuja Affirmation gives its leaders a high-five for obeying the Bible’s “plain and canonical sense, respectful of the church’s historic and consensual reading.” It is ironic, then, that global Anglicans who claim to prize the Bible and historic tradition are circumventing both biblical and traditional approaches to ministry and polity (church government). These are not secondary issues. On the long front in the war between secularism and orthodoxy, they are sites of the fiercest battles. For secularism’s god is, arguably, Equality. There is to be no distinction between man and woman in ministry, and laity should join clergy in determining church practice and doctrine. Yet the historic Church has paid careful attention to both Scripture and tradition on these matters. Jesus was a revolutionary in the way he treated women and had plenty of godly and gifted women to choose from, but he restricted the apostolate to men. Paul reserved pastoral and sacramental ministry to men as well: “I do not permit a woman to have authority over a man . . . A bishop must be the husband of one wife . . . . Let deacons be the husbands of one wife” (1 Tim 2:12; 3:1-2; 3:12). Paul made clear that this sexual distinction followed from creation rather than the Fall when in justifying sexual differences in ministry he pointed to God’s order in creation: “Adam was created first, then Eve . . . . For man was not made from woman, but woman from man” (1 Tim 2:12-13; 1 Cor 11:8). The Church did not reserve all ministry for men, only ordained ministry. In the first millennium in the East, deaconesses exercised a variety of ministries under the authority of the rector or bishop, such as pastoral care, counseling, caring for the sick and poor, teaching, spiritual formation, prayer ministry, preparing candidates for baptism and confirmation, assisting at baptisms, leading morning and evening prayer, and conducting other forms of social and educational work. Most of these continue among the ministries of deaconesses in several Anglican provinces. The historic Church also taught an apostolic succession in which Christ rules the church through bishops whom Jesus said are successors to the apostles: “As the Father has sent me, so I send you” (John 20:21). And as St. Irenaeus taught, “The apostles instituted bishops in the churches . . . leaving [them] behind as their successors, delivering up their own place of government to these men” (Against Heresies 3.3.1). Yet the Canterbury-rejecting Abuja Affirmation has recently formed a new Global Anglican Council that consists of primates, advisors, and guarantors—the latter of whom will be laity. This is a rejection of the historic Anglican commitment to Christ’s rule of the Church through bishops. Laity have always been involved in advising priests and bishops and archbishops, but final decisions for application of apostolic practice and doctrine have been left to the episcopacy. Now, however, global Anglican leaders are inviting laity to join bishops in making final decisions on Christian practice and doctrine. This reverses the 2024 decision of the Global South Fellowship of Anglicans to restrict final church governance to provincial bishops. The new result is presbyterian–not Anglican–polity. This rejection of Holy Tradition and the plain sense of Scripture is exactly what the Abuja leaders condemn as “normalizing hermeneutical pluralism.” What better way to describe “dual integrities”—the incoherent phrase which Anglicans use to describe contradictory views on Holy Orders? These leaders justly criticize Canterbury for “elevating cultural capitulation.” But is not this Abuja statement capitulating to secularism and current feminisms in its bowing before the altar of the new godword “equality,” which denies the sexual difference that is broadcast so loudly in both nature and revelation? And while these Anglican leaders aptly lampoon Canterbury for reframing the rejection of biblical authority as “good disagreement,” what about their own rejection of biblical authority and suggesting we can have good disagreement on Holy Orders and historic polity? Global Anglicans have hereby telegraphed to the world that their new structure and doctrines represent just another liberal Protestant denomination. It is not surprising that the arguments for women’s ordination in those Protestant denominations used the same hermeneutical methods that were later employed for an actively gay priesthood and so-called marriage. After all, if sexual difference is indifferent and the sexes are interchangeable in Holy Order, why not also in marriage? Anglican leaders in recent years have sought unity for the Anglican fight against the LGBT+ juggernaut threatening the Church and society. We commend them for bold leadership on this set of issues. But there is a danger that in seeking unity and numbers under a “big tent” they are embracing a premature and superficial unity that violates biblical and traditional norms. We exhort global Anglican leaders to consider two examples—one ancient and one recent—of recognizing the need for God’s people to turn (the Hebrew word for “repent”) toward deeper unity based on revealed truth. The first example is from Nehemiah 9. The great Jewish reformer has led his flock out of Babylon and realizes they have not broken from pagan ways—even after suffering from exile and condemning their idolatrous overlords. He leads them in one of the Bible’s most majestic prayers of corporate repentance: “We have acted wickedly (v 33), we have not kept your Law (34), we are slaves [of unreformed ways] (36), [but now] we make a firm covenant [to repent and follow Your law]” (38). The Latvian Lutheran Church is about the same size as the Anglican Church of North America (ACNA). The former has 250,000 souls and 300 parishes while the ACNA has 135,000 souls in 1000 parishes. From 1975 to 1993 the Latvian Lutheran Church (LLC) ordained women to the pastorate. But in 1993 Archbishop Janis Vanags led his Church to obedience to the Scriptures and the Great Tradition. The Church formally agreed that ordination to the pastorate should be restricted to men. Ordained women were permitted to keep ministering until retirement. And under the new Church constitution approved in 2016 women were given ministries as lay readers, teaching theologians, and evangelists. The LLC has always maintained the truth of marriage between a man and woman, and the sanctity of human life against abortion and euthanasia. It took humility for Nehemiah and Latvian Lutherans to admit they had gone wrong. It always takes humility for church leaders to “turn.” But just as Jesus taught that true unity must be based on truth (John 17:17, 19), global Anglicanism will have a deeper and stronger unity if its leaders turn toward full biblical obedience in both Holy Order and Church polity. Then it will be able to say in truth that it is obedient to the ancient “church’s historic and consensual reading.” Mouneer Anis is the emeritus Archbishop of Alexandria; Barbara Gauthier is an Anglican theologian and editor of Anglican News Update; Gerald McDermott is a priest in the Reformed Episcopal Church who teaches at Reformed Episcopal Seminary (Philadelphia) and Jerusalem Seminary (Israel).

