The Rt. Rev. Bruce Caldwell, who served as Bishop of Wyoming from 1997 to 2010, died on Palm Sunday, April 13, at 77.
The son of a priest, Caldwell was born in Painesville, Ohio. After a tour of duty in the U.S. Air Force, he graduated from the University of South Florida and General Theological Seminary.
Caldwell served two parishes in Florida before moving to Fort Yukon, Alaska, a tiny village north of the Arctic Circle, to be rector of St. Stephen’s Church. He and his family lived in a log cabin and chopped their own firewood, and he cared for several remote native Alaskan mission stations reachable only by airplane. He was rector of St. George’s Church in Bismarck, North Dakota, for six years before being elected as Wyoming’s eighth bishop on June 7, 1997, at a convention held at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Laramie.
Finding that fewer congregations in his deeply rural diocese were able to afford to call seminary trained, full-time clergy, Caldwell became a champion of total ministry, an approach in which ministry tasks are shared by a team of locally trained, non-stipendiary leaders, ordained and lay.
About a year after his consecration, Caldwell officiated at the funeral of Matthew Shepard, an acolyte of St. Mark’s Church in Casper and student at the University of Wyoming, who was brutally murdered. Shepard would become an iconic figure in the LGBT community, and an expansion of hate-crimes legislation named for him, which included provisions about gender and sexual orientation, was signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2009.
Caldwell later said he was deeply moved by his experience at Shepard’s funeral, and he was present when Obama signed the bill into law, saying afterward, “I think God was smiling and moving with every stroke of the pen … I think passage of this legislation gives the country the opportunity to press the pause button, to say enough is enough. No more violence.”
After his retirement, Caldwell moved to Minnesota, and was interim dean of St. Mark’s Cathedral. He later served as an assisting bishop in the Diocese of New York and for two years as Bishop Provisional of the Diocese of Lexington during the suspension and later resignation of its bishop, the Rt. Rev. Douglass Hahn.
Caldwell was preceded in death by his wife, the Rev. Brenda Caldwell, and he is survived by two daughters and a granddaughter.
The Rev. Mark Michael is editor-in-chief of The Living Church. An Episcopal priest, he has reported widely on global Anglicanism, and also writes about church history, liturgy, and pastoral ministry.
