COMMENTARY by David Virtue I www.virtueonline.org I September 20, 2026 It is 1950. The church is full. The rector smiles out at hundreds of happy faces. Marriages are solid. Everybody in town goes to church, and it doesn't much matter which one — as long as they attend, fill the plates, and cover the building costs. The priest gets his paycheck. The bells ring. The car lot is full of new Fords that even a factory worker can afford. The GI Bill puts a house and a college degree within reach. It is cultural Christianity, but no one wants to call it that. Then the Sixties took their toll. The children left and did not come back. The message could not compete; sex, drugs, and rock and roll were more interesting. Congregations faltered and thinned. Fewer families came. There were other things to do on a Sunday — sleep in, play sports, read the sports pages, fire up the barbecue. Marriages came unstuck. Divorces followed. Blended families followed those. The pews kept emptying. The priest retired. The parish decided it could not afford another full-timer; a part-time working priest would do. Visitations dropped off — a part-time priest had no time for the hospital or the home. A few parishes had endowments to cushion the fall. Most did not. The churches leaned on second-career priests. Older, often wiser, but with little spiritual steam left to disciple a next generation. They were placeholders. The seminaries dried up. Fewer men would commit to full-time ministry under heavy debt, and fewer churches remained to hire them. Retired priests moved in to fill the pulpits. Beneath the sociology ran a theology, or the wreck of one. Somewhere the church decided that Scripture was a document of its age and ours was the wiser one. The Resurrection softened into metaphor. Sin was redescribed as a social construct. The cross — that scandal at the center — was quietly filed away as unkind. A faith that had once made demands now offered only affirmation, and it blessed what the age already blessed and called the blessing courage. But a church that only echoes the culture has nothing the culture lacks. Why rise on a Sunday to hear what the Sunday paper already says? The revisionists believed they were rescuing the church by making it relevant. They made it redundant. A gospel with no offense in it carries no power in it, and a church with no power empties as surely as any other vessel with a hole in the bottom. The pews kept emptying. Churches began to close and sell off. The national coffers took the proceeds. Condos rose where sanctuaries had stood. The pews kept emptying. People began meeting in their homes. There was no priest to send for. Suddenly the old verse was on everyone's lips — where two or three are gathered together, there am I among them. A layman would lead: read the Scripture, offer a word, break the bread, and pray over the assembled few. Someone said it felt like an underground church in Iran. Everybody laughed. And then they went silent. David W. Virtue, DD, is founder and managing editor of VirtueOnline. His writings can be found at www.virtueonline.org, where you can subscribe to receive his free biweekly VIEWPOINTS. His Substack on the Middle East is at davidvirtue2.substack.com.

A Church of Pakistan perspective on interfaith responsibility in public life By Michelle Samuel 19 September 2026 The withdrawal of Tahir Ashrafi's Lambeth Award exposes a serious failure of due diligence, but it also reveals a deeper Western misunderstanding. The suffering of religious communities, religious freedom, and interfaith harmony overlap, but they are not interchangeable. In Pakistan, interfaith harmony is the difficult daily work of remaining in relationship while religious communities endure violence, discrimination, and fear, and while religious freedom remains incomplete. Twenty-five years after 9/11, Canterbury did something bold. Some people watched in awe, others in confusion. Lambeth invited a man who, some nineteen years ago, made shocking remarks celebrating Osama Bin Laden. This was not an invitation to have tea with the Archbishop of Canterbury. Lambeth conferred an award on him for interfaith harmony. To the Christian eye, this seemed perfectly natural, a generous recognition, a sister saying ‘Thank you’ for taking care of her family under threat. I mean, of course, the Most Revd Sarah Mullally, recognising the courage of Maulana Ashrafi in standing up for her Christian family in the aftermath of terrorism and in the middle of a season of hostility against Christians in Pakistan. To the tired Briton who has watched his country morph into ‘Londonistan’, it was yet another capitulation. To the incessant netizen, it looked like ‘the world gone mad’; to the politically correct, it was simply bad optics. So they correct bad optics by creating worse ones. If it was bad optics to have a less than healthy, less than sculpted mascot for religious freedom standing with two women veiled in niqab beside the first female Archbishop of Canterbury, it was far worse to compound the error by rescinding the award. Some people removed their pictures from the event; others removed the award from the recipient. In a bid for curated, bespoke optics that tell a sanitised story, the Church in Pakistan’s telling of gritty reality was discarded. To be clear, after the attacks on Jaranwala in 2023, and in recognition of a decade of support for the church, the Church of Pakistan recommended Maulana Ashrafi to the then Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Revd Justin Welby, for his work on interfaith harmony. This recommendation followed his successful visit to Pakistan, facilitated by Maulana Ashrafi in February 2022, which enabled them to address issues concerning Christians in the country. This award was presented on 11 September 2026. Hafiz Muhammad Tahir Mehmood Ashrafi received the Hubert Walter Award for Reconciliation and Interfaith Co-operation at Lambeth Palace for going above and beyond to ensure the voice of violently oppressed Christians is heard. The citation recognised his work as an ambassador of interfaith harmony in Pakistan. Within days, pressure grew, and Lambeth Palace withdrew the award. The controversy has rightly raised questions about judgment and due diligence. Those questions must be answered. The manner of the withdrawal has created what is clearly an administrative, political and, critically, a moral failure: Canterbury treated a relationship formed in the dangerous realities of Pakistan as though it were a public-relations object that could be displayed and then removed when the British political weather changed. It also confronts Canterbury with a question larger than this award: is it acting as a Church within the Communion and the body of Christ, or as an arm of politics responsive first to British public pressure? The Church in Pakistan’s relationship with Maulana Ashrafi could never have flourished if he were an extremist. The Church of Pakistan nominated Ashrafi from within its own lived experience. Every few years, the Church of England offers a chance to nominate a person of significance in various fields. This year was no different. The Church of Pakistan did not develop the idea in a vacuum. Lambeth and the Church of Pakistan had been discussing this nomination for some time — to be specific, since 2023. When Christian homes and churches were attacked, Maulana Ashrafi stood with us. Many people did. That solidarity did not erase every troubling word in his record. There will always be differences in our opinions and perspectives. Faith differences are significant differences. That is why interfaith harmony and engagement take hard work and deep commitment to respect and honour. They are not, and cannot be, simple, easy formulas. Nonetheless, in the hour of our grief, Maulana Ashrafi was willing to stand up to hostile stakeholders and say, ‘This was wrong.’ Even if it were for the cameras — which it was not — it demonstrates that Maulana Ashrafi is willing to do what it takes to actively craft a narrative of hope. It mattered to a Church carrying grief and continuing vulnerability, so they nominated him. Canterbury ought to have examined the nomination rigorously. But on what criteria? The criteria of a Church seeking to build bridges, or the criteria of a political institution seeking to preserve its national interests? Once we establish the criteria on which Canterbury should act, then we can decide whether it should have approved the nomination in the first place. In that case, Maulana Ashrafi would never have known that anyone nominated him, or that Canterbury was considering and rejecting him. Instead, Canterbury called him, congratulated him, invited him, and then conferred the award on him, his wife, and his daughter. By bringing his wife and his daughter to the award ceremony, Maulana Ashrafi demonstrated deep trust and respect for the office of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Maulana Ashrafi is in his own right a powerful, influential leader of millions of Pakistani Muslims. This rescinding of the award is not just an injury to the man and the institutions that support his work, but also a betrayal of his trust and honour. Canterbury should never have invited him, accepted the nomination, or broken bread with the recipient without basic vetting. The manner of the withdrawal has communicated, whether intended or not, that the lived reality of Christians in Pakistan carries less weight than political pressure in Britain. Again, the Communion is undermined! Three realities that must not be confused A great deal of language and discourse is being flung about on social media right now. The first intellectual mistake in this debate is collapsing three related realities into one: persecution, religious freedom, and interfaith harmony. We may all think we know this, but as the comments and discourse progress, the lines and distinctions blur. It is worth our while to stop and consider these distinct areas, all pertinent to a melting-pot world where migration, immigration, asylum seeking, and smuggling are changing the nature of our streets, neighbourhoods, churches, academia, and politics. We must recognise that each asks a different question. What wrong is being suffered? What freedom is owed to every person? How do people of different faiths live and act together? Clear answers are essential, because progress in one area does not prove that the other two have been secured. Persecution Persecution is the wrong suffered by a person or community because of faith or religious identity. It includes discrimination, coercion, false accusation, mob violence, forced conversion, destruction of homes or places of worship, forced displacement, and denial of equal citizenship. It is the use of power to punish, silence, intimidate, or remove a religious community. Religious freedom Religious freedom is the moral, legal, and social freedom owed to every person: to hold a faith, change faith, reject faith, worship, teach, gather, organise, and live according to conscience. That freedom is exercised within the equal dignity and rights of others; it does not protect violence, coercion, or practices that destroy another person’s life or liberty. Religious freedom therefore requires more than tolerance. It requires law, public institutions, and social habits that protect conscience and equal citizenship. Interfaith harmony Interfaith harmony is the relational work of living together across religious difference. It appears when neighbours, religious leaders, and institutions build trust, restrain hostility, protect one another, and cooperate for justice. A priest attending an iftar during Ramadan, or a cleric joining a Christmas celebration, can be a good sign of an enduring friendship, but the real test comes after an atrocity. When a church is blackened by fire and families are afraid to return home, who comes? Who condemns the violence without qualification? Who remains after the cameras leave? In Pakistan, the answer has often been the Church and those Muslim friends willing to stand beside her. Maulana Ashrafi is one such friend. The complexity of that friendship demands humility from distant observers, not simplistic judgment. Where the three realities overlap The three realities overlap without becoming the same. Persecution violates religious freedom and damages relations between communities. Religious freedom creates the legal and social space in which interfaith relationships can grow. Interfaith harmony can help defend religious freedom and resist persecution by creating the trusted relationships through which leaders intervene in a crisis. Yet a cordial relationship cannot substitute for equal rights, and an interfaith event cannot be offered as proof that persecution has ended. Pakistan has not found a complete way out of persecution. It has, however, developed forms of deliberation born from necessity. Religious leaders sit together, argue, intervene, negotiate protection, and seek practical routes through crisis. The work is unfinished and sometimes unsuccessful, but it is real. Religious freedom in daily life Religious freedom in the twenty-first century cannot be measured only by constitutional language, conferences, or awards. It must be secured in streets, workplaces, schools, markets, courts, and neighbourhoods. The law must protect Christians, Muslims, Parsis, Hindus, Sikhs, and Ahmadis as equal citizens. Public institutions must act before a crowd decides whose conscience, home, or place of worship may be violated. Interfaith relationships can support that freedom, but they cannot replace the state’s duty to uphold it. This distinction is especially important across Asia, where religious plurality is not a newly discovered policy field but an ancient social reality. Communities have lived beside one another for millennia through peace, rivalry, patronage, discrimination, and violence. Interfaith harmony in such settings is not an institutional experiment. It is a discipline learned through proximity, tested by crisis, and sustained by memory. Christian memory in the subcontinent reaches far beyond the British Empire. History places Thomas the Apostle at the court of the Indo-Parthian king Gondophares, a ruler known independently through coins and inscriptions. The apostolic encounter carries a profound image: a foreign early Christian of Jewish descent — a craftsman received at an Asian court, serving a king while establishing a Christian witness. Christianity in South Asia cannot be reduced to an imperial import. We have been navigating the realities of the subcontinent for 2,000 years. We know how