Special to Virtueonline By David Straw I www.virtueonline.org I May 18, 2026 Listen long enough in Anglican circles and you start hearing the same story. Conservatism means resistance. Tradition means injustice. The quiet suggestion is usually left hanging there. If you care about historic theology and biblical authority, you are probably on the wrong side of history. Real history is messier than that. And much more interesting. Some of the earliest and strongest opponents of slavery and racial exclusion were not progressives in any modern sense. They were Bible believing Anglican Christians. They were Anglicans shaped by Scripture, prayer, and a stubborn loyalty to biblical authority. Their courage did not come from new social theories. It came from Christian conviction. From the abolitionist movement in Great Britain to the early interracial work of the Reformed Episcopal Church in the United States, traditional Anglican Christianity has shown a moral seriousness that modern critics often ignore. None of this denies the failures of the church. Anglican history, like all Christian history, carries the marks of human sin and moral blindness. Christians were at times slow, cautious, and compromised. Some Southern Anglicans and evangelicals twisted Scripture, appealing to household codes or the so-called curse of Ham to defend slavery or delay reform. Those failures deserve honest acknowledgment. They should trouble us. But they do not tell the whole story. And they do not justify rewriting history to fit modern expectations. Evangelical Faith and the Birth of British Abolition One of the strongest evangelical Anglican voices was The Reverend John Newton. He was the former slave ship captain whose conversion gave us “Amazing Grace.” His repentance changed his whole life. His writings and counsel shaped William Wilberforce and the wider Clapham Sect and showed how personal conversion and biblical conviction can fuel real moral reform. The Clapham Sect founded schools, supported missions, and pushed for moral renewal across society. Their activism was not narrow. It was rooted in a Christian vision of human dignity. And it produced results that outlasted any secular political movement of their era. William Wilberforce and the Cost of Obedience William Wilberforce gives us one of the clearest examples. His long fight against the slave trade and then against slavery itself came directly from his evangelical Anglican faith. It did not come from modern ideology. After his conversion in 1785, Wilberforce saw his political work as a divine calling. He described his life’s purpose as the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners. For more than twenty years he battled powerful interests in Parliament. The slave trade was deeply woven into British commerce. He and his friends kept going anyway. In 1807 Parliament abolished the British slave trade. In 1833, just days before Wilberforce died, slavery itself was abolished across most of the British Empire. The cost was enormous. Britain paid about twenty million pounds to compensate slaveholders, roughly forty percent of the government’s annual spending at the time. Few modern nations have ever paid such a price for moral reform. Wilberforce rejoiced that his country was willing to bear it. The biblical truth that every person bears the image of God mattered more than money. Samuel Wilberforce and the Defense of Orthodoxy Wilberforce’s son The Rt. Reverend Samuel became one of the most influential Anglican bishops of the Victorian era. He served as Bishop of Oxford and later Winchester. Samuel defended orthodox Christian belief at a time when secularism and skepticism were gaining ground. He stood for Christian anthropology and biblical revelation even when facing new theories about human origins. Father and son showed the same spirit. Christian faith should not be hidden away. It must speak to the moral and intellectual challenges of its time. The Reformed Episcopal Church and Interracial Anglicanism Across the Atlantic the Reformed Episcopal Church offers another strong example. The REC was founded in 1873 to preserve evangelical doctrine, biblical authority, and classical worship. In the segregated South after the Civil War, the REC welcomed African American congregations when many other doors remained closed. Within a year of its founding, hundreds of Black communicants in South Carolina had joined and formed congregations that lasted for generations. This grew not from political theory but from missionary zeal, pastoral care, and a biblical view of human dignity. Bishop Stevens and Faithful Formation The story of Bishop Peter Fayssoux Stevens shows this commitment in action. His life is one of the more remarkable in American church history, and it deserves to be better known. Stevens was superintendent of the South Carolina Military Academy, the school now known as the Citadel. In January 1861 he commanded a detachment of cadets on Morris Island who were ordered to fire on the Union steamship Star of the West as it attempted to resupply Fort Sumter. Many historians regard that as the first hostile military action of the Civil War. Later that same year he resigned his post to be ordained as a priest in the Protestant Episcopal Church and was subsequently commissioned as a colonel in the Confederate Army. After the war Stevens devoted himself to ministry. He began working among freed Black men and women in South Carolina and saw a genuine church forming among them. When he brought four Black men he had trained for ministry before the examining authorities of the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina, all four were turned away. Three times the applications were made. Three times they were rejected. That refusal was the breaking point. Stevens resigned from the Protestant Episcopal Church in 1876 and affiliated with the newly formed Reformed Episcopal Church, which was willing to receive these men and their congregations. He became