The Rt. Rev. Stewart Ruch, bishop of the Anglican Church in North America’s Diocese of the Upper Midwest, has been acquitted on all ecclesiastical charges by the denomination’s Court for the Trial of a Bishop. The acquittal comes five months since his trial began, three years since formal complaints were filed, and six years since a child first reported sexual abuse by a lay minister in Bishop Ruch’s diocese.
“We are very grateful for the clarity of the outcome provided by the Trial Court and are eager to continue our work with Bishop Stewart as we plant a revival of Word and Sacrament,” the Upper Midwest’s standing committee wrote in a December 17 letter. “We are committed to doing all we can to ensure protection and care for those in our fold and to rebuild trust where it has been broken.”
After two formal complaints filed by three bishops and 13 clergy and laity, which accused him of mishandling reports of abusive ministers and repeatedly promoting at least six individuals with abusive histories, Ruch had been charged with four canonical offenses: habitual neglect of episcopal duties, conduct giving just cause for scandal or offense, violation of ordination vows, and disobedience to or willful contravention of the church’s canons.
On December 16 the seven-member court found Ruch not guilty of each charge, writing in its unanimous 71-page decision that the prosecution, representing the denomination, did not meet its burden of proving any canonical violation by the bishop. “The failure of proof in this case is complete,” the court wrote.
The trial was procedurally tumultuous. After alleging judicial misconduct by the court’s Presiding Officer, the case’s longtime prosecutor Alan Runyan abruptly resigned mid-proceedings in July. He was joined a week later by his assistant prosecutor, Rachel Thebeau, who accused the archbishop, the province’s COO, and the province’s chancellor of facilitating the Presiding Officer’s alleged misconduct. The province cycled through four prosecutors in the life of the case, while the court’s composition remained fixed.
The Ruch matter represents the court’s second time hearing a case against a bishop since the ACNA’s 2009 founding, its first time conducting a trial with live testimony, and its first acquittal.
‘Minimal evidentiary value’
Key to the court’s acquittal was its decision to admit into evidence the reports of three independent investigations into Bishop Ruch and the Diocese of the Upper Midwest, but only to assign weight to one of them.
Two years after learning of a 9-year-old congregant’s report of abuse by lay catechist Mark Rivera, who is now serving a 21-year prison sentence for felony child sexual abuse and sexual assault against an adult woman, Ruch agreed to a third-party inquiry into diocesan handling of the matter. The diocese commissioned consulting firm Grand River Solutions to produce a report, but later asked that the province take up investigative oversight.
Under Archbishop Foley Beach, the province formed a response team that selected law firm Husch Blackwell to conduct an investigation. During that inquiry, the diocese further asked that the province investigate “additional allegations regarding abuse of power,” a task for which the province hired Telios Law.
All three inquiries produced reports that the court admitted into the record, but the court considered only the Telios report “reliable and probative” because of expert witness and report author Theresa Sidebotham’s availability for questioning. “Because the Province failed to establish any evidentiary foundation for the Grand River Solutions and Husch Blackwell reports, the Court assigns minimal evidentiary value to both,” the court wrote.
In setting aside the two reports, the court sometimes made different findings of fact to what the reports described. For instance, the court said that “no testimony indicated that anyone discouraged reporting” Rivera’s abuse to Illinois’ child protection services. The Husch Blackwell report said that Ruch was contemporaneously aware of diocesan chancellor Charles Philbrick’s advice to the Rev. Rand York—the vicar of the child victim’s congregation Rivera served—that reporting was not necessary, according to its interviews with all three men.
The court found that the Telios report, which has not been released, exonerated Ruch. “Sidebotham concluded that there was no leadership culpability on the part of Bishop Ruch, no substantiated allegations of misconduct or canonical violations, and no evidence that diocesan structures failed because of any action or omission by him. The diocese’s trajectory—from parish-based safeguarding toward diocesan standardization—reflected normal institutional growth, not episcopal negligence,” the court wrote.
The court also assigned minimal weight to the testimony of two prosecution witnesses, saying they “had not participated in diocesan leadership” and “possessed no firsthand knowledge” of Bishop Ruch’s conduct.
Speaking with The Living Church, both witnesses disputed this characterization. The first witness served for almost two years on the diocese’s standing committee and two of its subcommittees, and the second witness led in creating a deanery child protection policy, then served on a diocesan task force to create its first protective standards in the aftermath of the Rivera disclosure.
“The [court decision] states again and again that too much of the testimony on the prosecution side was secondhand, based on emotion or opinion rather than on firsthand experience,” the first witness told TLC. “First of all, that’s false, and second of all, it’s really offensive to see misrepresentations of one’s service in the official record.”
“The court’s description of the development of safeguarding in the [Upper Midwest] does not comport with my experience as a pastor to children and families in the diocese for nearly two decades,” the second witness added.
Ruch’s defense witnesses included five bishops, who testified that Ruch acted “in accordance with safeguarding expectations” and did not show “patterns of neglect or inattentiveness.”
Priests, deacons, and laypeople from the diocese also testified. They addressed the charge that Ruch habitually promoted abusive ministers—some of whose backgrounds included solicitation of a prostitute and second-degree attempted murder, and some of whom reoffended. They said this was not negligence but “difficult and imperfect work of assisting fallen men and women who sought vocational calling” that Ruch undertook with sincerity.