to choose a nominee for excellence in the field of interfaith harmony. Why the Church of Pakistan nominated Tahir Ashrafi The nomination did not declare Tahir Ashrafi infallible. An interfaith award is not canonisation, and partnership is not agreement with every statement a person has ever made. The nomination recognised conduct within a particular relationship and a particular field of operation — namely, interfaith harmony. Jaranwala is central to that judgment. In August 2023, after allegations of Qur’an desecration, mobs attacked Christian neighbourhoods, burning and vandalising churches and homes. Archbishop Azad Marshall publicly cried out for justice, for protection, and for recognition that Christians’ lives were valuable in their own homeland; he described their condition as a form of legal apartheid. In the Church of Pakistan’s account, Ashrafi did not remain at a safe distance. He stood with the Christian community and its Archbishop during a moment of fear and humiliation. That presence cannot erase his record. The 2007 remarks that triggered the present controversy were grave and deeply offensive, especially when an award was presented on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the 11 September attacks. Canterbury should have discovered, assessed, and discussed them before the ceremony. Ashrafi should have been asked to answer for them directly: to state whether he repudiates them, and to explain the change his later work represents. Moral seriousness also asks whether people can change. If interfaith work has any purpose, it must include the possibility that a political and religious leader can move away from dangerous rhetoric, form relationships with those once regarded with suspicion, and use his influence to protect a vulnerable community. A record of change does not make the past disappear. It may, however, be exactly what reconciliation is meant to recognise. The Church goes where love is costly The Church’s vocation is not to meet only the approved, the safe, or the already converted to its vocabulary. Christ goes into the difficult place with truth and love. The Church therefore sits with those whom the world may call enemies — not because evil is unreal, but because no human being is beyond recognition, transformation, or responsibility. For Christians in Pakistan, such engagement is not a fashionable commission or a carefully staged dinner. It is part of survival and witness. We sit with Muslim leaders while speaking truthfully about the suffering of religious communities. We ask them to oppose extremist violence. We risk disappointment and sometimes betrayal. They, too, may risk condemnation by standing with us. This is gritty work. It leaves mud under the fingernails. It cannot be managed as a clean ceremonial box that is opened for a photograph and closed when controversy arrives. In the case of Tahir Ashrafi, the Church did not merely sit with him. He also chose to sit with the Church and to actively pursue a more harmonious relationship. That reciprocity is what Canterbury failed to understand when it treated the award solely as a British reputational problem and forgot that it is about a communion. What communion? I am beginning to ask! Our Communion was with the Church of England, and our interfaith engagement and harmony were with Maulana Tahir. Both have been damaged, and first aid and triage must now come from Canterbury. Canterbury must choose communion over political expediency The Church of Pakistan is an autonomous province of the Anglican Communion. It is not administratively under the Archbishop of Canterbury. Communion is not a system of control from a Western centre; it is a fellowship within the body of Christ, expressed through shared faith, mutual counsel, and the bearing of one another’s burdens. Those bonds may be strained by serious theological disagreements, but they cannot mean that the experience of a Western church automatically overrides the discernment of a church living as a vulnerable minority in an Islamic republic. Canterbury’s decision has consequences beyond London. The Church of Pakistan made a nomination based on relationships built over years and tested during actual suffering. To withdraw the honour abruptly — without an evident process of consultation with the nominating church, and without a visible assessment of local consequences — risks humiliating the recipient, discrediting the nominators, and exposing Christian partners in Pakistan to renewed anger. A Church acting within communion must take those consequences seriously because, in the body of Christ, the suffering of one member cannot be treated as a distant inconvenience. This crisis therefore poses more searching questions for Canterbury than it does for us. The Church of Pakistan knows why it nominated Tahir Ashrafi: in our time of suffering, he stood with us. Canterbury must explain why the judgment of that Church — a Church surviving under real challenges — was accepted in ceremony and then treated as expendable when political pressure arrived. It must decide whether its first instinct is to remain in faithful relationship with the Communion or to function as an ecclesiastical arm of British politics. If Canterbury made the original mistake through inadequate vetting, it should not shift the full cost of correcting it onto partners who live with the consequences far from Britain. What Canterbury should do now First, Lambeth Palace should disclose how it received, assessed, approved, and later reconsidered the nomination. The central question is not only who nominated Ashrafi or who presented the award. It is who recommended withdrawal, what information was considered, whether Ashrafi was invited to respond, whether the Church of Pakistan was consulted, and whether risks to Christians in Pakistan were assessed. What happened to the ‘do no harm’ policies? Second, Canterbury should apologise to Tahir Ashrafi and to the Church of Pakistan for the failure of process and for the public humiliation created by conferring an honour before completing adequate due diligence. Such an apology need not endorse his 2007 remarks. It can register disagreement with those remarks while accepting institutional responsibility for how the matter was handled. Third, the Archbishop of Canterbury should meet Archbishop Azad Marshall and representatives of the Church of Pakistan to hear why the nomination was made and what Ashrafi’s presence has meant in moments such as Jaranwala. Criticism is relevant and necessary, but it is not the only testimony that matters. This listening should have preceded any decision to rescind the award; it remains essential now. Fourth, future Lambeth Awards involving conflict-affected settings should include structured consultation with the nominating province, independent historical review, a right of response for the proposed recipient, and a security-impact assessment before any public announcement. Canterbury should also state whether appropriate government or security advice was sought in this case. An institution that frequently intervenes in political questions cannot treat basic due diligence as an afterthought when an overseas church’s safety and credibility are at stake. The meaning of the award The deepest irony is that the controversy could have become a mature testimony to reconciliation. Canterbury could have said that Ashrafi’s past words were indefensible, that his later solidarity with Christians mattered, and that the award recognised movement toward a better public witness rather than perfection. It could have invited him to recommit himself to protecting every vulnerable religious community. It could also have asked the Church of Pakistan how the matter should be addressed publicly, honouring the mutuality that a troubled Communion still claims to seek. To demand on social media that he repudiate his past claims is, by the same logic, to insist that every official who ever administered a citizenship oath to a British Asian bears responsibility for the British grooming gangs — and that his salary or pension should therefore be revoked. In fact, Canterbury first honoured him without adequate preparation and then withdrew the honour under pressure. That sequence satisfied neither truth nor reconciliation. It embarrassed the Archbishop of Canterbury, humiliated a Pakistani Muslim leader, disregarded the judgment of the Church of Pakistan, and left those closest to the risk to manage the fallout. It also revealed how quickly political pressure can outweigh the obligations of communion. Real religious freedom is a conviction about the dignity of conscience, not permission to associate only with people whose biographies have been sanitised for Western approval. This is where Christianity sets us apart. This is where compliance and political correctness are becoming the new engine of persecution, restricting and suffocating Christ’s Church. Britain — and in this case its religious arm, the Church of England, which bows to its every whim — must apply lawful and proportionate security scrutiny within its own borders, and refuse masses of radicals onto its own soil, before making such a sweeping judgment about those who operate with real and authentic grit in countries like Pakistan. It must also examine interfaith partners carefully before damaging the work in another country and context, and before damaging the overall testimony of the Communion. The inconsistency lies in neglecting serious scrutiny at one moment and then performing moral certainty after the consequences have been transferred to others. For Christians in Pakistan, religious freedom is also a spiritual practice, lived under the protection expressed in Saint Patrick’s prayer, The Deer’s Cry. It is the freedom to worship, to speak truth, to remain a neighbour under pressure, and to protect the vulnerable without pretending that the suffering of religious communities has ended. Interfaith harmony is the costly decision to keep walking together while seeking a way out of violence, legal inequality, and terror. The Church of Pakistan nominated Tahir Ashrafi because, when Christian churches were burning, it knew whom it could call a friend. Canterbury may reconsider an award, but it should not dismiss the experience that made the nomination possible. An inquiry, a direct conversation, and an apology are now required — not to avoid hard truths, but to face all of them. At the end of every paragraph, I resist the urge to say, ‘Thank you, Sarah Mullally.’ A missional call after the crisis This crisis is not only an administrative failure to be investigated. It is a missional test. The Church’s feet are being held to the fire. We bring the most searching questions before Canterbury and the wider Communion. Will the Church use this moment merely to defend institutions and manage political reputations, or will it receive it as a summons to repentance, repair, and a more faithful life within the body of Christ? To the Church in the United Kingdom What will the Church in the UK do to demonstrate grace and moral seriousness after the crisis Canterbury has opened? It must resist both a complacent multiculturalism that refuses to name extremism and a collective suspicion that treats Muslim neighbours as a problem to be managed. It must distinguish the suffering of religious communities from religious freedom, and both from the patient work of interfaith harmony. It must listen to churches that live as vulnerable minorities, examine Britain’s imperial inheritance honestly, and build local relationships strong enough to survive controversy. Mission in Britain requires the humility to receive wisdom from beyond the West. It is not enough to eat a delicious iftar meal in a mosque during Ramadan. We must be willing to pursue a more robust form of action and engagement, and to demand change. To the Church of Pakistan What does faithfulness require of us in Pakistan? We must continue to name the suffering of religious communities, identify its causes, and insist on equal citizenship and the protection of law. We must continue to remain present as full and responsible citizens. At the same time, we must not abandon the relationships through which Muslim and Christian leaders can intervene when fear becomes violence. We must neither romanticise interfaith friendship nor retreat from it when it becomes costly. Our calling is to keep the table open, to hold our friends to account, to protect the vulnerable, and to show that the Gospel’s ministry of reconciliation does not deny injustice; it enters the place of danger in order to confront it. To the Anglican Communion How will the Communion draw alongside the Church of Pakistan and make repairs that honour God — repairs the wider Communion is not responsible for in these last 72 hours, but repairs that only a stronger, Christ-centred communion can make through love and goodwill? It must listen before it judges, consult before decisions are announced, and share the risks created by those decisions. It needs transparent processes for due diligence, a right of response, meaningful consultation with the nominating province, and a serious assessment of consequences for vulnerable communities. Communion cannot mean a decision made in London whose human and developmental cost is borne elsewhere. Canterbury’s role is not to reproduce the habits of political power, but to strengthen the bonds of Christ’s body through truth, mutual responsibility, apology, and repair. These questions cannot be postponed to the next article or the next commission. They are the Church’s mission now. Will we become a Communion that tells the truth about the suffering endured by religious communities, defends religious freedom for every person, and sustains interfaith relationships when they are tested? Will we carry the Christ light? Will we make room for repentance and change without surrendering moral clarity? The credibility of the Church will not be restored by better messaging. It will be restored through just and prayerful action: an honest inquiry, a direct apology, patient repair, and a common witness shaped by justice, mercy, and humility. That is the road of interfaith harmony: not the denial of suffering, not retreat from religious freedom, but faithful presence in the midst of both. Note: Bishop Azad Marshall, the Moderator Bishop of the Church of Pakistan, has given an interview on the withdrawal of the award to Tahir Ashrafi, which will be published in the next couple of days. For more information please contact Canon Dr Chris Sugden on 07808 297043 (csugden@ocrpl.org), who will have contact details for Bishop Azad Marshall.

