Why I Oppose Jenny Andison

I do not oppose Jenny Andison because she is a woman.

I do not oppose her because she is intelligent, successful, evangelical, polished, or powerful.

I oppose her because I believe she represents something deeply wrong in the modern Anglican episcopate.

And I say that as someone who once believed in bishops.

Not casually.

Not sentimentally.

I believed in the office.

I believed bishops were more than ecclesiastical executives in purple shirts. I believed they were supposed to carry the Church’s memory, guard its soul, defend the vulnerable, correct the powerful, and absorb conflict rather than merely manage it.

I was young enough, once, to believe that.

Then I met enough bishops.

In 2016, the Diocese of Toronto held one of the most consequential episcopal elections in Canadian Anglican history. Three bishops were elected in one day. First came Riscylla Shaw, a Métis priest whose election carried the weight of Indigenous leadership and reconciliation. Then came Kevin Robertson, an openly gay partnered priest raising children with his partner, a historic moment for a church publicly wrestling with sexuality, family, inclusion, and authority.

Those elections meant something.

Whether people celebrated them or feared them, nobody could pretend the Diocese was simply conducting routine business. Toronto was making a statement about the future it believed God was calling into being.

Then came Jenny Andison.

To many, she looked like the safe pair of hands. The institutional candidate. The bridge. The person who could reassure the anxious after a day of rupture and change.

I gave her the benefit of the doubt.

I was wrong.

What followed was not, to me, the deepening of episcopal vocation. It was the exposure of what the office had become. After only a few years as bishop, she left episcopal ministry to become rector of one of the wealthiest and most influential Anglican churches in Canada.

She had the right to do that.

But rights are not the same thing as witness.

A bishop is not supposed to be a career phase.

The episcopate is not executive leadership training. It is not a management internship. It is not a credential one acquires before moving to a more desirable platform.

At least it wasn’t when I was ordained.

I know what the Church does to fallen priests. I know how quickly sacred language becomes legal containment. I know how easily pastoral responsibility disappears once institutional reputation is at stake. I wrote a whole book trying to tell the truth about my own failure without letting the institution pretend its hands were clean.

That is why this matters.

Because the Church is very good at demanding accountability downward.

Clergy are scrutinized.

Parishioners are managed.

The wounded are told to be patient, careful, prayerful, and quiet.

But bishops?

Bishops are protected by tone.

By process.

By title.

By the strange Anglican instinct to confuse dignity with avoidance.

My own experience with Jenny Andison left me with no confidence that she understood the spiritual gravity of episcopal authority. Others may have had different experiences. Fine. I can only speak from mine.

But I know this much.

The crisis facing the Anglican Church of Canada is not attendance.

It is credibility.

People no longer believe institutions that preach accountability while practicing self-protection.

They no longer believe leaders who speak of justice while insulating themselves from scrutiny.

They no longer believe bishops deserve trust simply because someone once laid hands on their head.

Authority must be earned.

Trust must be earned.

And when the office no longer reveals Christ’s courage, Christ’s truth, and Christ’s care for the wounded, then the office has become costume.

That is why I oppose Jenny Andison.

Not because of who she is.

Because of what her leadership came to represent.

A Church that remembers how to consecrate bishops.

But has forgotten what bishops are for.