the first bishop of what is now the Diocese of the Southeast, a position he held for thirty years. It would be a mistake to read Stevens as a civil rights champion in any modern sense. He was a product of antebellum South Carolina and fought for the Confederacy. He was a complicated man. But gospel conviction can work in complicated men. Over the following decades he built twenty-seven African American churches, many of which are still in use today. He taught mathematics at two historically Black colleges. He founded what eventually became Cummins Memorial Theological Seminary to train Black clergy in Scripture, theology, preaching, and pastoral care. He worked alongside the Reverend Frank Crawford Ferguson, himself a former slave, as a partner in that ministry. When Bishop Stevens died in 1910, his pallbearers were the Black ministers of his church. That image says a great deal. The REC Today and the Ongoing Witness That legacy continues. The Diocese of the Southeast in the REC is one of the most racially diverse jurisdictions in Anglicanism. Its congregations, clergy, and bishops include both White and African American leaders. Their unity rests on shared faith, sacraments, and gospel mission. The contrast with the Episcopal Church is worth noting directly. Despite decades of resolutions, task forces, diversity offices, studies, and making racial justice a centerpiece of its public identity, the Episcopal Church remains one of the whitest mainline denominations in America. The gap between its institutional apparatus and its actual demographic reality is something TEC’s own leadership has had to acknowledge. The machinery of progressive racial ideology has not produced the fruit it promised. The REC and the Anglican Church in North America more broadly tend to be significantly more racially and ethnically diverse than the Episcopal Church. This includes strong Nigerian congregations and whole dioceses connected to the Church of Nigeria as well as growing Hispanic ministries. These facts challenge the idea that theological conservatism must be abandoned to achieve real inclusion. Orthodoxy, Ideology, and the Modern Debate Some Anglican voices, shaped by mainline seminaries and elite university divinity schools, have argued that historic Christian orthodoxy is mainly an obstacle to racial justice. They seem to believe the church can only address racism by loosening its theological commitments and adopting modern ideologies. History tells a different story. The British abolitionist movement, the influence of John Newton, the perseverance of William Wilberforce, and the early interracial witness of the Reformed Episcopal Church all came from deep fidelity to Scripture and evangelical conviction. Not from theological innovation. Genuine diversity in the Church has historically come not from changing ideologies but from the biblical conviction that all people bear the image of God and that the Gospel unites what sin divides. Conclusion Anglican history gives us both encouragement and caution. Fidelity to Scripture and evangelical conviction has again and again produced moral courage, racial reconciliation, and a more diverse witness to Christ. At the same time it reminds us that sin remains even among sincere believers. Repentance is always needed. Bishop Stevens is a good place to end. He was not a saint in any simple sense. He was a former Confederate officer from a slaveholding society who broke with his own church when it refused to receive men he had trained for ministry. Gospel conviction did that. Not ideology. Not institutional pressure. The biblical vision of human dignity, rooted in creation and redemption, turned a man who fired the first shots of the Civil War into someone whose pallbearers were Black ministers he had spent his life serving. That is not a story modern categories handle well. It is, however, a true one. Postscript A word of clarification, lest anyone misunderstand what I’m saying. I am not arguing that ethnic inclusion is the chief goal of the Church. I also believe that the way this discussion has been framed in recent decades has harmed the Church immensely. My point is that the mainline’s hypocrisy is hard to miss. It talks endlessly about anti-racism and inclusion, yet its churches remain overwhelmingly white and increasingly older. That contradiction is not the main problem. It is a symptom of a much deeper one. Much of mainline Christianity today is built less on historic Christian orthodoxy and more on the shifting sands of modern progressivism. When that ideological foundation starts to crack, whether on race, sexuality, Scripture, or whatever issue comes next, the whole structure begins to wobble. We have been watching that collapse play out for decades in their membership numbers. Now, genuine acceptance of all people without partiality is not merely a good thing. It is a godly thing. It always has been. It flows naturally from the gospel itself: one new humanity in Christ, the Great Commission to all nations, James’ warning against favoritism, and Paul’s great declaration that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free… for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28, ESV). None of that is new. None of it is a modern DEI add-on. The real strength of the Reformed Episcopal Church and the ACNA is not their racial composition. It is their fidelity to Christ and to the faith once delivered to the saints. Where that fidelity is strong, the gospel does what the gospel has always done. It creates real unity across ethnic lines. Not as a program. Not as a metric to prove anything. As fruit. Orthodoxy first. The rest follows. The Rev. David Straw is Rector of Trinity Anglican Church (REC/ACNA) in Evansville. A church planter who has helped plant three Anglican churches, he was ordained to the diaconate in 2007 and to the priesthood in 2008. He is a graduate of Wesley Seminary. He and his wife have been married for nearly 35 years and have four children.