September 19, 2026 This transcript captures an interview with Bishop Azad Marshall of the Church of Pakistan regarding the withdrawal of an award from Maulana Tahir Ashrafi. Bishop Marshall explained that the Church of Pakistan was not aware of Ashrafi’s previous remarks praising Osama bin Laden and defending the blasphemy laws, noting that he has since worked closely with Christian communities and supported minority rights. The bishop expressed disappointment that proper due diligence was not conducted before the award was given and then withdrawn, stating that this has damaged interfaith relations and the Church of Pakistan’s relationship with the Anglican Communion. He called for an apology from the Archbishop of Canterbury and indicated he would make a formal apology himself, while also refusing to participate in an upcoming ACC meeting until a sincere apology is received. Bishop Marshall defended Tahir Ashrafi’s recent actions, stating that he has been supportive of the Christian community and has helped with various issues, including providing security for Archbishop Justin Welby’s visit to Peshawar. Tahir Ashrafi’s Interfaith Harmony Work Bishop Marshall recounted Tahir Ashrafi’s work protecting minorities and Christians. He particularly cited the case of a young Christian girl with Down’s syndrome and the Maulana’s personal commitment to justice in her case and to her religious freedom and safety. When the girl was accused of blasphemy, Ashrafi “went all out to protect her and speak on her behalf.” Bishop Marshall explained that Tahir Ashrafi’s motivation comes from his contact with Christians over the years and his desire to promote inter-religious harmony, noting his official role as head of the Pakistan government’s peace committee. They also discussed a meeting between Tahir Ashrafi and Justin Welby. Welby had nominated him for the award and invited him to dinner at his home immediately before the award was presented. Bishop Marshall expressed disappointment about the withdrawal. Not only does this disregard former Archbishop Welby’s hospitality, he said, but also his keen insight into matters of interfaith harmony and how they unfold in the real world. Award Withdrawal Controversy Bishop Marshall discussed the controversial past of Tahir Ashrafi and explained that proper due diligence was not conducted before the award was given, and that when the Communion moved to withdraw it, he was not properly consulted first. He expressed concern that the situation has embarrassed Christians in Pakistan and will damage interfaith relationships and the Church’s credibility. The Church of Pakistan and the Anglican Communion Bishop Marshall discussed the negative impact of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s decision on relations between the Anglican Communion and the Church of Pakistan. He said the Archbishop should apologize to Maulana Ashrafi and to the Church of Pakistan for mishandling the matter of a respected Muslim scholar. He will himself make a formal apology to Maulana Ashrafi and build relationships going forward, emphasizing that cultural differences shape perspectives on such matters. Until a sincere apology from Archbishop Mullally is forthcoming, he is refusing to participate in Anglican Communion meetings. He said Archbishop Sarah had displayed a lack of understanding of the cultural dynamics at play. Bishop Marshall concluded: “While we understand that we occupy different cultural, social and economic spaces, it is essential we talk more — specifics, not just generic interfaith chit-chat, but seeking God’s heart together for the world we live in and how to be the answer to the prayer Jesus taught us, ‘Thy Kingdom Come.’” Bishop Marshall was speaking with Canon Dr Chris Sugden.

Without the Holy Spirit, Christian discipleship would be inconceivable, even impossible. There can be no life without the life-giver, no understanding without the Spirit of truth, no fellowship without the unity of the Spirit, no Christlikeness of character apart from His fruit, and no effective witness without His power. As a body without breath is a corpse, so the church without the Spirit is dead. — John Stott Good bishops can be succeeded by bad bishops. Good archbishops can make mistakes. Priests can rebel unjustly. Accusers can lie. Institutions can protect themselves. Leaders can confuse their office with themselves. The Church has known all of this for two thousand years. That is why she developed councils. That is why she developed canons. That is why bishops are consecrated by bishops rather than appointing themselves. That is why authority in the Church is never supposed to stand alone. Authority must itself remain under authority. — Rev. Dr. Ronald Moore “Obedience is the only reality. It is faith visible, faith acting, and faith manifest. It is the test of real discipleship among the Lord’s people.” — J. C. Ryle We are seeing the biggest move of God in history today. This is what it looks like. We don’t invite people to our church and denomination because we need more butts in the pews to pay the bills. We connect them to Jesus and help them form church by making disciples. This is why Iran is the fastest-growing church in the world today. — Jerry Kramer Dear Brothers and Sisters, CANTERBURY GOES FROM BAD TO WORSE The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dame Sarah Mullally, is tone deaf and goes from bad to worse. To say she is a bumbling fool might be to underestimate her. Her utterances on Islam and her recent pilgrimage to Israel and the West Bank reveal a depth of ignorance unmatched in contemporary Anglican history. This week her support for Islam reached a new nadir when she awarded Muslim leader Hafiz Muhammad Tahir Mehmood Ashrafi, chairman of the Pakistan Ulema Council, the Hubert Walter Award for Reconciliation and Interfaith Cooperation at Lambeth Palace on September 11 — the twenty-fifth anniversary of the attacks — cited for his longstanding support for religious minorities in Pakistan, particularly the Christian community. Minority rights, note well — but not a syllable about the rights of women. Ashrafi’s wife stood next to him in full hijab, in defiance of the very freedoms the West claims to defend. Within the week Mullally was forced to withdraw the honor. Ashrafi’s past had caught up with him: this is the cleric who conferred the title “Sword of God” on Osama bin Laden — honoring the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks — in response to Britain’s knighting of Salman Rushdie in 2007. He has also defended Pakistan’s blasphemy and child-marriage laws and accused Jews and Christians of conspiring to destroy nuclear-capable Pakistan. The backlash on social media was swift and condemnatory. It’s actions like this that make you understand why GAFCON leaders will have nothing to do with her. Her day leading the Anglican Communion is done. Lambeth Palace is an empty theological shell. THE TRUE STATE OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND Well, what is the true state of the Church of England? Ask the men who run it and you will hear about a “Quiet Revival,” a warm tide of returning young men and rising Easter numbers. Ask the widow who still turns up on a wet Sunday in a village that has lost its priest, is losing its rectory, and will soon lose its building, and you will hear something else entirely. A source deep inside the church, and intimately familiar with its real workings, summed it up like this: “We are about to see a period of steep decline and closure, with a number of evangelical bishops now adopting a bizarre philosophy that ‘church’ does not require parish churches and parish priests. Everything can be done by informal lay groups, directed by ever-expanding diocesan offices, often many miles away. Rectories are being sold off, clergy not replaced, parishes being merged into large unwieldy clusters, and money increasingly being spent on staff at the office. We literally have bishops who do not believe in ordination or sacraments, and that they are the only actual ministers in the fantasy evangelical church which they have imagined for themselves.” You can read more here: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/the-true-state-of-the-church-of-england WALES PRESSES PAUSE The bishops of the Church in Wales have quietly shelved their promised bill to let same-sex couples marry in church, pleading the need for more “theological reflection.” The province already has a lesbian Archbishop, Cherry Vann, in a civil partnership, for goodness’ sake! So how much “theological reflection” are we talking about? Everybody knows where this is going, so why pretend otherwise? Archliberal Bishop Gregory Cameron of St. Asaph is totally committed to the idea. He is a close friend of both Vann and Rowan Williams. Would anybody actually stop the inevitable from taking place? THE WOOD TRIAL IS OVER The trial of ACNA Archbishop Steve D. Wood in Charleston is over. The bishops are mum, with as long as 101 days to decide his guilt or innocence. Some 38 witnesses stepped up to the plate to testify across five days of proceedings. We won’t know the verdict until December. If he is found guilty and appeals, he can drag it out another 30 days. The absolute last day the court may release an opinion, it has said, is December 21, 2026. My suspicion, based on my view of human nature and bishops, is that they will drag it out as long as possible, hoping time will kill the opposition, and then quietly declare him innocent of all charges. Wood faces three charges arising from the presentment brought against him: violation of his ordination vows; conduct giving just cause for scandal or offense, including the abuse of ecclesiastical power; and sexual immorality. TEC’S FIRST TRANSGENDER DEAN In a first for TEC, the Episcopal Church has installed its first transgender dean in the person of the Very Rev. Micah Cronin at All Saints’ Cathedral in Milwaukee. He — formerly she — is the first transgender-identifying dean in the history of the Episcopal Church. Cronin is a biological woman who identifies as a man, married to another biological woman, the Rev. Elias Henry, who also identifies as transgender and serves at a Lutheran, LGBT-affirming campus ministry at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. You can’t make this stuff up. The hollowed-out Episcopal Church has demonstrated for all to see that the less you believe, the faster you dissipate. The Episcopal Church has gone from binary to buggery in one generation. You can read more here: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/first-for-tec-the-episcopal-church-installs-a-transgender-cathedral-dean FLORIDA ELECTS A BISHOP AT LAST The Episcopal Diocese of Florida has finally elected a bishop after putting itself through three years of ecclesiastical torture over gay marriage. On September 11 the diocese chose the Rev. J. Randolph Alexander Jr. as its ninth bishop, closing out nearly two decades under Samuel “John” Howard and the bruising, drawn-out transition that followed his retirement. Consider what the wider world managed in the same span: wars in Europe and the Middle East, regime changes and geopolitical realignments, catastrophic natural disasters, and a U.S. presidential election. And a single Florida diocese, still holding a preponderance of conservative believers, spent three years maneuvering toward a bishop who would satisfy the pansexual elites of the wider church. Clearly, persistence pays. That they settled on a straight white male is the only concession the progressives apparently made. No queers this time. A NEW ARCHBISHOP FOR RWANDA The Anglican Province of Rwanda has a new archbishop. The Rt. Rev. Dr. Manasseh Gahima, Bishop of Gahini, has been elected as the next Archbishop and Primate of Eglise Anglicane du Rwanda (EAR — the Anglican Church of Rwanda). He succeeds the 71-year-old Archbishop Laurent Mbanda. Archbishop Mbanda had been due to retire at 65 in 2019 but was granted an extension by the province — an accommodation that allowed him to complete the reordering of Rwandan diocesan life and to steady the province through the Mugisha affair in Shyira, in which the Rt. Rev. Samuel Mugisha Mugiraneza faced a diocesan forensic audit and a Rwanda Investigation Bureau inquiry into alleged misuse of diocesan funds. His suspension in 2024 led to criminal conviction. Mbanda led GAFCON — now reconstituted as the Global Anglican Council — through the tumult of the Canterbury succession. He leads a province that ordains women priests and frames his opposition to Mullally around doctrine and the majority Communion belief that women cannot be ordained to the episcopacy. The archbishop-elect’s installation is planned for October 25, when he will also take on the role of Bishop of Gasabo, as is the custom of the primate in the province. SCANDAL AT