Is the church broken?

A call for reform.

As a priest in the ACNA, I have been deeply disturbed by the events in our province over the last several months. A couple of weeks ago a group of four clergy and seven lay members submitted a presentment to the ACNA accusing Archbishop Steve Wood of sexual and financial misconduct, and abuse of power. This was quickly followed by two thorough articles in the Washington Post detailing the presentment of Abp. Wood and the recently concluded trial of Bp. Stewart Ruch. This morning the Washington Post published another article with alleging Abp. Wood committed acts of sexual harassment, manipulation and corruption. Other reliable reporting is available at the Living Church.

Predictably, the province stepped into damage control mode, issuing “Talking Points” for the clergy. A significant number of Bishops issued pastoral letters to their diocese and a number of priests have also written pastoral or opinion pieces.

One of those widely shared pieces is the Rev. Dr. Bryan Hollon’s piece “The Church is Not Broken.” Dr. Hollon, Dean and President of Trinity Anglican Seminary, primarily wrote the piece to help seminarians think through their response. What he says about the church is absolutely true. But I believe that his diagnosis of the ACNA falls dangerously short.

Dr. Hollon says, “But listen: the discipline taking place in our Province is not a sign of a broken church. A broken church is one that fails to discipline, so that option needs clearly to be avoided…. The fact that we’re willing to scrutinize and correct our own leaders is evidence that we’re taking God’s Word seriously. It’s not necessarily evidence that the church is broken. It’s often evidence the church is functioning as it should…But the fact that discipline is being administered in [an] orderly, canonical fashion is a sign of health. Although it is painful and personal for many… it is necessary and gives cause for hope in our young province.”

I disagree with this diagnosis. This current episode is a symptom of persistent illness. The ACNA is not merely struggling with discipline but is paralyzed by core structural deficiencies that have facilitated harm, placing the province in a moral crisis that demands a corporate commitment to accountability and change.

Structural Flaws

The most critical structural deficiency is Title IV of the canons. The current disciplinary system is not merely failing; it is dysfunctional, a reality confirmed by the Province’s decision to entirely scrap the canons for a proposed rewrite that is almost five times longer. Let us listen to the Province’s Governance Task Force:

A commitment to “minimalism” that has not served the province well, as fundamental aspects of the disciplinary process for bishops—including basic aspects of an investigation—are left unspecified by the current canons. That lack of detail has meant an overreliance on ad hoc committees and teams, with processes being designed on the fly. The predictable result is mistrust on all sides, with feelings of vulnerability and exploitation both by those who bring accusations and by those who are accused (Revision of Title IV of the ACNA Canons, Introduction and Executive Summary, page 3, emphasis mine).

Even though the whole of Title IV is flawed, we will benefit from a closer examination of a few current canons. First, the hurdle to bring an accusation against a bishop is extraordinarily burdensome. IV.4.1 stipulates that a presentment can be brought against a bishop by three fellow bishops or a minimum of ten individuals consisting of a minimum of two presbyters (at least one presbyter and six lay members must be members of the bishop’s diocese). Are you confused yet?

Additionally, neither the canons nor the province have ever publicly stated the requirements of a presentment’s actual content. This places an undue burden on victims and their advocates, requiring them to 1) divine the unwritten requirements of a valid presentment, 2) potentially hire legal counsel to draft the document, and 3) be willing to share their trauma with enough laity and clergy to convince them to “sign and swear to the charges.”

The lay-written presentment against Bp. Stewart Ruch was only possible because a team of advocates had been meticulously collecting evidence for years, and they found a lawyer willing to help draft and sign the presentment. I have read their presentment and find the evidence clear and convincing. Despite all of this they struggled to find two priests to sign. Why? I’m sure you can imagine the implicit and explicit barriers for priests to accuse a bishop -- their own livelihood and the health of their local church are pressing.

(Note: The presentment against Abp. Wood was signed and sworn to by four priests.)

Following the submission of a presentment against a bishop, a Provincial Board of Inquiry is formed to investigate the claims and, if warranted, publicly call for a trial. This process, however, is crippled by a profound structural flaw: the centralization of power. The Archbishop holds the sole authority to appoint the members of the Board of Inquiry that determines if a presentment warrants a trial, and he alone selects the prosecutors for those trials. This structure vests ultimate control over discipline exclusively in the hands of the president of the College of Bishops, effectively making the episcopacy accountable only to itself.