By John G. Stackhouse Jr. | ThinkBetter Media | $9.99 | 191 pages Reviewed by David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueonline.org | May 18, 2026 The core question evangelical scholar John Stackhouse addresses is whether love of country is a virtue or a danger. He offers a clear, balanced guide to what Christian nationalism is, what it isn't, and how Christians can faithfully love both God and nation without confusing the two. Stackhouse steers between two extremes: those who insist Christians should embrace nationalist rhetoric, and those who condemn any patriotism as idolatry. Through a study of biblical identity, he demonstrates that earthly loyalties are real, meaningful, and good — but always secondary to one's identity in Christ. The key danger he identifies is when political identity begins competing with Christian identity — which he calls idolatry. The book opens with a personal and theological exploration of flags in churches and the meaning of allegiance. Subsequent chapters provide historical sketches of how religion and empire have interacted — from missionaries to colonial abuses to modern statecraft — and how national "origin myths" (including those of the U.S. and Canada) shape political behavior. A central chapter argues that nationalism is good in principle but becomes dangerous under specific conditions, followed by chapters on what genuinely Christian loyalty must look like in practice. The book closes with a sober warning about the political manipulation of faith. Stackhouse draws on history, theology, and contemporary culture to explore what nationalism really is and how it differs from patriotism, populism, or racism. His tone is deliberately measured — neither a MAGA apologist nor a progressive scold, but a historian and ethicist trying to give Christians analytical tools for a genuinely difficult question. The book is relatively short, aimed at pastors, church leaders, and thoughtful laypeople rather than academics. The framework he offers — distinguishing patriotism from idolatry without dismissing national loyalty altogether — is one Anglicans can readily identify with, though the question is more nuanced than a simple yes or no. There is a legitimate historical connection between Anglicanism and church-state establishment. The Church of England is an established church. Anglicans retain vestiges of historic Christian nationalism in their prayer books — prayers for the sovereign, for civil authorities, and so on. That's real. Some colonial-era Anglican clergy also framed English expansion in explicitly providential terms, which is an uncomfortable part of the tradition's history. Contemporary Anglican voices — across the theological spectrum — largely reject what American commentators mean by "Christian nationalism" today. Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, together with several Anglican bishops, issued a statement condemning the rise of "Christian nationalism" in the UK, denouncing the misuse of Christian symbols to exclude or stigmatize others. Within American Anglicanism — the ACNA and related bodies — there's genuine internal debate. Some traditionalist Anglican voices argue that while they reject "Christo-Americanism," the syncretism of nationalist symbols with Christianity, they distinguish that from the historic Anglican practice of praying for one's nation and its leaders. The term "Christian nationalist" as used in current American political discourse describes something quite specific: the fusion of Christian identity with American national identity, often with ethnonationalist overtones. That doesn't describe Anglicanism as a tradition. The Episcopal Church sits well to the left of that; the ACNA is conservative but not, as an institution, aligned with Christian nationalism; and the Global South Anglican provinces are operating in entirely different political contexts. A recent gathering in Washington, D.C. — Rededicate 250, a mostly conservative Christian prayer event on the National Mall marking the nation's 250th anniversary — drew sharp criticism. Writing in Religion News Service, Steven Waldman, author of Founding Faith and Sacred Liberty, argued bluntly that Christian nationalists have badly misread their own religious DNA. The religious ancestors of today's evangelicals, he notes, were not the architects of Christian America — they were its outcasts. Catholics were barred from voting in five colonies. Dissident Protestants were harassed. And Baptists — the forebears of modern evangelicalism — were routinely jailed for failing to conform to the Anglican establishment. From 1760 to 1778 in Virginia alone, 45 Baptist preachers were imprisoned. If political power in the founding era had been distributed by Christian census, Episcopalians and Congregationalists would have run the country. They were the dominant forms of Christianity then — and together make up roughly 2 percent of the population today. The first 150 years of colonial life can indeed be read as a series of experiments in the Christian nationalist approach. In Jamestown, failure to observe the Sabbath three times was punishable by death. In Massachusetts, Puritan leader John Cotton explained the logic plainly: "Theocracy, or to make the Lord God our governor, is the best form of government in a Christian commonwealth." But this theocratic vision was soundly rejected by the Founding Fathers — and the driving force behind that rejection was 18th-century evangelicals, the very ancestors of today's Christian nationalist movement. Christian nationalists are right about one thing — and many secularists wrong: most of the Founders believed religion was profoundly important. "Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people," John Adams wrote. "It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." George Washington agreed: "Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can exist apart from religious principle." But Christian nationalists take this truism and leap to what Waldman calls the greatest non sequitur in American political history — that the founders therefore wanted the state to promote Christianity. On the contrary: the evangelicals and their Enlightenment allies believed the best way to encourage Christianity was to get government out of it entirely. Madison, were he alive today, would likely say the same — and Stackhouse, writing from a very different vantage point two-and-a-half centuries later, arrives at a strikingly similar conclusion. A NOTE TO NEW VOL READERS We recently integrated our mailing lists and welcomed 1,000 new readers. We apologize for the delay — we experienced some technical issues with our website and lists, which have now been resolved. To read recent exclusive stories, please visit: www.virtueonline.org We have also updated our archives, which now contain more than 21,000 stories available for your exploration. Just click the archives link to get started.

