Author Archives: David

Archbishop Steve Wood hit with sexual misconduct and abuse of power accusations

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This doesn’t look good:

The highest-ranking member of the Anglican Church of North America has been hit with a slew of allegations – including sexual misconduct, abuse of power, and plagiarism.

A recently revealed presentment, which is a formal report that details offenses by leaders in the church, alleges that Archbishop Stephen Wood, 62, attempted to kiss a female employee, plagiarized his sermons, and bullied church staffers before he moved up in rank.

The ACNA was founded in 2009 by former members of the Episcopal Church who opposed the congregation’s openness to LGBTQ+ Christians and progressive causes.

The religion is a form of Christianity, following the preaching in the Bible and celebrating traditional holidays like Christmas and Easter.

Over a decade after its inception, the church found itself riddled with controversy as new allegations surfaced against the ACNA’s senior-most official.

Claire Buxton, 42, has spoken out about her experience working as the children’s ministry director at St. Andrew’s Church in South Carolina while Wood was the rector.

Buxton detailed her experience in one of six affidavits submitted in the presentment, reviewed by the Washington Post, alleging Wood’s behavior.

She also claimed in an interview with the Post that last spring that Wood tried to kiss her in his office.

‘He put his hand on the back of my head and tried to turn it up towards him while he slowly brought his face towards my face to kiss me,’ Buxton told the outlet.

She said she avoided the kiss by dropping her head and gave him a side hug instead before running out of the office.

Although she said that the alleged kiss occurred in 2024, Buxton insisted that Wood’s inappropriate behavior began years before.

She told the Post that in October 2021 he hugged her at a celebration ceremony, and his hand slowly slid down her back.

Buxton said she told her parents about the awkward encounter, admitting that it felt ‘sensual’ and that she speculated he was attracted to her.

Her parents brushed it off, so she continued her work as the children’s ministry director.

However, a year later, Wood allegedly divulged inappropriate information to Buxton in his office.

He allegedly told her that he fired a church staffer because she ‘slept with everyone.’ That same year, Wood began giving Buxton mysterious checks from a church account.

[…….]

Numerous other members of the Anglican Church expressed concern with Wood’s behavior, including Reverend Hamilton Smith, the rector of St. Thomas’ Church in South Carolina.

In a letter obtained by the Post, Smith told Wood: ‘I do not feel you have moral authority required to hold the office of Bishop.’

Smith said he believed Wood plagiarized his sermons, shamed colleagues, and accepted a $60,000 truck provided by the diocese.

‘You have told me numerous times that you are a sinner who had “a really bad year/a horrible season” in which you did things you now regret. While I rejoice in this self understanding, grace and forgiveness have limits,’ Smith wrote in the letter.

Reverend Rob Sturdy, another priest who submitted an affidavit, wrote that Wood frequently boasted about a woman from another church whom he could’ve had a relationship with if he pursued it.

Canadian Primate values institution over truth

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Archbishop Shane Parker has released a statement claiming that, whereas GAFCON has left the Anglican Communion, the Anglican Church of Canada will stay.

Whether that is accurate or not depends on how you define “Anglican Communion”. Here is a brief definition from Britannica:

Anglican Communion, religious body of national, independent, and autonomous churches throughout the world that adheres to the teachings of Anglicanism and that evolved from the Church of England. The Anglican Communion is united by a common loyalty to the archbishop of Canterbury in England as its senior bishop and titular leader and by a general agreement with the doctrines and practices defined since the 16th century in The Book of Common Prayer.

It’s true that Parker is holding to one part – “loyalty to the archbishop of Canterbury” – but not true that he is holding to the rest: “the teachings of Anglicanism” and “a general agreement with the doctrines and practices defined since the 16th century in The Book of Common Prayer.” He, the ACoC, the Church of England and TEC have departed from those practices.

Who, then, has really left the Anglican Communion: the vast majority of Anglicans who value biblical truth or an ever diminishing rump that loves the institution?

