In March 2021 he announced that he would be resigning from ministry in the Episcopal church due to unspecified disagreements with the direction the church was headed. At the time of his statement, Herzog was serving as priest-in-charge of St. Augustine Episcopal Church in Ilion, New York. Former Albany Bishop William Love announced that he would be joining the Anglican Diocese of the Living Word, a diocese within the Anglican Church of North America, as an Assistant Bishop. A week later, on April 10, 2021, Herzog also announced that he would be joining the ACNA and serve in ministry in the Anglican Diocese of the Living Word under Bishop Julian Dobbs.

In retirement, Herzog pastored an ACNA church plant in the Utica area where he passed away.

An old friend Harold Miller paid tribute to the bishop. "Dan came from the very Anglo--Catholic diocese of Albany in New York State, and I was from the more low church diocese of Down and Dromore, Ireland, but our hearts beat with the same passions: a passion for the Word of God, for evangelism and for growing Spirit--filled churches. That was to be the beginning of a 20--year link which blessed so many on both sides of the Atlantic."

"Bishop Dan lived through an extraordinarily difficult time in the Episcopal Church. It was not easy to lead a largely conservative diocese in a church which was becoming increasingly liberal both in doctrine and in ethics. He resisted with all his might but found twice over that TEC was no longer his home."

Bishop Dobbs said of him, "Bishop Dan was fighting battles for faithfulness before the rest of us even realized there was a war."

BY CONTRAST, Archbishop Michael Peers, 88, (1934-2023) was the 11th Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada and one of the longest serving leaders in the ACoC died. He served as primate from 1986 to 2004.

His tenure was marked by a near total capitulation to the culture, and in doing so, saw his church decline in numbers. Peers's 18-year-primacy saw many changes in both the church and society.

In 1985, a year before he was elected primate, the Book of Alternative Services was introduced to supplement -- but in effect replace -- the 1962 Book of Common Prayer. Critics saw the BAS as shifting substantially away from the theology embodied in the BCP, and also as having serious pastoral and devotional shortcomings. The next year the newly founded Prayer Book Society of Canada tried unsuccessfully to litigate the matter in an ecclesiastical court over which Archbishop Peers presided.

One feature of his episcopacy [primacy] was concern over how the ACoC had treated its indigenous. Peers apologized to the Inuit because so many had been abused physically, sexually, culturally and emotionally.

The primate was invited to write the preface to the book Anglican Essentials: Reclaiming Faith Within the Anglican Church of Canada (1995), a collection of essays from the two dozen talks given at the Essentials '94 Conference held in Montreal a year earlier. Peers had attended the gathering of 600 Canadian Anglicans converging from three different streams -- Anglo-Catholics, charismatics, and evangelicals -- all of whom worked together to draft the Montreal Declaration.

Most of the speakers were critical of what they considered the "theological revisionism" and "cultural accommodation" of the Anglican church, in his preface. Many who attended Essentials '94 later formed the Anglican Network in Canada, which eventually disaffiliated from the ACoC.

The primate was known as a strong supporter of ecumenism and during the 1990s served on the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches. He played a pivotal role helping the ACoC become full communion partners with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada in 2001.

Toward the end of his tenure the issue of the ordination of gay and lesbian clergy emerged and Peers supported it. In 2002 the Diocese of New Westminster became the first Anglican diocese in the world to formally authorize the blessing of same-sex unions, which sparked controversy across the Anglican Communion. Bishop Michael Ingham led the way to the eventual split in the ACoC.

In 2004 the last General Synod that Peers presided over he affirmed "the integrity and sanctity of committed adult same-sex relationships."

Peers cultivated a closer relationship between the ACoC and the Episcopal Church US, a denomination that is hemorrhaging numbers, imbibing a revisionist gospel by moving steadily away from historic Christianity.

A layman who knew him well said "Peers presided over a disaster for the ACoC, as Michael Ingham's foil."

A third bishop, the Rt. Rev. R. Stewart Wood died recently at the age of 89. He was the ninth Bishop of Michigan and an advocate for social justice.

His notoriety came when he ordained Jennifer Walters, a lesbian, as a priest at the Church of the Incarnation in Pittsfield Township, Michigan. This ultimately led to the diocese ordaining its first woman and openly consecrating a lesbian bishop in the person of Bonnie Perry.

At the beginning of his ministry as diocesan, Wood faced major divisions in the diocese over the then-illegal practice of blessing same-sex relationships. He later took a firm support in favor of same-sex blessings, and ordained Walters, with conservatives pushing back against his policies.

He participated in a symposium on "the theological implications of blessing same-sex couples" in a Detroit church shortly after becoming diocesan bishop in 1990. At the gathering, billed as "the first of its kind," several speakers discussed their experience of ministering to same-sex couples, and questioned celibacy.

The Mariners' Chapel, a conservative flagship in downtown Detroit (famous from the 1976 Gordon Lightfoot hit "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald") successfully broke away from the diocese in 1991 Wood deposed its rector for his refusal to use the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. The parish was allowed to keep its historic church building after a circuit court ruled that the 1842 bequest that created the chapel did not affiliate it with any denomination.

Ten conservative bishops also filed charges against Wood in 1995, along with four other progressive bishops, alleging that their decision to ordain gay and lesbian clergy violated a 1979 General Convention resolution that said the ordination of open homosexuals was "not appropriate." The charges were dismissed on the grounds that "there is no provision of the Constitution or Canons of the church which prohibits the ordination of homosexuals."

Wood symbolized all that is wrong with the Episcopal Church and contributed to the diocese declining and ultimately the whole church.

END