CEEC News Release 18 May 2026 In July this year, the Church of England will see the most significant Private Members’ Motion (PMM) on sex and marriage in the last 40 years being brought to General Synod. It has been confirmed by the Business Committee that the July General Synod will debate the PMM proposed by Professor Helen King, which seeks to affirm the compatibility of intimate same sex relationships with Christian discipleship. The controversial motion (in full below) is cleverly worded and designed to secure support for a revision of the Church of England’s sexual ethics, without explicitly asking for a change to Church of England doctrine. Professor Helen King (Oxford) to move: ‘That this Synod affirm that there are no fundamental objections to being in a committed, faithful, intimate same-sex relationship, and that such a relationship can be entirely compatible with Christian discipleship.’ Private Members’ Motions function similarly to those in Parliament: once sufficient support is gathered, the Business Committee may schedule them for debate. While PMMs do not change doctrine or law, they can signal the theological and political ‘view’ of the Synod. The last time General Synod expressed a view on marriage and sexual ethics in this way was in 1987. In that year, the ‘Higton Motion’ was passed by General Synod, which affirmed the Church’s traditional teaching on sexual ethics and marriage. Revd John Dunnett, National Director, Church of England Evangelical Council (CEEC), said: “This motion matters. While it might be viewed by some as committing General Synod to ‘nothing in particular’, this motion shows that the revisionists will find new and different ways to continually push their agenda – away from Scripture, away from our Church’s doctrine and towards liberal change – even when the House of Bishops is not doing so. And were the motion to find support it could be seen as paving the way for further change. “The big question is how the bishops and indeed the new Archbishop will respond. Will the Archbishop see it as an opportunity to allow Synod to express its mind, or would she prefer the process to be steered by the House of Bishops, and therefore encourage her colleagues to vote against the motion?” Around the Communion, Dunnett cautions, the overwhelming response would be one of both sadness and despair. “News of this motion will evoke a sad and negative response from across the Communion”, Dunnett concluded. “The Global South Fellowship of Anglicans and GAFCON would undoubtedly be concerned by the motion, and its passing would increase the impaired nature of relationships between the majority Anglican Communion and the Church of England.” The Evangelical Group on General Synod (EGGS) will be working to defeat the motion in as an effective way as possible. The February 2026 General Synod motion has committed the House of Bishops to forming a group which will carry forward the LLF trajectory – an initiative which could be of even greater threat to the apostolic understanding of marriage and sexual ethics upon which the Church of England has always been built. For more click here: https://anglicanmainstream.org/article/report-of-ceec-summits/ END

Bishop Charles (Chip) Edgar | Anglican Diocese of South Carolina By Arlie Coles I THE LIVING CHURCH I May 19, 2026 As the Anglican Church in North America’s yearly governance meeting approaches, the Anglican Diocese of South Carolina has proposed resolutions seeking “justice and transparency” in the denomination, the diocese’s standing committee announced on May 15. The ACNA’s Provincial Council is slated to meet in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on June 17-19 to conduct annual business and consider comprehensive reform to the church’s Title IV disciplinary canons. The Council’s gathering will be its first since the ecclesiastical acquittal of the Rt. Rev. Stewart Ruch, who had been accused of neglect in handling abusive ministers in his Diocese of the Upper Midwest. Bishop Ruch’s closed and virtual trial fell into difficulties when two provincial prosecutors—one from South Carolina—accused a presiding court member of judicial misconduct and resigned mid-proceedings. South Carolina’s proposed resolutions, whose texts are not yet published, promote the public release of the transcript of the Ruch trial, and of the eventual findings of a third-party review of the trial’s procedural handling. The review was commissioned by the church in March. “We are seeking to build a coalition of other ACNA dioceses who share our concerns about the work of the Court for the Trial of a Bishop and the importance of transparency,” the standing committee wrote of the resolutions in a letter to diocesan clergy. The unicameral Provincial Council is largely composed of diocesan delegations, each including the bishop ordinary, one cleric, and two lay persons. Matters are decided by a majority vote of its 119 members, according to the Council’s rules. ACNA spokeswoman Marion Ahlers confirmed to The Living Church that the church’s Executive Committee, which sets the Council’s agenda, had received South Carolina’s resolutions and would consider them during its May 19 meeting. The ACNA’s canons provide two paths for groups other than its Executive Committee to send an item for the Council’s consideration before it meets. Any ten delegates may add a matter to the agenda, or a diocese may “refer” a matter to the Council, but exercising either path is uncommon. South Carolina’s effort to discuss the release of the Ruch trial transcripts and third-party review findings through the Council marks its second attempt to have the documents published. If the resolutions claim to effect the release of the documents by their enactment, it also could represent a first test of provincial legal interpretation regarding the power of the Council as the church’s constitutionally designated “governing body.” In February, the diocese’s standing committee had asked the ACNA’s Executive Committee to commit to the documents’ release when negotiating the scope of the review, but the Executive Committee replied that it was improper for a single diocese to make the request, and that no entity could order the court to release any documents. Under provincial interpretation, “the canons do not grant the Provincial Council the authority to oversee the Court or its judicial proceedings,” but the Council does have “canonical authority to ‘deliberate upon matters affecting the interests of the Church’ and may consider resolutions accordingly,” Ahlers told TLC. Controversies of constitutional or canonical interpretation have previously been decided by the ACNA’s Provincial Tribunal, a court created for that purpose and without analog in the Episcopal Church. Several individuals sitting on the seven-member court have a connection to the Ruch procedures at the