THE FALLS CHURCH Sex scandals are not the exclusive property of the Episcopal Church, though barely a month passes without another priest or bishop dragging that failing denomination into the headlines. Orthodox jurisdictions have their share of shame too, and honesty requires saying so plainly. The latest erupts at the flagship parish of the Anglican Church in North America — The Falls Church Anglican in Falls Church, Virginia. On September 15 the U.S. Department of Justice announced the arrest of Jeffrey Turner Taylor, 66, now of Milford, Ohio, on federal charges of enticing minors for illegal sexual activity and traveling with intent to engage in illegal sexual activity with minors. Taylor was arrested and made his initial court appearance on September 14. According to court documents, he served as a youth minister at The Falls Church from 1990 to 2002, where he allegedly groomed and molested multiple boys under the guise of spiritual mentorship — sexual “horseplay,” probing questions about the boys’ private habits, and lurid disclosures about his own. He is said to have taken boys to ministry events in other states and abroad with the intent to abuse them. Investigators trace his alleged grooming and abuse from at least 1990 through 2008, including at two churches in Atlanta. If convicted, he faces the possibility of life in prison. Arraignment is set for September 24 in the Eastern District of Virginia. But here is the fact most reports have glossed over: when these crimes occurred, The Falls Church was not an Anglican parish at all. It was an Episcopal one. You can read more here: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/falls-church-abuse-case-a-crime-that-predates-acna EXILE AND RETURN Exile and Return: A Pastor’s Reckoning with the Mainline Church. This is the harrowing story of one orthodox priest’s twenty-year ordeal at the hands of revisionist bishops — the dark ecclesiastical back-alleys they inhabit, and how they nearly destroyed the life and ministry of a faithful man. The Rev. Jacob Dell had a single passion — to be an Episcopal priest. He had the best education money could buy: Yale, Nashotah House, the backing of his father, and, above all, an overwhelming experience of call that came upon him while he was worshipping at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York City. But Dell got the runaround for over twenty years. He was blue-blood material, the kind of young man the Episcopal Church once said it wanted and needed. He looked the part and could play it. His only problem was that he believed too much. For the “sin” of being faithful to the gospel, he was given the runaround for more than twenty years — marked as a “dead cat,” one of those priests the institution quietly decides to discard, blacklisted by bishops who keep their own private lists. You can read his story here: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/exile-and-return THE WEST, THE CHURCHES, AND THE FAITH BETRAYED I wrote a think piece on the state of the West and the churches that inhabit it. Muggeridge saw it. Solzhenitsyn named it. Melanie Phillips is living it. Os Guinness traced it to the root. And the churches, God help us, have joined the demolition crew. Civilizations, we are told, fall to barbarians at the gate. The truer and more terrible story is that they open the gate themselves, hand the barbarian the torch, and applaud the blaze as an advance in lighting. Malcolm Muggeridge understood this better than any man of his generation, and he was my friend. He said it with a mordant glee that never quite concealed the grief beneath it: whereas every previous civilization had been brought down by attacks from without, ours had achieved the unique distinction of training its own destroyers at its own educational institutions, then paying, out of the public purse, to broadcast their destructive creed far and wide. What is called Western Civilization, he wrote, is in an advanced state of decomposition, and another Dark Ages will soon be upon us — arriving so gradually, through the steady erosion of our values, that we should scarcely notice the lights going out. He was not describing a foreign invasion. He was describing a suicide. You can read more here: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/a-death-wish-dressed-as-progress TRINITY LAUNCHES ‘HOLY ORDER’ Ambridge, Pa.-based Trinity Anglican Seminary has announced the launch of Holy Order, a new podcast exploring how Scripture and the Anglican tradition — in all its richness and depth, both catholic and reformed — form Christians for faithful living in a disordered age. Though produced by the seminary, the show is not about Trinity itself. Rather, it extends the seminary’s teaching ministry beyond the classroom, making the formative riches of Scripture and the Anglican tradition more accessible to the wider Church and the world at a time when many are seeking a deeper, more rooted faith. You can read more here: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/trinity-launches-holy-order-a-new-podcast-exploring-faithful-christian-living-in-a-disordered-world SUPPORT VIRTUEONLINE My webmaster says that Google Analytics reports VOL readership is up 149% since July and is now read in 124 countries of the world, with well over one million page views. This is exciting news. My Substack on the Middle East has over 500 readers and is growing daily. But we do need tax-deductible donations to keep it coming. There are no salaries, just support for a webmaster, a website, and reporters and columnists who contribute to VOL’s success. We have no mega-donors and no grants — only faithful readers who believe in what we do. We have proven ourselves over more than thirty-five years of writing about Anglican affairs. Please consider a tax-deductible gift. It helps enormously. Online: virtueonline.org/donate By check (tax-deductible): VIRTUEONLINE, P.O. Box 111, Shohola, PA 18458 Thank you for your support. David W. Virtue, DD President and Managing Editor

Grudging retreat exposes a vetting failure at the heart of Sarah Mullally's new archiepiscopate By David W. Virtue, DD www.virtueonline.org September 18, 2026 Six days after handing a Pakistani cleric its Hubert Walter Award for Reconciliation and Interfaith Cooperation, Lambeth Palace quietly took it back. The recipient, Maulana Hafiz Muhammad Tahir Mehmood Ashrafi, chairman of the Pakistan Ulema Council, is a formidable operator. He has built a genuine reputation as a broker of religious harmony, a defender of Pakistan's beleaguered Christians, and a fixture of state-sponsored interfaith diplomacy from Islamabad to the Gulf. Lambeth thought it was honoring that man. It was also honoring another. In 2007, amid protests over Salman Rushdie's British knighthood, Ashrafi pledged to confer on Osama bin Laden the title Saifullah — “Sword of God” — for the service of waging jihad against infidels. That is the man Sarah Mullally, Archbishop of Canterbury, decorated at Lambeth Palace on Friday, September 11 — the twenty-fifth anniversary of the day bin Laden's disciples murdered nearly three thousand people, sixty-seven of them British. The National Secular Society called the spectacle obscene and almost beyond parody. For once the secularists had the better of the argument, and the Church of England had no answer. The retreat, when it came Thursday evening, was a study in institutional embarrassment dressed as principle. Lambeth did not repent; it explained. The award, it insisted, had recognized Ashrafi's support for Pakistan's Christian minority — support, it noted pointedly, valued by that country's own Anglicans. It rehearsed the familiar catechism that dialogue must cross deep differences. Only then, buried beneath the self-justification, came the admission that earlier comments had “come to light” and the honor was withdrawn. Come to light. A quarter-century of public record, a pledge to canonize the architect of 9/11, and it reached Lambeth's notice only after the medal was pinned and the photographs taken. Ashrafi's office, for its part, complained that his words had been stripped of “proper context” — as though there existed a context in which sanctifying a mass murderer becomes an act of reconciliation. This is not merely Ashrafi's disgrace. It is Mullally's. An archbishopric barely begun has already demonstrated that Lambeth's interfaith machinery cannot perform the most elementary due diligence before conferring the Church's honors on the anniversary of martyrdom itself. The scandal is not that a bad man was praised. It is that no one thought to ask. David W. Virtue, DD, is founder and managing editor of VirtueOnline. His writings can be found at www.virtueonline.org, where you can subscribe to receive his free biweekly VIEWPOINTS. His Substack on the Middle East is at davidvirtue2.substack.com.

By David W. Virtue, DD www.virtueonline.org September 18, 2026 Sex scandals are not the exclusive property of The Episcopal Church, though barely a month passes without another priest or bishop dragging that failing denomination into the headlines. Orthodox jurisdictions have their share of shame too, and honesty requires saying so plainly. The latest erupts at the flagship parish of the Anglican Church in North America — The Falls Church Anglican in Falls Church, Virginia. What the FBI Alleges On September 15 the U.S. Department of Justice announced the arrest of Jeffrey Turner Taylor, 66, now of Milford, Ohio, on federal charges of enticing minors for illegal sexual activity and traveling with intent to engage in illegal sexual activity with minors. According to court documents, Taylor served as a youth minister at The Falls Church from 1990 to 2002, where he allegedly groomed and molested multiple boys under the guise of spiritual mentorship — sexual “horseplay,” probing questions about the boys’ private habits, and lurid disclosures about his own. He is said to have taken boys to ministry events in other states and abroad with the intent to abuse them. Investigators trace his alleged grooming and abuse from at least 1990 through 2008, including at two churches in Atlanta. If convicted, he faces up to 105 years in prison. Arraignment is set for September 24 in the Eastern District of Virginia. The crimes are monstrous, and no jurisdictional footnote lessens the debt owed to the men who were boys when Taylor is accused of preying on them. An Episcopal Parish, Not an Anglican One But here is the fact that not a single report has bothered to note: when these crimes occurred, The Falls Church was not an Anglican parish at all. It was an Episcopal one. Taylor’s tenure ran from 1990 to 2002. The Falls Church did not vote to leave The Episcopal Church until December 2006 — more than four years after he left its staff. Throughout the years he is accused of abusing children, the parish sat squarely under the oversight of The Episcopal Church and the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia. The bishop to whom that parish answered was an Episcopal bishop. The canons that governed it were Episcopal canons. The supervisory failure, if failure there was, was an Episcopal failure. The Falls Church Anglican did not yet exist. Neither did ACNA, which would not be founded until 2009. This is not special pleading; it is the plain record. ACNA cannot be held to account for sins committed inside a denomination it had not yet left, in years before it drew its first breath. To file this scandal under “ACNA” is to get the story exactly backward. A Church That Named Its Own Sin To its credit, The Falls Church Anglican has not hidden behind that fact. Three years ago the parish opened its own investigation into the allegations against Taylor. It turned over what it found to law enforcement and cooperated with the FBI, and it continues, its wardens say, to provide confidential care to those who were harmed while praying for truth, for the healing of victims, and for justice. That is precisely what a church is supposed to do when the rot is uncovered — expose it, report it, and tend the wounded — whether or not the wound was inflicted on its own watch. Where the Accountability Belongs The harder question is one no one seems eager to ask. The Episcopal Diocese of Virginia held oversight of The Falls Church through every year Taylor is accused of preying on its children. What does the diocese that owned this parish then have to say now? Let the record show where the accountability belongs. And let the honest reader mark the difference between a body that drags the truth into the light and one that has too often perfected the art of looking away. David W. Virtue, DD, is founder and managing editor of VirtueOnline. His writings can be found at www.virtueonline.org, where you can subscribe to receive his free biweekly VIEWPOINTS. His Substack on the Middle East is at davidvirtue2.substack.com.

