The Rev. William Barto, a canon lawyer who is a priest in the Reformed Episcopal Church, a subjurisdiction of ACNA, said the decision was “sorely lacking” from a legal standpoint. He said it “reads more like a journal of the trial process” rather than a considered judicial decision, noting that half the document is focused on critiquing ACNA’s response to the allegations.

Barto told RNS in an email that the document and the process that led to it “demonstrates unequivocally that the ACNA can no longer leave ecclesial disciplinary matters on the back shelf.” He said the denomination must determine what role tribunals should play in the disciplinary process: “Are they judges or juries? investigations or trials?” he asked. He called for court members to receive further training in canon law….

A spokesperson for the denomination confirmed that there is a planned audit of the [Bishop] Ruch trial proceedings.

Read it all.

NEW from me this evening: ACNA Bishop Stewart Ruch found not guilty on all counts. The decision comes more than six years after a 9-year-old child first came forward with sexual abuse allegations against a lay minister in Ruch's diocese. https://t.co/yKckPyrY28

— Kathryn Post (@kathrynmaepost) December 17, 2025

One of those men, Nephtali Matta, works as the “Alpha Coordinator” at Ruch’s flagship church, leading regular discussions on Christianity. But Matta was arrested in Colorado in 2011, charged with attempted second-degree murder of his first wife, and spent nearly 480 days in jail. He later pleaded guilty to felony menacing and was released. He then moved to Illinois, joined Rez in Wheaton and was eventually hired to work part time.

The church’s interim head pastor, Matt Woodley, told The Post this year that he oversaw Matta’s hiring and that Ruch does not hire or oversee non-clergy employees. But the authors of the clergy-and-parishioner presentment have told The Post that the denomination’s bishops — as defined by the church’s own canons — are “administrators of godly discipline and governance” and “overseer[s] of the flock.”

The clergy-and-parishioner presentment also said that Ruch allowed John W. Hays, a registered child sex offender, to attend Rez as a worshiper, even though Hays had pleaded guilty to sexually abusing two boys years earlier. Hays’s presence at Rez became publicly known only when the watchdog group ACNAtoo published a blog item about it on its website.

The court’s ruling did not address Matta or Hays.

Read it all.

THREAD: The ecclesiastical court's acquittal of N. American Anglican Bishop Stewart Ruch bemoans the "narrative capture" of the case and claims that advocacy groups "exerted ongoing and distorting influence" over the investigation. But the verdict does not address many key areas:

— Ian Shapira (@ianshapira) December 17, 2025

‘There seems to be a kind of conspiracy, especially among middle-aged writers of vaguely liberal tendency, to forget, or to conceal, where the doctrine of Hell comes from. One finds frequent references to the “cruel and abominable mediaeval doctrine of hell,” or “the childish and grotesque medieval imagery of physical fire and worms.”…But the case is quite otherwise; let us face the facts. The doctrine of hell is not ” medieval”: it is Christ’s. It is not a device of “mediaeval priestcraft” for frightening people into giving money to the church: it is Christ’s deliberate judgment on sin. The imagery of the undying worm and the unquenchable fire derives, not from “mediaeval superstition,” but originally from the Prophet Isaiah, and it was Christ who emphatically used it. . . . It confronts us in the oldest and least “edited” of the gospels: it is explicit in many of the most familiar parables and implicit in many more: it bulks far larger in the teaching than one realizes, until one reads the Evangelists [gospels] through instead of picking out the most comfortable texts: one cannot get rid of it without tearing the New Testament to tatters. We cannot repudiate Hell without altogether repudiating Christ.‘ 

–Dorothy Leigh Sayers, Introductory Papers on Dante (Harper: London, 1954), pp. 44-45

“[Jesus of Nazareth] was not a kind of demon pretending to be human; he was in every respect a genuine living man. He was not merely a man so good as to be ‘like God’—he was God.

“Now, this is not just a pious commonplace: it is not a commonplace at all. For what it means is this, among other things: that for whatever reason God chose to make man as he is—limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death—he [God] had the honesty and courage to take his own medicine. Whatever game he is playing with his creation, he has kept his own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that he has not exacted from himself. He has himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. When he was a man, he played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile.”

—Creed or Chaos? (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1949), page 4 (with special thanks to blog reader and friend WW)

Dorothy L Sayers died on December 17th 1957. In the second of a two part series, we look at her successful career as a detective story author and her turn to theology in the last two decades of her life.https://t.co/BaAlhRdLQ2

— Orwell Society (@Orwell_Society) December 17, 2025

Incarnate God, who didst grant the grace of eloquence unto thy servant Dorothy to defend thy truth unto a distressed church, and to proclaim the importance of Christian principles for the world; grant unto us thy same grace that, aided by her prayers and example, we too may have the passionate conviction to teach right doctrine and to teach doctrine rightly; We ask this in thy name, who livest and reignest with the Father, in the unity of the Holy Ghost, one God, for ever and ever.

Bluntisham, Cambridgeshire, for #SteepleSaturday. The writer Dorothy L Sayers grew up in this parish. Her father was the rector, a bellringing enthusiast who restored the bells here and became the model for the Reverend Venables in her book The Nine Tailors.

The landscape of… pic.twitter.com/32423XEicR

— Simon Knott (@SimoninSuffolk) July 5, 2025

O God, who didst send thy messengers and prophets to prepare the way of thy Son before him: Grant that our Lord when he cometh may find in us a dwelling prepared for himself; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who came to take our nature upon him that he might bring many sons unto glory, and now with thee and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth, ever one God, world without end.

–A New Prayer Book (London: Oxford University Press 1923)

Ladybird Artists Advent Calendar, window 17
‘Winter Pastoral’
Artist: SR Badmin pic.twitter.com/klqHwCBXFs

— Helen Day (@LBFlyawayhome) December 17, 2025

After this I looked, and lo, in heaven an open door! And the first voice, which I had heard speaking to me like a trumpet, said, “Come up hither, and I will show you what must take place after this.” At once I was in the Spirit, and lo, a throne stood in heaven, with one seated on the throne! And he who sat there appeared like jasper and carnelian, and round the throne was a rainbow that looked like an emerald. Round the throne were twenty-four thrones, and seated on the thrones were twenty-four elders, clad in white garments, with golden crowns upon their heads. From the throne issue flashes of lightning, and voices and peals of thunder, and before the throne burn seven torches of fire, which are the seven spirits of God; and before the throne there is as it were a sea of glass, like crystal. And round the throne, on each side of the throne, are four living creatures, full of eyes in front and behind: the first living creature like a lion, the second living creature like an ox, the third living creature with the face of a man, and the fourth living creature like a flying eagle. And the four living creatures, each of them with six wings, are full of eyes all round and within, and day and night they never cease to sing, “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come!”

–Revelation 4:1-8

A Pink Morning. 3°C and a remarkable dawn. Blackbirds pic.twitter.com/p2qg7Rgh6S

— Yorkshire Wolds Weather (@WeatherWolds) December 17, 2025