crux of any potential dispute. Of the Tribunal’s judges, the Rt. Rev. Chip Edgar (South Carolina) signed his standing committee’s announcement in support of releasing the trial transcript and review findings; the Rt. Rev. Alex Cameron (Pittsburgh) served as chair of Bishop Ruch’s standing committee during Ruch’s leave of absence pending trial; and the Rt. Rev. Phil Ashey (Western Anglicans) delivered remarks defending the court’s procedural actions in a May 2 lecture on ecclesiastical justice. The Rt. Rev. Alan Hawkins (Christ Our Hope), who sits as an alternate, also led oversight of the provincial investigation into Ruch now being reviewed. The South Carolina standing committee also criticized Bishop Ashey for other comments he made during the lecture that “prognosticat[ed] about the outcome” of the pending case against Archbishop Steve Wood and “promoted falsehood” about its complainants. Ashey is advising Wood as he awaits trial on canonical charges of personal and sexual misconduct. In a lengthy retraction sent to the church’s bishops a week later, Ashey apologized for his speculation that Wood would be exonerated and for his “inaccurate” portrayal of the complainants, some of whom now belong to the Diocese of South Carolina, as “aggrieved” terminated employees. Of the complainants formerly employed under Wood at St. Andrew’s Church, Mount Pleasant, none were terminated, and all resigned, though Wood asked most of them to stay, one complainant told TLC. While the province contends that the Council is without authority to govern the court’s protocols with regard to the Ruch documents, the Council’s main item of business at its June meeting will be a vote on a comprehensive Title IV revision that fully restructures the church’s disciplinary bodies and their procedures. If passed, the new canons will phase out the current seven-member Court for the Trial of a Bishop and replace it with a tribunal from which smaller panels are drawn, and will introduce norms of public trial procedure=—two features also found in Episcopal Church canons. In January, the ACNA’s College of Bishops called for a special meeting of the church’s Provincial Assembly, a second body that typically meets only every five years to ratify canonical changes passed by the Council, to be held a week after this year’s Council meeting “to ensure these disciplinary reforms can be implemented immediately.” The bishops also “voted unanimously” with the Executive Committee to prohibit Council members from amending the reforms from the floor, according to a communiqué from the church’s Governance Task Force. “Meetings of the Provincial Council are not really a good forum for wordsmithing changes on the fly,” ACNA chancellor Bill Nelson said of the prohibition at a February town hall. “And this is particularly true in the case of a highly integrated set of canons … that have been the subject of great study, comment, and revision by the entire province for a full year.” The Council’s current rules provide no mechanism for forbidding floor amendment, but the prohibition would become codified if Council members also vote to adopt a proposed rule that bans floor amendments to any proposed canonical revision, reaching beyond the current Title IV initiative. “Motions to amend the Constitution & Canons shall be subject to an up or down vote,” the proposed rule reads. Some have called for further amendments notwithstanding the potential rule. The Rev. Matthew Wilcoxen and the Rev. Elijah Lovejoy, delegates to the Council and Assembly respectively, published two intended amendments to the Title IV revision in a blog post on May 17. The two priests seek to place an alternate proposal, identical to the original but for their further changes concerning pastoral care and guidance for clergy respondents, before the Council as a separate item of business rather than by revising the proposal during floor debate. “The [Governance Task Force] has proposed for us a much stronger Title IV. While we should have real gratitude for that, the Provincial Council need not simply rubber stamp it as it is,” Wilcoxen and Lovejoy wrote. “They should exercise their canonically given agency to amend it where it clearly needs improving.” Growing bottom-up efforts to govern the ACNA by acts of its Council come amid other pending measures that may further clamp down on individual delegates’ ability to legislate. An amendment passed by last year’s Council, up for potential ratification by this year’s Assembly, will create a Provincial Constitution and Canons Committee that is appointed by the Archbishop and Executive Committee, is not composed of Council members, and will have exclusive authority to regulate how or if future amendments are presented to the Council for a vote. The multidirectional momentum surrounding the coming governance meetings demonstrates the church’s persistently competing visions of who should decide how clergy misconduct issues are handled, even as it prepares to try its primate. The Council and Assembly gatherings in June will fall between the second set of pretrial hearings in the matter of Archbishop Wood, scheduled for May 20, and the beginning of his ecclesiastical trial, scheduled for July 20. Arlie Coles is a lay Anglican from the Diocese of Dallas who writes about modern Episcopal history and polity. She is also a machine-learning researcher serving on General Convention’s Task Force on Artificial Intelligence and Intellectual Property.

COMMENTARY By David W. Virtue, DD I www.virtueonline.org I May 20, 2026 It is an old axiom. Pride goeth before a fall. The real sin of ACNA is pride, not just its collective sins. Proud that we are not like TEC. Proud that we have not embraced pansexuality. Proud that ACNA is growing and TEC is not. Proud that we are orthodox and TEC is heterodox. In a nutshell, proud that we are not like them. Of course, ACNA is trying desperately hard not to break up over women’s ordination, and the denomination is trying desperately hard to define itself — are we conciliar or confessional? But pride is a poor foundation for any church, and ACNA is discovering this the hard way. The irony is almost too rich to ignore. ACNA was born out of a righteous rejection of The Episcopal Church’s apostasy — and that origin story, noble as it was, has become something of a golden calf. We tell the story of our founding so often, and with such satisfaction, that we have begun to confuse the act of leaving with the act of arriving. Separation from error is not the same as arrival at truth. It is merely the beginning of the journey. The women’s ordination question is Exhibit A. ACNA has managed to hold together Anglo-Catholics who regard female ordination as an ontological impossibility and evangelicals who regard opposition to it as mere tradition dressed up as theology. That is not a settlement — it is a ceasefire. And