Once a trial is warranted, a court is formed. Canon IV.5.7 stipulates only that the court “shall establish its own procedures.” This canonical “blank tablet” is the second major flaw, as it allows the court to establish an adversarial model, in contrast to the inquisitorial norm for Anglican trials.¹

The disastrous result of this procedural choice is precisely what the ACNA’s own Governance Task Force (GTF) highlighted in its subsequent analysis. The GTF concluded the current procedures led to:

Delay and expense caused in part by a reliance on adversarial elements and presuppositions that are more appropriate to U.S. civil litigation than to canon law, which should instead have a more inquisitorial approach. That means, among other things, that in canon law the formulation of presentments and the gathering of evidence should not be controlled by parties and their lawyers, but rather by the tribunals themselves. (Revision of Title IV of the ACNA Canons, Introduction and Executive Summary, page 6).

The court’s self-made procedures also lead to arbitrary and inconsistent rules of confidentiality. Unhindered by clear canonical requirements, the court is free to shift its standards: proceedings have been variously kept confidential until judgment (Atkinson trial), confidential until the Archbishop chose to intervene publicly (June 2023), or only offered regular updates after public pressure and a request from the Archbishop. This shifting, secretive process is a direct repudiation of standard Anglican tradition. As the highly regarded The Principles of Canon Law Common to the Churches of the Anglican Communion makes clear, court actions should be accessible to all because they affect the entire body of Christ (Principle 24.6). These deficiencies exist because the ACNA framers decided to eschew the existing canons of the Episcopal church and norms from the broader Anglican world.

To the ACNA’s credit, a total rewrite of Title IV is in progress. Nonetheless these structural deficiencies have amplified the damage and trauma of recurrent instances of abuse.

The System’s Role in Facilitating Harm

This is starkly illustrated by the scandal in the Diocese of the Upper Midwest (UMD). For two years, a mother seeking justice against a lay leader who abused her daughter, was met with institutional inaction. It was only after she and her advocates resorted to Twitter that her complaints became national news and spurred the province to act.

This scenario is a modern echo of the parable of the Unjust Judge in Luke 18 . There, a vulnerable widow is denied justice until she persistently harasses the judge, who finally grants her plea out of self-interest. Similarly, when supporters formed advocacy group ACNAtoo, their persistence was dismissed as “woke” by many. Yet, they were simply using the 21st-century town square to cry out for justice, because the canonical system provided them no other means to be heard.

So the ACNA was shamed into action: they created a Provincial Response Team (PRT) to oversee the allegations and investigation into the UMD and Bishop Ruch’s response to the allegation of abuse by Mark Rivera. After five months three members of the PRT resigned–accusing the provincial agents of withholding direct communication from survivors, negotiating the terms of investigations without their involvement or consideration, misleading survivors, engaging in inappropriate conversations with people under investigation, a lack of transparency, failed promises to cover costs of therapy, and more. I encourage you to read their resignation letter and additional statement.

The province opened two investigations into the UMD, by Telios Law and Husch Blackwell. The Telios investigation has always been under a shroud of secrecy. The terms of the contract and the findings have never been released. Multiple interviewees reported being asked to rank a list of other witnesses and survivors. Rachael Denhollander, a prominent survivor advocacy lawyer, commented that:

Having witnesses rank other witnesses or individuals is an inappropriate way to assess credibility. And frankly, it opens the door and makes it more likely that whoever is in power gets assessed as credible, because it is more likely that they will get higher rankings from other people in power who are close to them. Yes, assessing credibility is normal. No, the way they are doing it is not normal.

The Husch-Blackwell Investigation’s interview terms and obligation to release a completely unredacted report to ACNA leadership led to multiple survivors declining to participate—ultimately hindering the quality of the investigation. Their concerns about this report were validated in 2023 when the ACNA publicly released an insufficiently redacted report which revealed detailed descriptions of a minor’s sexual abuse during an ongoing criminal court case. Multiple people reported this dangerous mistake to the province and they removed the report. The ACNA has never delivered on their promise to re-release the properly redacted report. ACNAtoo properly redacted the report which is available here.

In 2023 the ACNA authored a presentment against Bp. Ruch which was based on the findings of the investigations and signed by three bishops. Progress on this presentment was stalled for several months and was only resolved after Abp. Beach publicly released details of a dispute with the church courts. This dispute exposed such foundational flaws in the canons that it was only resolved through unprecedented action by the Provincial Council and the College of Bishops.

Around the same time a group of more than 39 lay persons, two priests, and two deacons submitted a presentment against Ruch. This presentment argued that Ruch’s actions were part of a larger pattern of enabling and platforming dangerous men.

Both presentments were then combined into a single trial. However, it was discovered that the court was unable to conduct more than one trial concurrently due to the canonical constraints and the aforementioned problematic adversarial model. Thus the Ruch trial was unable to proceed until the Atkinson trial (another instance of presentment of a bishop for abuse) was completed in May 2024.