From here:

Pastoral statement from the Primate and Metropolitans of the Anglican Church of Canada concerning the Anglican Communion

By Archbishop Shane Parker on October 18, 2025

In recent days, primates of the Global Anglican Future Conference announced their decisions to leave the Anglican Communion. In response to this, we, the Primate and the Metropolitans of the Anglican Church of Canada, reaffirm the Solemn Declaration of 1893 found in the (Canadian) Book of Common Prayer:

We declare this Church to be, and desire that it shall continue, in full communion with the Church of England throughout the world, as an integral portion of the One Body of Christ composed of Churches which, united under the One Divine Head and in the fellowship of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, hold the One Faith revealed in Holy Writ, and defined in the Creeds. (BCP 1959/1962, viii)

We reaffirm the four Instruments of Communion: the Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Consultative Council, the Primates’ Meeting, and the primatial See of Canterbury with its people, clergy, and its Archbishop.

We reaffirm the historic Anglican appeal to Scripture, Reason, and Tradition.

The practical and theological question before us is this: Can communion with the Risen Christ contain conflict, so that conflict and disagreement lose their power to divide? We believe the answer to this question is a resounding “YES” because this has been borne out many times in Anglican experience and intuition from the Reformation to the present time.

The Anglican Church of Canada looks forward to participating in the next gathering of the Primates’ Meeting, the next meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council, and the next Lambeth Conference. We rejoice in the appointment of Bishop Sarah Mullally as the next Archbishop of Canterbury and will warmly welcome her to Canada after she is installed in 2026.

With steadfast faith and joyful hope,

The Most Reverend Shane Parker, Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada
The Most Reverend David Edwards, Metropolitan of Canada
The Most Reverend Anne Germond, Metropolitan of Ontario
The Most Reverend Gregory Kerr-Wilson, Metropolitan of Northern Lights
The Most Reverend John Stephens, Metropolitan of British Columbia and Yukon

Synod approves Queer Interfaith Coalition letter

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Shouldn’t that be Interfaith Queer Coalition? Surely it’s the coalition that’s queer not interfaith.

No matter, the letter admonishes us to uphold the “sacred tenets of intersectional equity”, which I’m sure I’d be happy to do if I knew what it meant.

It also denounces “the damaging heresy that some people are more deserving of equality than others”. Now that I can get behind: I deserve to be equal to someone who is younger, taller, thinner, and better looking than me.

From here:

Queer Interfaith Coalition letter endorsed with amendment recognizing diversity of opinion on marriage canon General Synod passed a resolution June 29 endorsing an open letter to the Canadian government from the Queer Interfaith Coalition, an organization which supports LGBTQ+ acceptance across different religious groups.

The letter says it is “reclaiming the religious voice from those who have sought to weaponize faith.” Signatories commit to building religious communities that reflect a number of “sacred tenets of intersectional equity” including the idea that 2SLGBTQIA+ people are created “in the Divine Image,” and to, among other things, dedicating themselves to promoting the human rights and mental health of LGBTQ+ people and ending gender-based violence.

The motion passed after some debate surrounding a clause denouncing “the damaging heresy that some people are more deserving of equality than others,” and the passing of an amendment intended to address concerns about that clause. Many members of General Synod spoke in favour of the letter, including Bishop Kevin Robertson of the diocese of Toronto. He said there was a need for the church to stand up for LGBTQ+ rights at a time of growing backlash and diminishing support.

The amendment to the resolution states that General Synod will not understand the letter to contradict “A Word to the Church,” and that the word “heresy” “must not be interpreted as a condemnation of those Christians who do not believe Scripture permits Holy Matrimony for same-sex couple[s].” “A Word to the Church” is a document written by church leaders and adopted by General Synod in 2019. It affirms that Anglicans may hold a variety of beliefs about same-sex marriages, must stand together despite their differences and that the church must respect the self determination of Indigenous communities in particular.

Charlie Kirk and the silence of the Anglicans

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When George Floyd was killed, in no time at all, Anglican bishops began parading their lamentations online.