ceasefires, as history teaches, have a way of breaking down at the worst possible moment, usually when the combatants are already exhausted from fighting on other fronts. The conciliar versus confessional question cuts even deeper. A conciliar church derives its authority from gathered episcopal consensus. A confessional church derives it from agreed doctrine. These are not merely different polities — they are different ecclesiologies, and they produce different answers to almost every hard question a church will eventually face. ACNA has tried to be both, and in trying to be both, risks being neither. Meanwhile, the Diocese of the Western Gulf Coast reminds us that the structural tensions within ACNA are not theoretical. When an episcopal election becomes contested enough to require referral to the House of Bishops, it reveals something the denomination’s boosters would prefer not to dwell on: that the same politicking, the same factionalism, the same institutional gamesmanship that drove faithful Anglicans out of TEC has not been left behind. It traveled with the luggage. And then there is the wreckage at the top of the house itself. Archbishop Steve Wood — elected to lead ACNA with such fanfare in June 2024 — now stands suspended from ordained ministry, facing an ecclesiastical trial scheduled for July 2026 on charges of violation of ordination vows, conduct giving just cause for scandal, and sexual immorality. The man appointed to manage the crisis, Bishop Julian Dobbs, carries his own shadow: longstanding allegations of financial irregularities involving missing chaplaincy funds, matters previously investigated, “resolved,” and now resurrected with a vengeance in federal court filings. A church that left TEC in large part because of its failure to hold leaders accountable now finds itself struggling to do precisely that — and doing so in the full glare of the Washington Post, Baptist News Global, and the federal judiciary. The litigation involving the Jurisdiction of the Armed Forces and Chaplaincy is perhaps the most instructive episode of all. Bishop Derek Jones, after being inhibited by the very archbishop now facing trial himself, departed ACNA entirely, launched a rival denomination — the Anglican Reformed Catholic Church — and filed a million-dollar lawsuit against the church alleging trademark infringement and unfair commercial competition. The JAFC’s chaplaincy operation, which gave ACNA a military presence wildly disproportionate to its size — roughly twenty times more per capita than the Southern Baptist Convention — has now become a weapon pointed back at the denomination. One is left with a portrait almost too grim for satire: the man accused of stealing money (Dobbs) disciplining the man accused of sexual misconduct (Wood), while battling the man who accused him of stealing money (Jones), who was himself suspended by the man accused of misconduct. This is not biblical order. It is a Shakespearean tragedy dressed in clerical collars. None of this is to say ACNA is without merit, or that its founding was not necessary. It was. But a church that defines itself primarily by what it is not — not TEC, not pansexual, not heterodox — will eventually have to reckon with what it actually is. That reckoning, long deferred, may now be arriving. Pride goeth before a fall. The cure is not self-flagellation but repentance — genuine, corporate, and costly. ACNA would do well to remember that orthodoxy is not an achievement to be celebrated. It is a gift to be stewarded, humbly, and before God. If you want to read more stories by this writer you can click here: www.virtueonline.org END

Issued by The Oxford Centre for Religion and Public Life (with permission from Dr Sookhdeo’s family) Anglican Mainstream I May 19, 2026 The board of the Oxford Centre for Religion and Public Life heard with great sadness the news of the death (May 18) of Dr Patrick Sookhdeo at the age of 79. Dr Sookhdeo was Executive Director of OCRPL, and Founder of Barnabas Fund, now called Barnabas Aid. Dr Sookhdeo’s family came to the UK in the 1950s from Guyana. He left his Islamic background and became a Christian at the age of about 16 or 17. He studied at London Bible College where he met his wife to be, Rosemary, who had come from New Zealand. Together they founded In Contact Ministries ( later called Servants Fellowship International) in 1975 in St Andrew’s. a redundant church building in Plaistow, East London to promote evangelism and compassionate ministries in multi-cultural urban contexts. In 1989 he created the Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity. He and Rosemary also founded the Barnabas Fund to give practical help to persecuted Christians around the world. In 2000 he obtained a doctorate from the London School of Oriental and African Studies. He is the author, co-author or editor of over 40 books. Nic Ng from Olive Aid Malaysia said: “Dr Sookhdeo dedicated much of his life to a cause that the world too often overlooks – the suffering and persecuted Church. His deep compassion for Christians facing hardship, discrimination, and persecution across the globe was the driving force behind the work he helped establish here in South East Asia through Olive Aid Trust. Dr Sookhdeo once said ‘My inspiration has always been Barnabas, the encourager. Who stood up for the suffering saints of the early Church’”. Bishop Yassir Eric, presiding bishop over the Anglican Church’s Global Ekkios diocese for Muslim Background Believers and an OCRPL Board member, said: “I will always remember his love and concern for believers from Muslim backgrounds. He stood with us, encouraged us, strengthened us, and gave dignity and attention to many of us whom many others overlooked… His legacy will endure. His witness will endure. His love for Christ and His Church will continue to bear fruit.” Metropolitan Philoxenus Mattias Nayis, the Patriarchal Vicar of the Archdiocese Germany of the Syrian Orthodox Church wrote: “During some of the most painful years endured by the peoples of Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and the Middle East in general he stood steadfastly beside the poor, the displaced, the persecuted and the needy” In recent years Dr Sookhdeo developed and grew the Oxford Centre for Religion and Public Life which had been founded in Oxford in 2005. It currently runs theological training for people in grassroots ministries in Africa and Asia, as well as graduate programmes at Masters level with the North Eastern Christian University, Nagaland, India and a doctoral programme with Stellenbosch University in South Africa, providing theologically orthodox, biblical leaders for parts of the church ravaged by persecution, war, migration and natural disasters: indeed a fitting legacy for him, providing for the persecuted church into the future! In the midst of this great loss, the Trustees of the OCRPL entrust Rosemary, his family and colleagues into the care and sustaining power of the Lord whom Patrick loved and served with energy, integrity, and self-sacrifice: . ‘Rest eternal grant unto him O Lord and may light perpetual shine upon him.’ Further information can be obtained from Canon Dr Chris Sugden, Secretary and Acting Chair of OCRPL via csugden@ocrpl.org