The province eventually released the bishops’ presentment of Ruch in the summer of 2025, but they again failed to properly redact the details of two victims of clergy abuse. When alerted by ACNAtoo, the province agreed to remove, redact, and re-release. Again this presentment is only available at ACNAtoo.org.

After 13 months of motions and discovery, the Ruch trial finally began in July 2025 and was a disaster. The prosecutor and deputy prosecutor resigned, alleging that a court member used provincial staff to access the prosecution’s files and then pursued a line of questioning in court that was previously ruled to be out of bounds. Their conclusion was that “the trial process had been irreparably tainted.” Read their letters here and here.

After a replacement prosecutor also resigned, the trial finally concluded on Oct 13 with a ruling due within 60 days. In total it has taken 6 years since the first allegations; 4 years since the province took notice; almost 3 years since the first presentment was filed; more than 2 years since the second presentment.

This timeline demonstrates that justice delayed is justice denied. Following an “irreparably tainted trial” neither side can have confidence in the upcoming judgment.

Has the ACNA been trustworthy in other allegations against Bishops?

In September, Archbishop Wood inhibited Bishop Derek Jones of the Jurisdiction of the Armed Forces and Chaplaincy after numerous complaints. Bishop Jones resigned as a bishop and has filed a lawsuit against the ACNA. Reports indicate that allegations against Bp. Jones have been reported since 2022 and were not acted upon by the former Archbishop.

As of this week (October 2025), Archbishop Wood has taken a paid leave of absence and retired as rector of St. Andrew’s in South Carolina after being accused of sexual and financial misconduct. After a group of clergy and laity drafted the presentment, many critics questioned their decision to initially share the document with The Washington Post concurrent with its formal submission to the ACNA. However, this skepticism overlooks a crucial institutional failure: The system’s own lack of confidentiality validates the presenters’ distrust. Within 24 hours of the presentment being officially submitted to the ACNA and the College of Bishops, the news was leaked to the blog Anglican.ink, which broke the story before any official ACNA statement or the Washington Post report. Despite official “Talking Points” claiming that “all reports are kept in strict confidence,” the quick release of this sensitive, non-public information proves that advocates and survivors are justified in concluding the system cannot be trusted to maintain confidentiality.

The provincial “Talking Points” memo specifically says, “The complainants shared this document with … The Washington Post … prior to its being circulated to the ACNA or any bishops.” We know that this is false. In fact, four bishops were asked to sign the presentment in the spring of 2025. Two of them declined to read it, and none of them agreed to sign it. The Provincial PR team drafting the “Talking Points” may not have known this, but neither the bishops approving the memo nor the four bishops given the presentment had the integrity to correct the lie. This led to multiple bishops and commentators parroting a lie and disparaging the presenters. See the Cover Letter for the Refiled Presentment.

Currently Bp. Ray Sutton, the Dean of the province, is the acting archbishop. Unfortunately, he has been accused of 1) directly mishandling and betraying confidentiality in regard to complaints about Bp. Jones, and 2) of contemplating forming a “bishop-friendly board of inquiry” if or when a presentment was brought against Abp. Wood. As acting archbishop, Sutton is in charge of appointing the members of boards of inquiry and prosecutors should a case go forward to trial.

Is this evidence of a “church functioning as it should”?

Bishop Chris Warner wrote, “That the allegation was sent to the Washington Post is disheartening, because, as the article insinuates, there is the expectation by some that the College of Bishops will not seek to do the right thing in this matter.”

That is exactly right. Everyone is disheartened. I can guarantee you that every signatory to Abp. Wood’s presentment grieves that they could not trust the system, nor the College of Bishops, to act justly apart from this public exposure.

Our Current Moral Crisis

The core narrative of the ACNA—that of a pure, orthodox remnant in a hostile culture—has blinded us. As Bishop Edgar recently observed:

I recall being at Plano, Texas in 2009 when the ACNA was formed. I wish I had seen it then, but looking back I see clearly now. There was a troublesome spirit of pride at work as we Constituted the ACNA. Here was our sin: we were so focused on the evil outside of ourselves, that we couldn’t see the sin within us.

From the moment that survivors and advocates spoke out about abuse in the UMD, they have been attacked. We couldn’t collectively imagine the rot among us, so they must be the enemies trying to destroy our beautiful church. Survivors and advocates have been privately and publicly harassed, belittled, besmirched, and berated by senior priests, provincial leadership, and bishops. Speaking out for survivors put several priests at risk of discipline, loss of employment, or being forever blocked from becoming a bishop.

These are not isolated issues; it is a problem of scale. The ACNA has 27 dioceses and the special jurisdiction for chaplains. We know that a minimum of three bishops are currently facing serious presentments (Ruch, Jones, and Wood). This total of three bishops facing serious presentments represents more than 10% of our dioceses. Given a persistent lack of transparency—evidenced by an ACNA spokesperson citing “other presentments received” during the last 18 months—this is only a minimum figure ( ACNA Primate Faces Misconduct Charges - The Living Church, paragraph 11).

