The ecclesiastical trial of the Rt. Rev. Stewart Ruch III, an Anglican Church in North America bishop who is accused of mishandling reports of abusive ministers in his diocese, has been halted less than a week into its proceedings by the sudden resignation of its prosecutor. The trial is scheduled to resume August 11, according to a court order.
In a July 22 press release, the ACNA’s Archbishop, the Most Rev. Stephen Wood, announced that Runyan’s place would be taken by the Ven. Job Serebrov. Serebrov is archdeacon of the church’s Jurisdiction of the Armed Forces and Chaplaincy.
Alan Runyan, who has served as the ACNA’s provincial prosecutor since April 2024, described his withdrawal from prosecuting the case against Bishop Ruch in a July 19 letter. He wrote that “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.
Because of the single court member’s actions, Runyan wrote, “all six of the other members of the Court had been exposed to an unwarranted suspicion of provincial investigative bias … contrary to the Court’s duty to determine the outcome based solely on the evidence in the trial record.”
Wood announced Runyan’s “unsettling and surprising” resignation late on Sunday, July 20, and explained through the ACNA’s chancellor in a second announcement the next morning that a new provincial prosecutor will continue the case. The archbishop made no recommendation regarding the composition of the court, which remains fixed.
Ecclesiastical trials of bishops in the ACNA are governed by the church’s canons, which establish an adversarial framework that sets a prosecutor, representing the denomination, against the accused, who is presumed innocent and has a right to representation by counsel. At trial, each side argues its case before the members of the court. A majority of court members is required to obtain a verdict on any charge.
The identity of the court member accused of improper questioning is unclear, as is the procedure that allowed the member, rather than the prosecuting or defense attorneys, to conduct a prolonged examination of a witness.
The ACNA canons give the court wide freedom to establish its procedural rules, which the court did in 2021. The 2021-24 trial of Todd Atkinson, the former bishop of the ACNA’s Via Apostolica district, was conducted under those rules—but oral argument with live testimony was waived in the Atkinson trial, leaving little precedent to guide witness examination in the Ruch trial.
It is also unclear whether there were real-time attempts by the prosecutor or the court’s legal adviser, the Hon. Tad Brenner, to stop the member of the court from speaking improperly in the virtual courtroom, which was hosted through a “secure online platform” and was closed to the public and the media.
In his resignation letter, Runyan wrote that “full transparency is in the best interests of the entire ACNA” and called for the full transcript of the trial record and all pretrial submissions to the court to be released by the church’s provincial office. ACNA chancellor William Nelson said the provincial office believes the release of trial records is “a matter for the Court to decide.”
Calls for court transparency have previously come from Wood. In September 2024, Wood reported that the court had agreed to his request to publish pretrial motions as they were ruled upon. (While in the Episcopal Church there is a canonical duty to publish documents once a Title IV matter reaches a hearing panel, there is no such analogous obligation in the ACNA.)
From September 2024 to June 2025, there were no motions, rulings, or orders published on the court’s webpage, though an unknown number were issued by the court during that time, including the April 2025 order mentioned in Runyan’s resignation letter.
Likewise, motions filed before Wood’s September 2024 request have not been retroactively published, an author of the clergy and lay presentment against Ruch told The Living Church. In May 2024, the author said, Ruch moved to disqualify Runyan from prosecuting, claiming that Runyan’s past participation in ACNA’s oversight of a 2022 third-party investigation into Ruch’s diocese rendered Runyan biased. Around the same time, Runyan moved to consolidate two sets of charges into one trial, which Ruch moved to oppose. Runyan’s motions were granted by the court while Ruch’s were not.
Ruch’s defense has consistently criticized ACNA’s investigative processes that led to trial, claiming they were extracanonical and invalid. “[The Province] has permitted generalized aspersions of imprudent leadership and overbearing personality to form the justification for a giant fishing expedition,” Alec J. Smith, counsel to Ruch, wrote in a letter to the church’s former primate, Archbishop Foley Beach, in 2022.
Charles Philbrick, former chancellor of Ruch’s Diocese of the Upper Midwest, argued in a 2022-23 dispute that charges by three bishops against Ruch were invalid in part because they used information derived from the third-party investigation overseen by the ACNA. That dispute went to the denomination’s highest court, but that court suggested that questions about the investigation were matters for the Court for the Trial of a Bishop first.
The court’s April ruling that evidence pertaining to the investigation was improper, and which the unidentified member of the court allegedly contravened at witness examination, was made “because, rather than focusing solely on the charges made against him, Bishop Ruch had focused on information about the investigative process,” Runyan said in his resignation letter.
Since 2021, Ruch’s case has provided a series of stress tests for the ACNA’s Title IV disciplinary canons regulating the charging, investigation, and trial of bishops. The denomination will host a “rollout” on July 29 of a comprehensive draft revision that aims to remedy weaknesses in procedures for charging bishops, investigating claims, and guiding court actions, according to the Rev. Canon Andrew Rowell, chair of the church’s Governance Task Force.
Before moving into the ACNA, both Wood and Runyan hailed from the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina. Runyan served as lead counsel for the breakaway South Carolina diocese in its property dispute and coauthored a series of influential critiques of the Episcopal Church’s 2006-09 revision of its Title IV disciplinary canons.
Alan Runyan declined to comment on this story.Â
Arlie Coles is a lay Anglican from the Diocese of Dallas who writes about modern Episcopal history and polity. She is also a machine-learning researcher serving on General Convention’s Task Force on Artificial Intelligence and Intellectual Property.
