Stewart Ruch
Stewart E. Ruch III is an American Anglican bishop. He has been the first bishop of the Anglican Diocese of the Upper Midwest at the Anglican Church in North America, since his consecration on 28 September 2013. He is married to Katherine and they have six children.
The Right Reverend Stewart Ruch | |
|---|---|
| Church | Anglican Church in North America |
| Diocese | Anglican Diocese of the Upper Midwest |
| Orders | |
| Consecration | September 28, 2013 by Robert Duncan |
He was raised as a high church Presbyterian and in the Charismatic movement, but he felt more attracted to Anglicanism when he joined Wheaton College and first read the Book of Common Prayer. He later had a spiritual crisis and only returned fully to the Christian faith in September 1991, thanks to the ministry of Fr. William Beasley, at the Church of the Resurrection in West Chicago, IL, and after severing many friendships from his Wheaton days.
He majored in English at Wheaton College, and was also actively involved in theater. He later earned a Master of Theology at Wheaton and won Wheaton's Kenneth Kantzer Prize for Theology. He is currently working on his Doctor of Ministry graduation at Nashotah House.
He has been the rector of the Church of the Resurrection, which relocated to Wheaton, Illinois, since 1999. He left the Episcopal Church, because of disagreements with the leadership of the denomination and what he perceived as liberalism, particularly on the subject of sexual ethics, and particularly in the sermons and writings of the Bishop of Chicago Frank T. Griswold. Ruch then, in 1997, became pastor at the Church of the Resurrection following Canon William Beasley. Soon, he and others joined the new Anglican Church in North America, launched in June 2009.
Ruch would be consecrated the first bishop of the Diocese of the Upper Midwest on 28 September 2013.[1]
He and Baroness Caroline Cox escaped narrowly an ambush by Islamist Fulani herdsmen during a visit to Jos Plateau State, in Nigeria, on 14 November 2016.[2]