By David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueonline.org | September 17, 2026 By any measure, the new Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Dame Sarah Mullally, is the most naïve Christian figure in the world today — unless you count the Patriarch of Moscow, who has blessed Russia’s legions to retake Ukraine. Her utterances on Islam and her recent pilgrimage to Israel and the West Bank reveal a depth of ignorance unmatched in contemporary Anglican history. Boko Haram and Fulani militants have been kidnapping and killing Christians, lay and clerical alike, by the hundred across Nigeria and the Sahel. The secular media would sooner ignore the slaughter and fix its gaze on allegations of genocide by Israel inside Gaza. The Slaughter She Ignores Nigerian Christians are being butchered by Islamist terrorists — more believers are killed there than in any other country on earth — and it is a slaughter she has ignored. Across the globe, Christians are being gunned down by Islamist militants and slowly pushed out of the Middle East. Arab states such as Saudi Arabia refuse to permit churches for the few Christians within their borders. Try being a public Christian in Iran, and you will be arrested — and may well be killed — in short order. It is profoundly ironic that Iran is home to one of the fastest-growing churches on earth, while the Church of England is among the fastest dying. On any given Sunday the Church of England can barely muster 700,000 worshippers. In Iran, credible 2025–2026 estimates converge on a visible Christian population of 250,000 to 370,000 — atop a vast underground convert movement, put by many at well over a million, and by some at several million, meeting clandestinely in homes. A Pilgrimage of Grievance The archbishop’s recent visit to Israel was a public embarrassment. From June 20 to 24 she undertook what Lambeth Palace styled a “pilgrimage of prayer and solidarity,” travelling with Hosam Naoum, the Anglican Archbishop in Jerusalem, through East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Israel. She became the first Archbishop of Canterbury to set foot in the Palestinian Christian town of Birzeit, where she preached on June 21, pledging to use her office to win for Palestinians “the peace you desire and the freedom you deserve.” There is no record of her meeting Israel’s political leaders. She preferred the company of Palestinian Christian clergy and activists, and closed the trip with a joint pastoral letter that accused Israel of annexing the West Bank “in all but name” and catalogued “unchecked settler violence, forced displacement, systemic discrimination and expanding checkpoints” — the familiar liturgy of grievance, with scarcely a word for the Israeli dead of October 7. Judea and Samaria: A History She Forgets Her grasp of Jewish history is beyond naïve. Does she not know that before the West Bank was ever called the West Bank it was Judea and Samaria — the historic heartland of the Jewish people for centuries? Mullally is happy enough to hold forth on slavery and reparations, but her command of Jewish history is as thin as that of the Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, whose own visit to the region produced comments Jews found equally offensive. Returning from the West Bank and East Jerusalem in November 2025, Cottrell accused Israel of “genocidal acts,” “apartheid” and “ethnic cleansing,” and lent his voice to divestment. The Chief Rabbi, Sir Ephraim Mirvis, condemned the language as “incendiary and morally inverted.” Today Jews in England live in fear. Muslim gangs hold sway over streets in a number of cities, and British Jews — a people lauded only a few years ago for their learning and their contribution to national life — now look over their shoulders. Benjamin Disraeli, of Jewish birth, was Britain’s first Prime Minister of Jewish descent, a fact the modern public has all but forgotten. Nor should Arthur Balfour’s 1917 declaration favoring a Jewish national home — or Winston Churchill’s own lifelong support for Zionism — be allowed to slip from memory. Jesus Lifted the Veil; Islam Slaps It Back On Now she is seen entertaining a Muslim leader whose wife appears in full hijab. The visual contrast — a Christian woman in authority beside a fully veiled Muslim woman — is stark. What “harmony” can there be with a tradition that treats a woman’s face as something to be hidden and, in its harder expressions, holds women to be innately subordinate, “deficient in intellect and religion”? Abraham treated women with real affection and loyalty, though within a patriarchal frame that granted men overwhelming authority. His bond with Sarah was one of love, partnership and pain: he heeded her counsel — “Whatever Sarah tells you, listen to her” (Genesis 21:12) — and he mourned her death, securing her burial place with great care (Genesis 23). Jesus would have none of the veil. He treated a Samaritan woman — despised by the Jews of his day — with startling respect. Jesus, as it were, lifted the veil; Islam slaps it back on. Mullally, apparently, sees no contradiction. The Muslim leader she honored, Hafiz Muhammad Tahir Mehmood Ashrafi, chairman of the Pakistan Ulema Council, received the Hubert Walter Award for Reconciliation and Interfaith Cooperation at Lambeth Palace on September 11 — cited for decades of work in religious diplomacy, interfaith harmony, minority rights and counter-extremism. Minority rights, note well — but not a syllable about the rights of women. Ashrafi hails from Pakistan, a land where Christians face episodic violence: mob attacks triggered by blasphemy accusations, church bombings by extremist groups (Peshawar, 2013), the forced conversion of Christian girls in some rural districts, and the daily harassment of believers in workplaces and neighborhoods. Name the War The journalist Peter Mullen rightly observes that the gravest peril facing the West is that our political establishments will not even admit the peril exists. Church leaders like Mullally have erected an everlasting interfaith talking-shop with moderate Muslims. It is futile, for it is not the moderates who pose the threat but the militants — and the moderates too often become the fellow-travelers and useful idiots who do as the militants bid. There is a war going on, and the responsible thing is to name it. It is not merely the United States and Israel against Iran; it is simmering across the planet, and nowhere more fiercely than in Europe. We should say so. So should Sarah Mullally. David W. Virtue, DD, is founder and managing editor of VirtueOnline. His writings can be found at www.virtueonline.org, where you can subscribe to receive his free biweekly VIEWPOINTS. His Substack on the Middle East is at davidvirtue2.substack.com.

By David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueonline.org | September 15, 2026 Well, what is the true state of the Church of England? Ask the men who run it and you will hear about a "Quiet Revival," a warm tide of returning young men and rising Easter numbers. Ask the widow who still turns up on a wet Sunday in a village that has lost its priest, is losing its rectory, and will soon lose its building, and you will hear something else entirely. A source deep inside the church, and intimately familiar with its real workings, summed it up like this: "WE are about to see a period of steep decline and closure, with a number of evangelical bishops now adopting a bizarre philosophy that 'church' does not require parish churches and parish priests. Everything can be done by informal lay groups, directed by ever expanding diocesan offices, often many miles away. Rectories are being sold off, clergy not replaced, parishes being merged into large unwieldy clusters, and money increasingly being spent on staff at the office. We literally have bishops who do not believe in ordination or sacraments, and that they are the only actual ministers in the fantasy evangelical church which they have imagined for themselves." That is not the grievance of a disappointed traditionalist. It is a description of policy. And the documents bear it out. Managed Decline, Dressed as Mission Consider the arithmetic that Lambeth would rather you did not do. The Church of England sits atop a Church Commissioners' endowment of some £11.5 billion ($15.5 billion), one of the largest church endowments the world has ever seen. Yet only about eight per cent of the Commissioners' planned annual distribution is ring-fenced for frontline parish ministry. The rest funds a machine. That machine is now eating its own foundations. Twenty-seven of the forty-two dioceses are running deficits, and their answer, almost everywhere, is not to shrink the diocesan office but to cut the parish priest. The diocese of Oxford maintains barely 310 stipendiary parish clergy while listing more than 150 staff at its diocesan office — a ratio that tells you exactly where the institution now believes its ministry happens. The campaign group Save the Parish, founded in 2021 and now led by the Rev. Marcus Walker, rector of Great St Bartholomew in London, has spent five years documenting the mechanics. Its chairman calls it a "doom loop": starve the local church of money, merge and close, watch the volunteers quit and the people drift, then use the falling numbers to justify the next round of cuts. Roughly forty per cent of the churches now closing sit in poorer areas, where a struggling diocese has nothing left to give. Where does it lead? To Wigan. The "Minster Communities" experiment there — the flagship of the parish-free model — turned into a disaster, and now threatens the closure of up to nineteen churches. Truro tried its own version, styled "On the Way." Everywhere the vocabulary is the same, and everywhere it means the same thing: "developing mission and ministry" means fewer clergy; "fruitful and sustainable" means a higher parish share squeezed from fewer people. The instruments are quietly canonical — Pastoral Schemes to amalgamate benefices, Bishop's Mission Orders to dissolve a parish into a "fresh expression," and the sale of the parsonage once the priest is gone. Sell the vicarage, and the church has begun, deliberately, to withdraw from that place — rural or urban — for good. This is what my source means. The men presiding over it are not vandals; many are sincere. But sincerity that liquidates the parish is still liquidation. This month a joint report by Save the Parish and senior church figures warned, without exaggeration, that the parish vicar is becoming an "endangered species." The "Quiet Revival" and What It Conceals Now to the good news, because an honest man reports it. The Church's own Statistics for Mission recorded a fifth consecutive year of modest growth in 2025 — roughly 707,000 people at a typical week's services, up a fraction on the year and about fifteen per cent above the Covid trough of 2021. In April 2025 the Bible Society went further, publishing The Quiet Revival and claiming a twenty-five per cent rise in Church of England attendance between 2018 and 2024. Seize on those figures if you like. But read the fine print, because the Church's own chief statistician did. Dr Ken Eames, the C of E's senior statistical research officer, states flatly that by almost every measure, in almost every diocese, attendance and participation were still significantly lower in 2024 than in 2018. In roughly half of all churches every attendance measure was lower in 2024 than in 2019; in only about one in eight were they all higher. Adult weekly attendance remains close to eighteen per cent below where it stood in 2019, and Eames warns that the numbers should not be expected to return to their pre-pandemic level at all. The growth curve is concave — the rebound is already slowing. The broader picture is bleaker still. By the British Social Attitudes survey, just five per cent of British adults now attend a Christian service weekly, down from eight per cent in 2018, and there is no evidence whatever of the much-trumpeted revival among the young. A "Quiet Revival," then, that is inaudible in the national data and invisible in the CofE's own diocesan returns. A church that must inflate a post-Covid dead-cat bounce into a revival has already told you how frightened it is. Has ALPHA Jump-Started the Church? Which brings us to ALPHA, the great evangelistic hope of the age, born at Holy Trinity Brompton and carried worldwide by Nicky Gumbel. Credit where it is due: ALPHA is superbly produced, disarmingly hospitable, and built on a sound instinct — that modern people want to belong before they will believe, to ask their questions over supper before they will kneel. As a tool it has genuine reach. But has it jump-started the Church of England? The evidence says no, and it has said so for a long time. The classic field research found that some seventy per cent of ALPHA participants arrived through their own churches — they were already churchgoers — and only about five per cent regarded themselves as outside the faith at all. Of the minority who reported a "conversion," most were already in the pews; the honest conclusion was that ALPHA's real effect is to rejuvenate already-evangelical congregations and spread charismatic religion among the committed, not to reach the lost. It is a hothouse for existing plants, not a net cast into deep water. There is a deeper worry, and it is a theological one. Critics from the Reformed side have long charged that ALPHA leaves