Here is Linda Nicholls, who was at the time, Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, expressing her dismay at “another black man killed by police brutality”. Fair enough: the death of George Floyd was brutal, he was black, and it was caused by a white policeman. The policeman who caused the death was convicted of unintentional second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter. But he was not convicted of premeditated murder.

There was no shortage of other bishops eager to air their righteous indignation for all to admire. It wasn’t confined to ACoC and TEC bishops: not wishing to be left behind, here is a collection of ACNA bishops mourning and lamenting in unison.

It is now five days since the horrific murder of Charlie Kirk, a conservative Christian who has been effectively defending orthodox Christian values to young people on US college campuses since he was 18. Unsurprisingly, this has rubbed some people up the wrong way, leading not only to his assassination but to celebrations of his assassination.

You might think that the bishops condemning George Floyd’s death would leap at this opportunity to once again write letters of mourning and condemnation at this dreadful murder.

But they haven’t. Shame on the lot of them.

The one exception I did find was from Bishop Phil Ashey, who at least had the decency to ask for prayers for the family.

Here is a disgusting Facebook post by ACNA’s Rev. Harry K Zeiders (recently removed, along with the foot from his mouth), implying that Charlie Kirk deserved what he got because of his support for the Second Amendment.

Ironically, Bernie Sanders – whose views don’t quite align with those of Charlie Kirk – posted one of the better comments on this:

The curious case of the Archbishop who doesn’t need to get married in church

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I used to live in Machen, a small Welsh village about 12km away from where the new Archbishop of Wales, the Most Rev. Cherry Vann, is to be consecrated in Newport Cathedral. Much as I would enjoy visiting my old home, I won’t be using that as an excuse to attend Ms. Van’s installation as Archbishop.

Vann is collecting a catalogue of firsts to add to her résumé: she was the first female priest to be ordained in the UK, and now she is the first lesbian primate to be in a homoerotic relationship with her partner for the last 30 years.

What is curious about that, you may be wondering. After all, the only thing that the Anglican church can do that excites any interest in the secular press is to have yet another scandal exposed or to appoint a new archbishop with unusual sexual tastes. I’ve come to suspect that it’s all part of a devious Anglican strategy to be noticed.

The curious thing about it is that, while every liberal Western province is clamouring to enshrine same-sex marriage into their liturgies, this Archbishop says she doesn’t need to be married in church.

If an Archbishop doesn’t need to be married in church, why does anyone else?

Problem solved: there will be no same-sex marriages in churches because it isn’t needed.

From here:

The archbishop grew up in a religious family in Whetstone in Leicestershire, following in her church organist father’s footsteps by studying at the Royal College of Music and then the Royal Schools of Music, where she trained as a teacher.

She entered an Anglican theological college in 1986 to prepare for ordination and then worked in the Manchester diocese, becoming a priest in 1994 and archdeacon of Rochdale in 2008.

Gender and sexuality are still highly divisive issues in the Anglican communion. Even in her new role as the first female and first openly gay archbishop in the UK, Vann was cautious on the topic of gay marriage.

“I don’t personally feel the need to get married in church; Wendy and I have been together for 30 years, we’ve made our vows, and we are committed to each other.

ACNA continues burrowing down the woke rabbit hole

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From here


ACNA’s New Vice-Chancellor for Safeguarding

In the midst of a difficult week for the Anglican Church in North America, there is a happy announcement: we have a Vice-Chancellor for Safeguarding, Jeannie Rose Barksdale! She has quite the resume, including a Stanford degree in Political Science and Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity.

Now in case any reader thinks Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity is grievance studies, you need to repent of noticing. Noticing is Whiteness.

Since then she has been busy, including being an active member of Church of the Advent, Washington, D. C., in the Diocese of Christ Our Hope. But she has found time to write. So let’s meet Jeannie Rose Barksdale in her own words.

Back in February, she found time to write for that erudite and balanced Christian publication, Sojourners. In it she is sad about a repeat shoplifter getting caught at Target. The shoplifter needed more love. She is also “feeling powerless and overwhelmed.” Why?