‘Irreparably tainted’?
The court’s decision to bring in new evidence also influenced its verdict. In an April order, the court had initially ruled that the topic of the province’s investigations was not to be raised at trial. Instead, it would consider only the alleged facts in formal complaints against Bishop Ruch.
But in his July 19 resignation letter, Runyan alleged that a court member improperly questioned a witness for over an hour using evidence excluded by that April order, calling the procedures “irreparably tainted” as a result. He called for the transcript of the trial—which was virtual and closed to the public—to be released to the whole church, which the court did not do.
The court attributed its new consideration of the investigations to a recently “eroded” assumption that the investigations had been overseen by a Board of Inquiry, the canonical body that later considered charges based on the investigations’ findings and indicted Ruch for trial, rather than by the ad-hoc team the province had assembled in 2021.
Runyan had served on that team, and when Ruch moved in May 2024 to disqualify Runyan as prosecutor based on that service, the court found no issue with the team’s investigatory oversight at that time and denied the motion.
By the time of the verdict, the court believed it was the province’s practices that were irreparably tainted. Almost half of its lengthy decision harshly criticized the ACNA’s investigations, which it described as “a long and complex chain of institutional miscommunication, investigative mismanagement, internal provincial tension, procedural irregularities, sustained public pressure, and the absence of consistent canonical process,” redounding to a negative assessment of the prosecution’s evidence.
The decision also heavily chastised Runyan, calling his resignation and accusation of judicial misconduct “intolerable.” It further deplored the “narrative capture” and “distorting influence” effected by online public discussion and the work of grassroots advocacy groups like ACNAtoo, which was formed in 2021 to spotlight abuse in the diocese.
“It is now devastatingly clear that if an abuse victim wants to report abuse in the ACNA … they must now bear the additional burden of ensuring they are not perceived as being ‘captured’ by narratives the ACNA deems illegitimate,” ACNAtoo responded in a statement. “Instead of humbly learning from people or sources they might prefer to avoid, the ACNA has relegated survivors’ own stories to the category of propaganda.”
The court commended Ruch’s “shepherd’s heart” and found that he responded to harsh criticism with “humility, a posture of learning, and a demonstrated willingness to listen, repent where harm was caused, and adjust his conduct accordingly”—a tonal contrast that has gathered some reaction.
“Even his costly mistakes [the court] made into opportunities to praise a maturing leader,” the second prosecution witness told TLC. “It’s unfortunate for people hoping for some solace who really suffered during that time.”
A denominational FAQ states that in response to earlier concerns about the investigations in the Ruch case and to Runyan and Thebeau’s recent judicial allegations, its College of Bishops and its Executive Committee resolved to commission “an independent review” of the trial’s procedural events. They expect the review to be conducted in early 2026.
Landmark implications
The landmark case has judicially concluded without possibility of appeal, and apart from its merits may set a controversial precedent for the denomination’s coming trials of its former chaplaincy bishop, the Rt. Rev. Derek Jones, and of its archbishop, the Most Rev. Steve Wood. The same court will sit to hear both cases.
While the court did not rely on this for its verdict, it advanced a theory in its decision that all sponsors of formal complaints against bishops must have “firsthand knowledge” of each allegation. Since such formal complaints may only be canonically filed by three bishops or by ten clergy and laypeople, this interpretation could require as many as ten eyewitnesses for a given act, presenting a high bar for sexual misconduct allegations in particular.
“A good faith reading of the Canons clearly indicates [that] accusers must only be required to declare the credibility of such charges … with reasonable certainty of time, place and circumstance,” the complainants in the Wood matter, who allege that the archbishop made continual sexual advances toward a female staff member, wrote in a revised cover letter to their complaint in November.
Some have interpreted the court’s excoriation of the province’s procedures during the Ruch trial as an indictment of the ACNA’s disciplinary structures. The American Anglican Council, whose leaders are at the helm of the denomination’s efforts for Title IV disciplinary reform, said that “the proceedings revealed that Title IV was asked to bear weight it was not designed to carry in its current form.”
Others have taken the verdict as a sign that church discipline is functioning properly. According to Chad Graham, who prosecuted the case that deposed former bishop Todd Atkinson, the decision represents the “golden thread” of “innocence until proven guilty.”
“The Church should celebrate and take confidence: the system worked, and worked well, discerning truth amid pain and complexity. Courts are not infallible—human judges err—but here, men and women of good faith reviewed voluminous evidence and reached a reasoned conclusion to exonerate Bishop Ruch,” Graham wrote in a blog post.
“This decision has been met with a wide range of reactions,” the Rt. Rev. Julian Dobbs, who is acting as archbishop during Wood’s inhibition, wrote to the province on December 18. “As members of one body in Christ Jesus, it is both our duty and privilege to bear with one another in love and to uphold one another in prayer as we all process and respond to the decision from the Court.”
The court’s decision was updated on December 22, removing from the original document the significant sentence “None of the three bishops who had signed the bishops’ Presentment appeared to testify, despite requests that they do so under oath.” TLC has reached out to the ACNA’s communications team for clarity about the revision.
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.