the impression that it is experience, not truth, that finally matters — that its converts are drawn to a Christian lifestyle rather than to Christ crucified through the preached gospel. Even the sympathetic sociologist Martyn Percy has faulted the course for thinning its doctrine, exalting private conversion over the church and the sacraments, and speaking in the accent of the comfortable middle class. A course that whispers about sin and shouts about the Spirit's tingle will fill a room, but it will not raise the dead. ALPHA is a symptom of the same evangelical drift my source names — the belief that atmosphere can do the work of ordained ministry, Word, and Sacrament. Why the Church Is Dying So the closures are real, the revival is oversold, and the flagship course recycles the faithful. But these are symptoms. The disease lies deeper, and it is worth naming plainly, for the record. The tide of secularism has become a flood. In the 2021 census the Christian share of England and Wales fell below half for the first time — from 59.3 per cent in 2011 to 46.2 percent — while those professing no religion rose from a quarter to well over a third of the population. Some five to six million people dropped their Christian identity in a single decade. Britain is, for the first time in its recorded Christian history, no longer a Christian-majority nation. The clergy have lost their nerve. A church that fears to name sin cannot preach salvation, for salvation from nothing is nothing. The historic vocabulary of judgment, repentance, hell, and the cross has been quietly retired as impolite, and in its place we are offered "diversity and inclusion" — a therapeutic gospel with the offense of Christ carefully removed. The energy once spent evangelizing the nation is now spent placating the ever-expanding sexual-identity lobby within the church itself, and blessing what Scripture will not bless. The church has bent the knee to the state and the age. Terrified of giving offense, its bishops conform to whatever Parliament and the culture demand, mistaking respectability for relevance. But a church indistinguishable from the world has nothing to offer the world. It cannot call men to repent when it will not itself repent of anything. And into the vacuum steps a rival faith that suffers from none of these doubts. The Muslim population of England and Wales grew by some forty-four per cent in a single decade, from 4.9 to 6.5 per cent of the whole. Islam advances because it is confident, unembarrassed, and certain of its truth claims — precisely the qualities the Church of England has spent two generations apologizing for. Nature abhors a vacuum, and so does the human soul. The Reckoning There you have it. An £11.5 billion ($15.5 billion) endowment and empty pews. Diocesan offices swell as parishes are sold from under their people. A "revival" that its own statisticians quietly disown. A flagship course that gathers the saved and misses the lost. Bishops who no longer believe in the ministry they were consecrated to guard. A church that will not preach repentance cannot be surprised when no one repents. A church that will not name sin need not wonder why no one seeks a Saviour. And a church that sells its parishes to balance the books of its bureaucracy has confused the cure of souls with the management of decline. The true state of the Church of England is this: it is not being persecuted to death. It is quietly, respectably, and with excellent minutes taken at every meeting, arranging its own funeral — and calling it mission. END

PRESS RELEASE AMBRIDGE, Pa., Sept. 9, 2026— Today, Trinity Anglican Seminary announced the launch of Holy Order, a new podcast exploring how Scripture and the Anglican tradition—in all its richness and depth, both catholic and reformed—forms Christians for faithful living in a disordered age. Though produced by the seminary, the show is not about Trinity itself. Rather, it extends the seminary's teaching ministry beyond the classroom, making the formative riches of Scripture and the Anglican tradition more accessible to the wider Church and the world at a time when many are seeking a deeper, more rooted faith. Hosted by the Very Rev. Dr. Bryan Hollon, Dean and President of Trinity Anglican Seminary, and Cooper Nye, Director of Executive and Academic Communications, Holy Order offers thoughtful conversations on theology, culture, history, and the Christian life through the lens of the Anglican tradition. Each episode stays true to the name of the show by connecting timeless Christian wisdom with the questions and challenges of the present day, bringing listeners from a problem–a point of confusion or disorder–toward clarity and order. Listen and subscribe to Holy Order here: https://tas.edu/podcast "Holy Order reflects Trinity's deepest commitments: to forming leaders for mission, being rooted in scripture, serving the Church, and creating lifelong learners," Hollon said. "We see it as a teaching ministry, and our hope is that these conversations serve not only clergy and seminary students, nor Anglicans alone, but anyone seeking to deepen their faith and follow Christ." Hollon added: “I am convinced that Anglicanism is a really good way to be a Christian. I love the riches of our tradition, and I believe they are precisely what so many are searching for today. My hope is that Holy Order will introduce some to the Christian faith and help others go deeper in it.” The inaugural episode introduces the central vision of the podcast–the meaning of Holy Order. Drawing on Scripture, St. Augustine, Richard Hooker, and C.S. Lewis, Bryan explains how, ultimately, order is about love–because our lives are ordered by what we love most. The show then turns to a two-part exploration of C.S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man, examining Lewis's diagnosis of modern moral confusion and the enduring importance of objective truth, virtue, and Christian formation. Future episodes will include special guest appearances, featuring conversations with leaders from both the Church and academia. New episodes will be released biweekly on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and iHeartRadio. Learn more about the show and subscribe at https://tas.edu/podcast. About Trinity Anglican Seminary Trinity Anglican Seminary, located in Ambridge, Pennsylvania, is the flagship seminary of the Anglican Church in North America. Founded in 1975, Trinity forms biblically faithful Christian leaders through a residential community oriented around prayer, worship, study, and formation in the Anglican way. Trinity trains students in the 2019 Book of Common Prayer and provides a formation fully aligned with the ACNA’s vision and standards. The seminary maintains strong connections with global Anglicans through GAFCON (Global Anglican Future Conference) and the Global South Fellowship of Anglicans. Its student body includes residential students, online learners, and international students from Africa, Asia, Latin America, Australia, Europe, and the Middle East. For more information, visit www.tas.edu.

ACNA's Court for the Trial of a Bishop heard 38 witnesses over five days in Charleston. Bishop Julian Dobbs urges the province to wait in prayer, not speculation. By David W. Virtue, DD www.VirtueOnline.org September 14, 2026 CHARLESTON, SC — The ecclesiastical trial of Archbishop Stephen D. Wood, the inhibited head of the Anglican Church in North America, ended on September 11 after five days of testimony in Charleston, South Carolina. But the province he once led now faces a wait of as long as 101 days before it learns whether its archbishop will be found guilty or cleared. In a statement released at the close of proceedings, the Court for the Trial of a Bishop said it had heard from thirty-eight witnesses over the course of the trial, and thanked each of them for their testimony and travel to Charleston. The court laid out a timeline that could run to 101 days from September 11. That span allows for the processing of the trial transcript by the court reporter, the receipt of proposed findings of fact and conclusions of law from both the Province and the Respondent, and the court's own further deliberations. The absolute last day the court may release an opinion, it said, is December 21, 2026. It cautioned that the timeline could prove shorter but declined to speculate on when a decision would come. Wood faces three charges arising from the presentment brought against him: violation of his ordination vows, abuse of ecclesiastical power, and sexual immorality. He has denied wrongdoing. He was inhibited from the exercise of ordained ministry in November 2025, and Bishop Julian Dobbs, Dean of the Province, has exercised the canonical duties of the archbishop's office throughout his suspension. It is the first trial of a sitting archbishop in the young province's history. The Statement of the Court In the Matter of The Most Rev’d Stephen D. Wood (Archbishop, The Anglican Church in North America; Bishop, Diocese of the Carolinas) STATEMENT OF THE COURT The trial in the case of the Presentment of Archbishop Steven Wood concluded on September 11, 2026. The Court for the Trial of a Bishop would specifically like to express its gratitude to each of the thirty-eight witnesses it heard from over the course of five days for their testimony and travel to Charleston, South Carolina. The next steps in the timeline could take up to 101 days from September 11, 2026, including time for the processing of the transcript by the court reporter, receipt of findings of fact and conclusions of law from both the Province and Respondent, and further deliberations of the Court. The absolute last day the Court may release an opinion is December 21, 2026. While the timeline may end up being shorter, the Court cannot speculate on the timing of an opinion at this time. Each morning before trial opened, the Court prayed with the attorneys, the Respondent, the Court advisors, and court reporter. Each day we prayed in the words of our Lord and Savior, “thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” This is our continuing prayer. That even in the midst of the great grief and stress this process has brought to the Province, God’s will shall be done. As you move forward in these months of uncertainty, please let that prayer ground your heart. Please keep the Court’s deliberations in your prayers. /s/ +Ryan Reed The Right Reverend Ryan Reed President of the Court for the Trial of a Bishop /s/ Katherine R. Grosskopf Katherine R. Grosskopf Presiding Officer, Court for the Trial of a Bishop A Pastoral Message from Bishop Dobbs In a pastoral video message released September 14 at the conclusion of the trial, Bishop Julian Dobbs — Dean of the Province and acting head of the ACNA during Archbishop Wood's inhibition — urged clergy and laity to meet the long wait for a verdict with prayer rather than speculation. He framed the proceedings as part of the Church's canonical discipline, meant to uphold the integrity of ordained ministry, and reminded the province that the inhibition he imposed on Wood in November 2025 was a procedural safeguard that implied neither guilt nor innocence. Dobbs appealed for grace and unity toward everyone caught up in the matter — complainants, witnesses, and the wider Church — and asked the faithful to trust the canonical process and stay fixed on the Church's mission as it awaits the Court's opinion. Now, the Waiting For a province that has spent the better part of a year consumed by the Wood affair, the trial's end brings no resolution — only a change in the character of its waiting. The verdict, when it comes, will be the first any sitting archbishop of the ACNA has faced. Until then, as the court itself prayed each morning in Charleston, the province is left to wait upon a will not its own: thy kingdom come, thy will be done. END