Lately, it has been far easier to despair than to love concretely. The Trump administration’s strategy of flooding the zone has made me feel powerless and overwhelmed — which is, as Adam Russell Taylor recently described it, precisely the point. Even while wrestling with lament, I’ve wanted to move toward contributing to addressing injustice to counter the pervasive injustice that occupies so much of our news. But I’ve just not known how.

Yes, the first days of President Trump II were so awful, it was difficult to love, to even know how to love. Oh, the “wrestling with lament”!

You may have guessed that I don’t much like Donald Trump. I think he is a bombastic, egotistical oaf. Having said that, I have to admit that what he has done has not been all bad: I tend to think of his positive achievements as happy accidents. Since they have all been bludgeoned into existence by executive order, they will all be undone in four years or so when an extreme leftist gets into power and uses the same technique. And I do not doubt that in four years the anti-Trump pendulum will swing with vengeance to the left.

Still, all this is temporal vanity that has little bearing on the eternal matters that should preoccupy the church.

So, if Ms Barksdale is in that much mental distress over wordly events that are largly beneficial – even though enacted by a buffoon –  and ACNA has hired her, both she and ACNA are in serious trouble.

Priests in bikinis

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Actually, only one lady priest from the Diocese of Toronto.

Rev. Gerlyn Henry was walking to her car carrying her new bikini in a transparent bag when she was intercepted by a passerby who accused her of immodesty.

Rev. Gerlyn Henry enjoys making TikTok videos, and the one she made recounting this was viewed so many times that it made an appearance in People Magazine.

If only the ACoC could find a way of making the Gospel (the real one, not the one it normally peddles) as popular. Bikinis are probably not the answer.

You can watch the video here.

If that has whetted your appetite for more, the Rev can be found prancing around in a rainbow stole to celebrate “Pride” here, a sartorial choice I find more disturbing than a bikini.

Rumblings of chaos in ACNA

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Rt. Rev. Stewart Ruch III has been charged with the mishandling of sexual abuse disclosures and was being tried in an ecclesiastical court which was not open to the public.

The trial collapsed when the prosecutor, Alan Runyan, resigned because:

“the trial process had been irreparably tainted” by a member of the ACNA’s Court for the Trial of a Bishop who improperly questioned one of the prosecution’s witnesses for over an hour on the fifth day of trial.

The questioning allegedly brought in external material that had not been admitted into evidence by the court before the trial. This material, which pertained to the ACNA’s previous investigation rather than to the charges against Ruch, had been explicitly ruled improper by the court in an April 2025 pretrial order.

Archbishop Steve Wood appointed a new prosecutor so the trial could continue.

Meanwhile, Rachel Thebeau, the deputy prosecutor released a letter calling into question the integrity or competence – possibly both – of ACNA’s leadership. This was a career limiting move that led to her being persuaded to resign.

Archbishop Steve Wood has issued his own letter in response, a spectacle of duelling letters, defending himself and the other ACNA leaders tangled up in this:

The past few days have presented great challenges for our Anglican Church. As you may be aware, on Friday, a now-former employee of the province who was assisting in the prosecution for the ecclesiastical trial that is currently before the Court for the Trial of a Bishop, widely circulated a letter to individual members and clergy across the province that levels serious but misguided allegations against me, the provincial Chancellor, the Executive Director of the Province, and the Court. The letter suggests that we acted unethically and compromised the integrity of the Church. These accusations have sent a wave of pain, confusion, and division rippling across our province.

This makes me cringe, since the focus seems to be less on the truth or otherwise of Thebeau’s accusations and more on the aggravation it is causing ACNA leaders.

The College of Bishops has been pressed into service with yet another letter to help circle the ecclesiastical wagons. Maybe I’m imagining it, but it reads rather like a Trump cabinet meeting where toadying is the order of the day. The standout sentence is this piece of Newspeak: ” We are grateful for their ongoing commitment to appropriate levels of transparency”

Where is the truth in all this? I don’t know. What I do know is that the whole process is exceedingly murky and that makes me very suspicious.