By Josep M. Rosselló I May 15, 2026 On Tuesday, April 28, 2026, the Anglican Network in Europe (GAFCON) convened its Annual General Meeting (General Synod), marking a significant milestone in the life of our province-in-formation. With representatives from all three dioceses—the Anglican Convocation in Europe, the Anglican Mission in England, and the Anglican Missionary Congregations Europe—the meeting was characterized by a spirit of profound unity and a shared vision for the re-evangelization of Europe. A key highlight of the Synod was the re-election of three members to the Standing Committee. We are delighted to announce that Keith Robertson, Amaka Ani, and Francis Olaniyi have been elected to serve a three-year term. These individuals bring a wealth of experience and a deep commitment to the Gospel. We invite the whole Church to join us in prayer for them as they take up these vital roles in governing and supporting our shared mission. The Rt. Rev. Andy Lines, our Presiding Bishop, delivered a powerful and encouraging report that resonated deeply with those in attendance. Bishop Andy highlighted the remarkable growth of the Anglican Network in Europe, noting that what began as a small seed is now flourishing into a robust witness across multiple nations. “We are seeing the fruit of our labour under God in the growth of new plants and the revitalization of existing communities,” Bishop Andy remarked. “However, growth brings its own set of challenges. We must remain agile, ready to adapt our structures to meet new opportunities while remaining anchored in the unchanging truth of the Holy Scriptures.” The Financial Report provided further cause for thanksgiving. The Synod heard that the Anglican Network is currently meeting its financial needs, a witness to the generosity of our dioceses, congregations and members. However, the report was not merely about the present; it outlined strategic steps being taken to ensure the Network is financially resilient and “future-ready.” By building a sustainable foundation now, we are ensuring that the next generation of church planters and pastors will have the resources they need to thrive. The meeting also focused on the essential “scaffolding” that supports our mission. Synod received a comprehensive update on the ongoing work regarding our Constitution and Canons, ensuring our legal framework is robust and fit for purpose as we move toward full provincial status. Equally vital was the Safeguarding Report. The Synod reaffirmed that the care and protection of the vulnerable are at the very heart of our Christian witness. The report detailed the standards and training currently in place across the three dioceses, ensuring our churches remain safe spaces for all to hear the gospel of Jesus Christ. As the meeting drew to a close, there was a palpable sense that the Anglican Network in Europe is entering a new chapter. So, a time of prayer was taken to pray for the work of the three dioceses. We leave this Synod emboldened by the Lord’s faithfulness and ready to face the challenges of 2026 and beyond, always for the expansion of the Gospel and the glory of God. “Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.” (Ephesians 3:20-21) Bishop Josep M. Rosselló is the Assistant Bishop of ACE, a diocese of the Anglican Network in Europe

Press Release Anglicans For Life® FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE May 18, 2026 Are Priests Prepared to Baptize a Clone? Ambridge, PA – May 1, 2026 – As the world of bioethics advances faster than the church is teaching about issues such as artificial wombs, designer babies, surrogacy, and genetic selection, Anglicans For Life (AFL) is launching a new website on June 1. This website is dedicated to providing clear Biblical guidance for clergy when addressing complex bioethical questions. Church members are already wrestling with difficult life-and-death issues, including infertility treatments, the moral status of leftover human embryos, and end-of-life care for aging parents. These decisions are being made in every congregation — whether or not parishioners bring their questions to their priest. “The greatest ethical challenge of our time is not simply what we can do with technology and medicine, but who we are as human beings,” said Emma Waters, bioethics policy analyst and consultant for the new website. “In an age of technological utopianism, the Church must proclaim the good news of Biblical anthropology: that human beings are created in the image of God, with inherent worth, purpose, and dignity.” Canon Georgette Forney, President of Anglicans For Life, added: “The mission of the new website is to apply Biblical principles to life, technology, and medicine, equipping Christians to navigate today’s bioethical challenges with wisdom. We uphold the inherent dignity of every human life and advocate for the responsible stewardship of technology and medical advancements in alignment with God’s design for human flourishing.” Anglicans For Life is developing AnglicanBioethics.org as a stand-alone educational resource for the Anglican Communion. By offering Biblical, technical, and pastoral insights about each topic, the site aims to give clergy greater confidence to teach, preach, and counsel parishioners with godly wisdom, grace, and mercy. Anglicans For Life is celebrating the launch of the new Anglican Bioethics Center website with special reveal events on Tuesday, June 2 and June 9, in co-operation with Trinity Anglican Seminary’s June Term classes. (311 11th Street, Ambridge, PA 15003 in the Commons Hall) In addition to presentations by Emma Waters (June 2) and C. Ben Mitchell (June 9), the event will start at 5:30 pm and conclude by 7:15 pm and include pizza, salads, and fun prizes! The final hour (6:15–7:15 pm) will also be livestreamed on Anglicans For Life’s Facebook page. RSVP here. Anglicans For Life is the only para-church ministry in the Anglican Communion that equips and enables local congregations to provide Life-Affirming outreach and ministry, while educating and offering pastoral resources on the Sanctity of Life, including abortion, assisted suicide, adoption, sexual risk avoidance, and bioethics. For a video on more regarding this topic click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ThkJCEkrgk Media Contact: The Rev. Canon Georgette Forney, President, Anglicans For Life 412-749-0455 Georgette@AnglicansForLife.org (mailto:Georgette@AnglicansForLife.org) AnglicansForLife.org