A Pastor’s Reckoning with the Mainline Church The harrowing story of one orthodox priest’s twenty-year ordeal at the hands of revisionist bishops — the dark ecclesiastical back-alleys they inhabit, and how they nearly destroyed the life and ministry of a faithful man. Exile and Return: A Pastor’s Reckoning with the Mainline Church, by Jacob W. Dell. Good Hill Books, 157 pp. (in pre-order) Reviewed by David W. Virtue, DD www.virtueonline.org September 14, 2026 The Rev. Jacob Dell had a single passion — to be an Episcopal priest. He had the best education money could buy: Yale, Nashotah House, the backing of his father, and, above all, an overwhelming experience of call that came upon him while he was worshipping at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York City. He was blue-blood material, the kind of young man the Episcopal Church once said it wanted and needed. He looked the part and could play it. His only problem was that he believed too much. For the “sin” of being faithful to the gospel, he was given the runaround for more than twenty years — marked as a “dead cat,” one of those priests the institution quietly decides to discard, blacklisted by bishops who keep their own private lists. “The blacklist has always been real,” Dell writes. “In the Episcopal Church it operated through anonymous phone calls, hotel bar conversations, and the informal network of clergy transition officers who talk to each other before the formal search process begins.” It is the pre-screening that happens before a search committee ever sees your name — the signal that arrives through a well-meaning intermediary who tells you the truth before the institution has committed anything to writing. “Learn to read the informal signal when it comes,” Dell counsels, “because it will come first. File it. It will save you months, if not years, of effort that was never going to get you anywhere.” The system nearly broke the young man whose only desire was to serve God, preach the gospel, and draw people to Christ. The institution took its time. It would take more than two decades, several false starts, a wilderness decade, a marriage, three children, and a divorce for the call to ripen — and longer still for it to bring forth grain. Dell was persistent. With every rejection slip he was asked whether he still believed he had a vocation to the priesthood, and each time he said yes. The church might reject him; his call was irrevocable. Paul Moore, the Bishop of New York, told him to “go sow wild oats” before thinking about parish ministry. Dell resisted the advice. Moore, as his daughter Honor Moore later revealed, had himself led a secret double life as a bisexual man — which lent his counsel a certain irony, and made him a fly in the Episcopal ointment to anyone of orthodox conviction. The pain of rejection grew so intense that Dell briefly gave up and joined the Roman Catholic Church. Still the call remained, and he came back to try again. His model was Clarence Pope, the Anglo-Catholic Bishop of Fort Worth, who twice fled TEC for Rome and twice returned. More rejection slips followed — until a break in the clouds came when he was ordained a deacon by Bill Love, Bishop of Albany, the same Bill Love who would later be thrown to the wolves for his “failure” to obey the church’s edict on same-sex marriage. For a time, Dell worked in technology for the national church at 815 Second Avenue in New York, first in digital marketing and advertising sales, then in what became digital evangelism — a venture for which he secured three million dollars in start-up money. It was still not enough to get him ordained a priest. Digital evangelism was fine; telling people from a pulpit that they must repent of their sins defied the new episcopal order of inclusion and diversity. Undeterred, Dell pressed on. He remarried and tried once more. One does not lay down one’s life for half a faith; Jesus did not die for partial sinners. For Dell it was all or nothing. From Bishop Andrew Smith of Connecticut, to whom he next applied, the answer again came by letter. Rejection. Smith cited the Commission on Ministry’s concerns about his “associations in the wider church” — code for keeping company with people who might actually believe the gospel. Nothing about his morals. Nothing about his job performance at the church’s own headquarters. Smith said no; the Commission did the dirty work. By now Dell had run the cycle time after time: the Episcopal chaplaincy at Yale in 1991; St. John’s Episcopal Church, aborted after a street-corner conversation in 1994; and finally the Diocese of Connecticut in 2006–2007. Smith rejected him, and it seems Bill Love — who had ordained him a deacon — added his own voice of rejection. Dell was placed on administrative leave. A nervous breakdown followed. Reprieve came through Bishop Stacy Sauls, the Chief Operating Officer of the Episcopal Church — a made-up title, since the canons say the church has a Presiding Bishop, not a COO. Sauls agreed to ordain him. Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori was present at the ordination. Dell was by now forty years old. He recalled a conversation over drinks with Jennifer Reddall, then priest-in-charge at the Church of the Epiphany on York Avenue and later the Bishop of Arizona. “We eat our own in the Episcopal Church,” she told him — in the clinical manner of a surgeon describing a malignancy. At one point Dell applied to the ACNA. There, too, he got the bum’s rush. He wrote to Bishop Julian Dobbs of the ACNA Diocese of the Living Word. It was Dobbs’s wife, Brenda, Dell says, who first ignored his approach and then wrote to nix his ordination. By what authority, one wonders, does a bishop’s wife reject a candidate for holy orders? The essay that finally put a target on his back was his own. In July 2023 Dell wrote for Covenant, the blog of The Living Church, under the title “Return of the Exiles: A How-To Guide for Restoring Faithfulness to Mainline Churches.” In it he embraced the language of reconquista — the patient, congregation-by-congregation, endowment-by-endowment reclaiming of captured mainline institutions for the gospel they long ago abandoned. For a church that prizes inclusion above conviction, an orthodox priest openly calling for its recapture was intolerable. The piece, which he cites in the book, marked him more surely than any anonymous phone call ever could. In October 2024 the congregation of the First Congregational Church and First Ecclesiastical Society of Woodbury, Connecticut — founded in 1659 — voted unanimously to call him as their pastor. His exile was over. Under his ministry, he reports, membership has since doubled. The full venality of the Episcopal Church will be revealed only at the Last Judgment. How many other priests have been put through a similar hell we may never know. But one day the truth will out, and the injustice heaped upon so many will be adjudicated. God help them — and God help the institution that did it. David W. Virtue, DD, is founder and managing editor of VirtueOnline. His writings can be found at www.virtueonline.org, where you can subscribe to receive his free biweekly VIEWPOINTS. His Substack on the Middle East is at davidvirtue2.substack.com.

The command to judge not is not a requirement to be blind, but rather a plea to be generous. Jesus does not tell us to cease to be men... but to renounce the presumptuous ambition to be God. --- John Stott The church can live faithfully in post-Christian America because its life never depended upon America being Christian. Its life depends upon Christ, and Christ has not surrendered his throne. – Rev. James Bell A sword that inevitably divides. There can be peace between two men who agree that religion is merely a private preference. There can be peace between them if Christ is only one teacher among many. There can even be peace if Christianity is reduced to a collection of harmless moral principles. But Jesus will not remain in that little box. He claims lordship. And lordship requires allegiance. That is where the sword appears. – Rev. Dr. Ronald Moore The church does not need to control the culture in order to live faithfully within it. --- James Bell "We are not primarily called to do something or go somewhere; we are called to Someone." --- Os Guinness Dear Brothers and Sisters, HOW TO BE CHRISTIAN WHEN AMERICA IS NOT America is still full of Christianity, even as it becomes increasingly post-Christian. Churches stand in nearly every community, and Christian language continues to shape our holidays, political speeches, weddings, funerals, and arguments about morality. According to the most recent national Religious Landscape Study from Pew Research Center, 62 percent of American adults still identify as Christian, while 29 percent identify with no religion. Christianity remains the largest religious tradition in the country by a wide margin. But numbers alone do not tell the whole story. Not so long ago, in 2007, 78 percent of American adults called themselves Christian. Even more important than the numbers, though, is this: Christianity no longer shapes the way our country thinks about right and wrong the way it once did. Ideas that used to sound normal now seem odd. Many places that once took Christian values for granted now see the world very differently. Things like sex, marriage, freedom, the body, duty, and the meaning of life—these used to be understood through a Christian lens. Now, we have to explain what we mean, even in places where it once went without saying. The question before us is therefore larger than whether America was ever truly Christian or which political party accelerated its decline. The more urgent question is how Christians should live when the culture no longer reinforces their faith, their neighbors do not share their moral language, and political power cannot be trusted to preserve a Christian social order. If Christianity can remain faithful only when it is culturally dominant, then the end of Christian America will feel like the end of Christianity itself. If Jesus Christ is Lord, however, the loss of cultural privilege may reveal how much confidence we placed in arrangements that were never the kingdom of God. The church does not need to control the culture in order to live faithfully within it. American Christians have not experienced what they experienced. Losing an election is not exile. Being criticized on social media is not persecution. A Christian who is threatened, fired, or pressured to violate conscience may face a serious injustice, but we should still resist using the suffering of ancient Judah to make every modern Christian discomfort sound heroic. Christians in America retain remarkable freedoms, vast resources, thousands of institutions, and substantial political influence. The New Testament gives the church an exilic identity even when Christians have not been removed from their homeland. Peter addresses believers as "elect exiles" and "sojourners" because their deepest identity is found in God's kingdom. The church is never fully at home in any nation, even when that nation quotes Scripture, honors Christian holidays, and protects Christian institutions. Every country can be loved where it is good, served where service is just, and resisted where obedience to the state would require disobedience to God, but no country can bear the full weight of Christian hope. The Christian meaning of exile is therefore not a story in which we are always the innocent victims and our opponents are always Babylon. It is the recognition that every nation is temporary, every culture is morally mixed, and every Christian belongs first to Jesus Christ. A church prepared to live faithfully in exile must first allow God to expose the empire it has permitted within itself. Exile is not the whole Christian story. Scripture does not end with Babylon ruling forever or with God's people escaping creation. It ends with Babylon fallen, the nations healed, the dead raised, and the holy city coming down from God. Our hope is not that Christians will finally find a nation comfortable enough to become their permanent home. Our hope is that God will dwell with his people, judge every evil, wipe away every tear, and make all things new. I am indebted to a Rev. James Bell, Baptist Substack contributor for these thoughts. His writings can be seen here: https://jamesbell333289.substack.com/ A SECOND CAROLINA BISHOP IN THE DOCK: EDGAR TO FACE DISCIPLINE OVER A CHAPEL The Anglican Church in North America finds itself in a continued beleaguered state. It was announced this week that South Carolina Bishop Chip Edgar will face a presentment following his dedication of a school chapel with the Episcopal Bishop of South Carolina, The Rt. Rev. Ruth Woodliff-Stanley. Bishop Edgar submitted a letter to Bishop Julian Dobbs, Dean of the Province, indicating voluntary submission to discipline in the matter of the Porter-Gaud chapel dedication. Bishop Edgar was notified that a Presentment had been submitted to the Province charging him with just cause for scandal or offense in violation of the disciplinary canons of the ACNA because of his conduct during the dedication service on August 18. Bishop Edgar confessed to the truth of the charge in the Presentment, stating that he should not have participated in the dedication service in the manner that he did. The College of Bishops will determine the punishment for Bishop Edgar at their meeting in Plano, Texas September 21-25, 2026. The Rt. Rev. Julian Dobbs, Dean of the province later wrote sharing a statement with the province reaffirming his province's position of "principled disengagement from those who promote false teaching." "The seriousness of the situation led a complement of Bishops within our College to submit a Presentment, that is, a formal canonical document that advances a disciplinary case by setting out allegations of canonical misconduct against a bishop." As a result there will be no board of inquiry, nor a trial. A blogger, The Optimistic Jurist, asks a lot of awkward questions of Dean Dobbs regarding this presentment which you can read here: https://optimisticjurist.substack.com/ You can read my take on all this here: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/he-said-he-said-two-bishops-clash-over-a-chapel-an-altar-and-holy-communion ACNA COURT FINDS BISHOP DEREK JONES GUILTY ON ALL FOUR CHARGES The Anglican Church in North America has rendered its verdict on Bishop Derek Jones, and it is total. On August 19 the Court for the Trial of a Bishop convicted him unanimously on all four charges — defiance of a Godly Admonition, contempt for the canons, conduct giving cause for scandal through the abuse of ecclesiastical power, and the promotion of schism. The court found a bishop who had inverted his office: a shepherd who ruled as a lord, tying a chaplain's very livelihood to mandatory payments, weaponizing Title IV against clergy in and beyond his reach, backdating documents, and punishing those who dared to raise their voices. Sentence awaits only the running of the appeal clock