ACNA’s New Archbishop: Passionate for Evangelism

New Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) Archbishop Steve Wood remembers texting Bible verses in March 2020 with the Rev. Geoff Chapman of St. Stephen’s Church, Sewickley, Pennsylvania, as he was about to be placed on a ventilator. Among the earliest U.S. cases of COVID-19, Wood would be sedated for 10 days and hospitalized far longer with an arduous recovery.

It wasn’t the first serious challenge that the rector of St. Andrew’s Church in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, had experienced: less than two years before, most of the 48,000-square-foot church building had caught fire and burned, displacing one of the largest congregations in the ACNA.

Wood still experiences tinnitus in his left ear from his COVID infection, but he recovered and St. Andrew’s was rebuilt after a season spent meeting in a school cafeteria and lawn. That season prompted the congregation’s theme of “Beauty from the Ashes”: that God is working to redeem brokenness.

“The College of Bishops I know are the people who dropped everything to spend an hour in prayer” as he was in the hospital, Wood told a June 27 press conference at St. Vincent’s College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, during the Anglican Church in North America’s Provincial Assembly.

Elected June 22 at a conclave of ACNA bishops, Wood assumes leadership of a small but growing denomination (the ACNA reported 12 percent growth in attendance in 2023).

“I did not come here with any expectation that this would be a possibility and was as surprised as anyone as the vote unfolded,” Wood said. The new archbishop, raised in a charismatic and evangelical church, was not among the names publicly rumored ahead of the conclave as a potential successor to Archbishop Foley Beach, who is stepping down after 10 years of leadership.

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