When the scope is expanded to include bishops who have been deposed, or who resigned over serious failures in the last five years (Jackson, Hobby, Atkinson), the total represents over 20% of the ACNA’s dioceses. One in five ACNA dioceses has had their bishop removed or under serious accusation in five years.

One in five.

I would say, “Imagine the pain, shame, confusion, spiritual harm, anger, and distress this causes among the clergy and laity – to say nothing of our reputation in the community.” But I don’t have to imagine it; I have experienced it and so have 20% of you.

A subsequent post may further explore this aspect.

Challenges to Crucial Reform

How do we fix this? One answer lies in structural reform, but the very constitution of the ACNA contains principles that prevent change. This is not an accident; the system was designed by the bishops and drafters of the canons to centralize power again deviating from Anglican norms.

Principle 18.1. Representative government is fundamental to church polity, and in matters which touch all, all should have a voice. (The Principles of Canon Law…)

Two examples are most prescient.

First, the Archbishop is elected by the bishops alone in a secret conclave. The ACNA is the only Anglican Province where the Archbishop is solely elected by the College of Bishops with no canonical input from clergy or laity, violating Principle 18.1. Canon I.3.2 simply states, “The College of Bishops shall meet … for the purpose of electing … a new Archbishop to serve a five-year term.” But the bishops have extra-canonically determined that this election must happen 1) with no prior nominations or vetting, 2) in a secret conclave whose workings remain hidden from the church. How might things be different today if there was even a rudimentary nomination and feedback process before the election of a new archbishop?

Second, the ACNA has hindered the legislative authority of its Provincial Council (PC). The power to legislate is vested in the representative assemblies of a church (Principle 19.1). The ACNA’s Constitution explicitly vests this authority in its “governing body,” the Provincial Council (ACNA Constitution VII.1).

Yet from its earliest days, the PC has been discouraged from acting as a true legislature. Instead of robust debate, legislation often arrives at the Council as a final text from the Governance Task Force (GTF)—now the Constitution and Canons Committee (C&C)—and is presented for a simple up-or-down vote. This deference is not accidental; it reflects a desire by the episcopacy to avoid floor battles, resulting in a culture where the Council, and the broader Provincial Assembly (PA), function more as cheerleading bodies than active legislatures.

This culture is now being codified. A recently proposed amendment formalizes the C&C’s role, virtually guaranteeing that all substantive legislation must first pass through this centralized gate before reaching the Council. While this may appear to be a simple codification of rule-making, in practice, it further constrains the legislative capability of the Provincial Council and reinforces a structure where canonical authority is functionally centralized in the hands of the bishops, who have disproportionate influence over the Committees. ²

A Cry for Change

This is a critical inflection point. First we must heed NT Wright’s reminder that “the line between good and evil does not lie between ‘us’ and ‘them’... between Left and Right, [Between the Episcopal Church and the ACNA, between clergy and laity]. That fateful line runs down the middle of each of us, every human society, every individual.”

Clergy and laity should educate themselves about the failures of our church. Although it is painful, we need to read formal complaints, criticisms, and survivor stories in conversation with official diocesan and provincial communications. We do this prayerfully, seeking to discern the truth.

We also must privately and publicly voice our concerns. Although Anglicans are known for deference and our clergy are reluctant to rock the boat, we have the nation’s attention. It is past time to speak out on behalf of those whose voices have been silenced and ignored.

Bp. Sutton must be forced to step down as acting archbishop and a replacement without previous ties to Abp. Wood or Bp. Jones should take his place.

It is well past time for the church to trust their elected representatives in the PC and the PA to be faithful and wise saints in the creation and debate of legislation.

Those of us in this province, whether lay or ordained, should take the posture of the widow in Luke 18. Let us knock and pray, speak and advocate, until our leaders prove themselves to be more like Christ than the unjust judge. May God have mercy on the ACNA. Amen.

Gracious Father, we pray for your holy Catholic Church. Fill it with all truth, in all truth with all peace. Where it is corrupt, purify it; where it is in error, direct it; where in anything it is amiss, reform it. Where it is right, strengthen it; where it is in want, provide for it; where it is divided, reunite it; for the sake of Jesus Christ your Son our Savior. Amen.

1. I am told that the proposed revisions are actually still primarily adversarial. However, the provincial revisions make this distinction to primarily denote the amount of control the court/tribunal will have over the form, scope, and speed of the trial.

2. Read more in this excellent series by Arlie Coles: https://substack.com/home/post/p-165380932