There are some more opinions in the latest Anglican Unscripted:

 

The Sean Feucht fuss

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Sean Feucht is an American musician and pastor who has been refused permits to perform in a number of Canadian cities because his performance “goes against the values of inclusion, solidarity and respect.”

He opposes abortion, is less than enthusiastic about 2SLGBTQ+ demands and he is not reluctant to prance around in the political minefield of MAGA. He supports Donald Trump, the embodiment of everything that is shallow, vulgar, crass, and egomaniacal in the American psyche, which is, in my view, a failure in discernment, taste or both.

Feucht has been accused of ethical and financial misconduct by other faith leaders, although, until proved otherwise, the accusations might well be bogus.

It’s easy to have sympathy for Sean Feucht and what he claims to stand for and I am quite sure that he should be allowed a platform in Canada. If he really is as off the wall as his detractors would have us believe, then I’m confident we have the resilience to withstand his onslaught on our religion of diversity and inclusion.

Nevertheless, I question the wisdom of tying politics and Christianity together so tightly, whether it be from the left or the right. I suspect that many Christians who do so would be unable to resist Satan’s third temptation to Jesus in the wilderness.

To end on a lighter note, here is a video of a daft policewoman telling us that those of us who “lean towards traditional values” are on the road to the perdition of extremism. So whatever Sean Feucht is up to, it can’t be all bad.

[fvplayer id=”24″]

Losing the wonder of salvation

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Entropy is a measure of a system’s disorder; with time, it increases. When applied to the universe, it is a degradation of matter and energy to an eventual state of cold uniformity. When the universe reaches maximum entropy, it will be lifeless and inert. Reversing entropy is the stuff of science fiction, although I imagine it will happen at Christ’s return when the universe is remade.

I’ve come to think that there is also a form of spiritual entropy. When first we are saved from sin and reconciled to God, we are filled with the wonder of it all. John Bunyan put it like this (my emphasis):

Now I saw in my dream, that the highway up which Christian was to go, was fenced on either side with a wall, and that wall was called Salvation. Isaiah 26:1. Up this way, therefore, did burdened Christian run, but not without great difficulty, because of the load on his back.

He ran thus till he came at a place somewhat ascending; and upon that place stood a cross, and a little below, in the bottom, a sepulchre. So I saw in my dream, that just as Christian came up with the cross, his burden loosed from off his shoulders, and fell from off his back, and began to tumble, and so continued to do till it came to the mouth of the sepulchre, where it fell in, and I saw it no more.

Then was Christian glad and lightsome, and said with a merry heart, “He hath given me rest by his sorrow, and life by his death.” Then he stood still a while, to look and wonder; for it was very surprising to him that the sight of the cross should thus ease him of his burden.

When – or just before – I became a Christian in 1978, my first prayer was that if all the claims of Jesus were true, I would somehow be able to believe them. And, while you are at it, please give me a hand quitting smoking. The next morning I woke up convinced that Jesus is who he claims to be. And as a non-smoker.

I was overcome with the wonder of it all. How could He save a wretch like me? Numerous things that had made no sense suddenly came into focus like pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle flying together with a loud click. Not everything became clear, of course: I still don’t understand quantum mechanics.

Over time, spiritual entropy sets in: the wonder of it all fades and I have once more to bring the early days to mind; to do otherwise is to grow cold to the Gospel or even forget what it is.

The church has the same problem. It doesn’t just grow cold, though, it replaces the Gospel with something else and calls it the Gospel. Social justice is the usual substitute. Or “equal marriage” as it’s called. Or “climate justice”. Or “inclusion”.

There is no wonder in these, just dreary shabbiness.

Eager to enter the competition for who can pollute the Gospel with the most drearily shabby, cliché-ridden tripe from the fevered imagination of underemployed theologians, ACNA has joined the race.  The Matthew 25 Initiative is live and is inviting all who wish to abandon their first love to join it. And lose the wonder of it all.