and the judgment of the College of Bishops. Rather than answer to the church, Jones bolted from it — standing up a rival denomination in Alabama, courting his own chaplains away, staging an unauthorized consecration, and suing the province he had sworn to serve for a million dollars. The court named this for what it was: schism. And the verdict lands on a province already reeling, for the very archbishop who signed the first admonition against Jones, Steve Wood, now stands suspended and faces the same court beginning September 7. The house that judges Derek Jones is a house on fire. You can read my full take here: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/acna-court-finds-bishop-derek-jones-guilty-on-all-four-charges THE GLOBAL ANGLICAN COMMUNION COMES HOME TO ABUJA If you had any doubts about where the Anglican Communion is heading, the Global Anglican Council — the conciliar body GAFCON raised up as an alternative to the Anglican Consultative Council, the Instruments of Communion, and the Archbishop of Canterbury — announced this week that the headquarters of the reordered Global Anglican Communion will be established in Abuja, Nigeria. This should surprise no orthodox Anglican, whether of the West or the Global South, who have watched in vain for more than two decades for a single sign of repentance from Western Anglicanism and its pansexual agenda. From Lambeth Resolution 1.10, through the Windsor Report, to the present hour, the West has been running Gadarene-like toward the cliff. It has ordained gay and lesbian bishops in the Episcopal Church and in the Anglican Church of Canada, and it has now enthroned a partnered lesbian, Cherry Vann, as Archbishop of Wales — the first such primate in the history of the Communion. Down the slope they go, hastening to join the swine our Lord sent over the edge two thousand years ago, never to return. The decision to plant the Communion's headquarters in Abuja was taken at the Council's meeting in Recife, Brazil, on Saturday, August 22, 2026, and announced in a communiqué from its chairman, the Most Rev. Dr. Laurent Mbanda, "to strengthen and support the future life and ministry of the global fellowship." Abuja was the natural — perhaps the only — choice. It was there, at G26 in March, that the Abuja Affirmation declared the old Instruments of Communion to have failed and proclaimed the Anglican Communion reordered into a truly global Church, with the Jerusalem Declaration as its doctrinal spine and the newly minted Global Anglican Council as its conciliar voice. The city that named the new order should fittingly become the seat from which it is governed. You can read more here: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/the-global-anglican-communion-comes-home-to-abuja WOMEN'S ORDINATION GOES GLOBAL — AND THE GLOBAL SOUTH BREAKS RANKS The ordination of women to the priesthood and now, with more frequency to the episcopacy, has gone global. Where it was thought that the Global South would hold the line has now proven not to be. Kenya has formally appointed two women to the episcopate in the Anglican Church of Kenya (ACK), marking historic milestones in a country where women bishops remain controversial. But this is not the only province to do so. Kenya and South Sudan, both aligned with GAFCON or the GSFA, have consecrated women as bishops, and a growing number ordain women to the priesthood. The Jerusalem Declaration treats the ordination of women as a secondary matter, noting that full agreement has not been reached among all signatories and that it is not held to affect one's salvation. Its proponents emphasize that while they maintain a unanimous view on primary matters, the diversity of opinion on women's ordination is acknowledged within their global fellowship. The ACNA is firmly against ordaining a woman to the episcopacy, but even ordination to the priesthood is raising talk of internal schism. The Reformed Episcopal Church (REC) is firmly opposed to the ordination of women in any order, and there are rumblings that it might be the first to show ACNA the back door. The ACNA's Anglo-Catholic wing is also opposed to the ordination of women as are some evangelicals. The province's two-tier approach to women's ordination is showing its fragility in the face of Anglo-Catholic and confessional-evangelical resistance. You can read more here: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/on-muddying-the-anglican-waters-over-women-s-ordination RICH IN ENDOWMENTS, POOR IN SOULS The decline of church life in the West is now almost a cliché. The Episcopal Church recently reported it had $31 billion in the Church Pension Group to keep the church afloat indefinitely, or at least till the last priest dies. No worries there. So also for the Church of England which has two major financial pillars keeping it afloat: The Church Commissioners' endowment (~£11.6 billion) and the Church of England Pensions Board assets (~£3.5 billion), which translates into just over $20 billion in US dollars. An insider told VOL that there are sufficient endowments to ensure that all 43 dioceses continue to have bishops, and to keep the archbishops in the lifestyle to which they are accustomed. The façade will survive (like the Church of Ireland) with grand cathedrals and state occasions. There simply won't be parish churches and clergy any longer except in large towns. Like a sort of Museum of Religion where you can see the expensive relics – such as Doollally – but you are no longer able to find a local church in which to worship if you are so minded. BRAZIL: A TALE OF TWO CHURCHES They never met, and there was never any intention that they should. Two bodies of Anglican leaders — with different gods, different gospels, and different destinations — passed each other like ships in the night in Brazil this August, a communion in unambiguous schism. In São Paulo, seven Canterbury-aligned primates of the Americas, among them Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe and Brazil's Marinez Bassotto, issued a statement deploring colonialism, secularism, migration, corruption, and climate change — naming every crisis in the world except the one consuming their own provinces. Not a word about the collapse of attendance across the Anglican West, not a word about the doctrinal earthquakes that have shattered the Communion they represent. It is more congenial to pronounce upon the state of the planet in righteous indignation than to stare the state of one's own church in the face. In Recife, under the banner of God's faithfulness, a very different assembly gathered — the Global Anglican Communion (GAFCON) — to install the Very Rev. Gabriel Uchôa Cavalcanti as Dean of the Catedral Anglicana do Espírito Santo, thirty years after his father, Archbishop Miguel Uchôa, planted that church with thirty souls. Their story is one of hope purchased through severe trial: expelled from the IEAB in 2005 for refusing to bend on Scripture, robbed of their buildings and standing, they endured even the murder of Bishop Robinson Cavalcanti in 2012, and yet grew from an embattled diocese into a province. The São Paulo primates, meeting in the same country the same month, made no mention of this schism, these losses, this exile — for one cannot lament what one has caused. Two gatherings, two gospels, two destinations. One lamented the world; the other saved souls out of it. One counted its causes; the other counted its converts. And the arithmetic is merciless: only one of them was growing. You can read more here: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/brazil-a-tale-of-two-churches ROWAN WILLIAMS: ON HIS KNEES BEFORE TERROR Twenty-five years ago Rowan Williams was a hundred yards from the towers when they fell, and to his credit he stayed — praying with the frightened, comforting the trapped. But out of that morning came Writing in the Dust, seventy-eight pages of deliberate irresolution that has governed the Anglican mind ever since. Williams offered no verdict, no just-war reckoning, only a "breathing space" in which the West might decline to answer violence with violence. He would call the atrocity a crime; he would not call it evil. Of the men who murdered three thousand people he could say they had "serious moral goals." His title was his confession: from John 8 he took the bent, silent Christ writing in the dust — but inverted every role, lifting mercy off the guilty and laying it over the aggressors while recasting the grieving West as the bloodthirsty mob. Melanie Phillips named it exactly: a churchman "on his knees before terror." Set beside him the passengers of Flight 93, who did the one thing the book forbids — took a vote, said the Lord's Prayer, stormed the cockpit, and answered force with force to spare the Capitol. That is the line Williams cannot draw: between revenge, which feeds itself, and justice, which shields the innocent. The root is a habit of mind — a Hegelian to the marrow, for whom evil is never a thing to be named and resisted but a moment in some larger process awaiting reconciliation. Yet the Bible knows no such synthesis; its moral world is stubbornly two-fold, Christ and Belial with no treaty between them. Handed a front-row seat to the clearest evil of our lifetime, close enough to choke on its dust, Williams spent the rest of his life reasoning it away. The stones, Your Grace, had already been thrown. The hour called not for another man to understand them, but for one with the nerve to stand in their way. You can read my full take here: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/on-his-knees-before-terror-rowan-williams-and-the-death-of-christian-nerve AN OLD HERESY IN NEW CLOTHES: THE SYNOD TURNS ON ISRAEL What the Church of England now calls conscience is in truth an old heresy wearing new clothes. The hostility to Israel that the Synod voted to "hear" is supersessionism revived — the ancient conceit that the Church has displaced the Jew in the economy of God, that the promises made to Abraham were revoked and reassigned. Cranmer's church once knew better. The Reformers were Hebraists who prized the Old Testament as the very Word of God; the churchmen of Balfour's generation read Scripture and saw a people with a covenant and a claim. Their successors read the morning headlines and see a grievance to be curated. A church that has forgotten how to read its own Bible will always mistake the latest cause for the eternal one. And so the Mother Church has arrived at a strange inversion. It can bless what Scripture forbids and will not bless the people to whom Scripture was first entrusted. Its bishops, moderate men of every opinion and no conviction, hurry to affirm each passing fashion while the pews empty beneath them, mistaking the applause of the age for the approval of God. Mullally's belated regret changes nothing; the retreat was tactical, not repentant. A church that trims its witness to the mood of Birzeit and the fashions of the Synod floor has not grown more compassionate. It has merely grown ashamed of the gospel it was ordained to preach, and a church ashamed of its gospel has nothing left to say to England, to the Jew, or to God. You can read more here: https://davidvirtue2.substack.com/p/new-british-pm-backs-ukraine-turns FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF THE EPISCOPAL ABSURD The Bishop of Northern Michigan Bishop Rayford Ray, recently blessed Monarch butterflies describing the act as "definitely relational" and "an act of reverence" as they headed to Mexico for warmer climes. A New York priest, The Rev. Tommy Dillon has been a Dolly Parton fan most of his life. He not only loves the country singer's music and movies, but he's also been to Dollywood, her amusement park in Tennessee, more than once. Most of all, he admired Parton's dedication to social justice and philanthropy, especially through her nonprofit, the Dollywood Foundation. "Dolly really lived out the example of what the kingdom of God looks like on Earth," Dillon told Episcopal News Service. "She welcomed everybody." Not a word on what the Apostle Paul might have thought about this, ere he headed to execution for the "crime" of believing in the Resurrected One. No butterflies on him. In more flatulent news, penguin poop is being analyzed for climate change. I'm sure there is an Episcopal bishop out there ready to bless penguins and their poop ere they head to Antarctica for the winter. It is hoped the Episcopal Church might discover Jesus before it disappears into the sunset, but don't count on it. SUPPORT VIRTUEONLINE If you value what VOL writes, please consider a tax-deductible donation. This work is a labor of love, but we have bills to pay. There are no salaries — but the daily writing continues, and a webmaster and overseas journalists must be supported. VOL has brought on new writers with clear insight into Scripture and culture. We have no mega-donors and no grants — only faithful readers who believe in what we do. We are now read in more than 100 countries by tens of thousands of readers who trust us to cover the most pressing issues facing Anglicanism today. Yet only a small fraction contributes. We have proven ourselves over more than thirty-five years of writing about Anglican affairs. Please consider a tax-deductible gift. It helps enormously. Online: virtueonline.org/donateBy check (tax-deductible): VIRTUEONLINE, P.O. Box 111, Shohola, PA 18458 Thank you for your support. David W. Virtue, DD President and Managing Editor