THE STEVE WOOD TRIAL HAS BEGUN
ACNA Archbishop must answer allegations that include sexual immorality, bullying and plagiarism
By David W. Virtue, DD
September 9, 2026
CHARLESTON, SC — At long last Archbishop Steve Wood goes to trial for allegations that could derail his future hopes and aspirations and lead to a future of ignominy and shame. Exonerated, he will go back to leading a denomination struggling over the ordination of women and distrust by a growing number of laity disillusioned by his leadership. He faces a split among his fractious military chaplains, unresolved lawsuits and much more.
No archbishop of the Anglican Church in North America has ever stood in the dock of his own church. Wood is the first. The denomination that was born in 2009 out of a flight from the Episcopal Church — a flight undertaken in the name of holiness, orthodoxy, and the plain reading of Scripture — now finds itself asking whether it can hold its own primate to the standard it once demanded of Canterbury. That is the real question the six-day trial in Charleston will answer, and it is far larger than the fate of one man.
The court will not make it easy to watch. The proceedings, seated September 7 through 12 with extension dates reserved for September 21 through 26, are closed to the public. The Court for the Trial of a Bishop, presided over by the Rt. Rev. Ryan Reed, has given each side fifteen hours — no more — to lay out its case, examine and cross-examine witnesses, and argue before the bench.
The Charges
Wood answers three formal charges: violation of his ordination vows; conduct giving just cause for scandal or offense, including the abuse of ecclesiastical power; and sexual immorality. They are among the gravest a bishop can face, and they carry, on conviction, the prospect of deposition.
The Allegations
Behind the three charges lies a presentment that ranges wider still.
The case broke into public view in October 2025, when The Washington Post reported that Wood had been accused of sexual harassment during his long tenure as rector of St. Andrew’s Church in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina — the flagship parish he built over twenty-five years and the platform from which he rose to the archbishopric. Claire Buxton, a divorced mother of three who served as the parish’s children’s ministry director, alleges that Wood began behaving inappropriately toward her in the fall of 2021, showered her with attention and with money — more than three thousand dollars, she says, drawn from church funds — called her by a pet name, and, in April 2024, attempted to kiss her in his office.
A presentment — the canonical instrument by which charges are brought — was filed that same month by a group of Wood’s former colleagues, among them four presbyters and seven lay people. It carried not only Buxton’s account but allegations that Wood bullied his staff and plagiarized sermons. In November it was resubmitted to add the account of a second woman, who said Wood had pressured her into situations that made her uncomfortable and had invited her to drink with him, and to add the claim of the province’s former communications director that Wood had conspired with other senior leaders to tilt the church’s investigative machinery in a “bishop-friendly” direction.
Wood has denied the allegations, declining to comment on the most recent.
How the Church Got Here
The months since have been a slow procession through canons the ACNA had never before tested on a primate. On November 3 Wood announced a voluntary leave of absence — a device that, his critics were quick to note, would have allowed him to return to office whenever he judged the moment right. More than 140 clergy were unpersuaded and signed an open letter asking that he be inhibited outright until a verdict was rendered. On November 16 the Dean of the Province, Bishop Julian Dobbs, did exactly that, barring Wood from the exercise of ordained ministry. Dobbs has carried the archbishop’s duties ever since.
On December 12 a ten-member Board of Inquiry found probable cause to send Wood to trial. In June the Court for the Trial of a Bishop denied his motion to dismiss. The trial date wandered — from July to late October and finally forward to September — and in August the court closed the last door Wood had tried to open, denying his bid to pry loose the sealed files of the Board of Inquiry and ruling that it would decide the matter solely on the presentment, the archbishop’s responses, and the evidence heard in the room.
A House Already Shaking
Wood goes to trial in a province coming apart at several seams at once, and the trial cannot be understood apart from the wreckage around it.
His military chaplains are in revolt. In September 2025 Wood inhibited Bishop Derek Jones, who led the Special Jurisdiction of the Armed Forces and Chaplaincy and the roughly three hundred chaplains it endorsed, over complaints alleging abuse of ecclesiastical power. Within a day the jurisdiction declared itself out of the ACNA, and Jones — denouncing the move as a “hostile corporate takeover” — filed a million-dollar lawsuit against the province and, before Christmas, founded a rival body, the Anglican Reformed Catholic Church. Last month an ACNA court found Jones guilty on all four charges laid against him, promoting schism among them, and referred him to the College of Bishops for sentencing.
Nor is Jones the only bishop in the dock. On the very eve of Wood’s trial the province charged Bishop Edgar with misconduct — and Edgar’s diocese, which overlaps Wood’s own Diocese of the Carolinas, has been among the most active in pressing the case against the archbishop. Earlier, Bishop Stewart Ruch escaped a court that seemed more exercised by laypeople asking questions on social media than by the substance of what they were asking. Over all of it hangs the unresolved question of women’s ordination, the fault line that has divided ACNA dioceses since its founding and that no archbishop has yet been able to close.
What Is at Stake
Two futures now hang on the Charleston bench. If the court acquits, Wood returns — as he must, canonically — to a house that has spent a year learning to live without him: to fractious chaplains, unresolved suits, and a laity a good portion of which has already made up its mind. If the court convicts, he faces the prospect of deposition, an appeal, and the unhappy distinction of being the first archbishop his church has ever cast down.
The verdict will not come quickly. Under the canons the court may take as long as 101 days after the trial concludes to render its judgment; an acquittal ends the matter; a conviction opens the door to appeal.
But the deeper reckoning is not Wood’s alone. A church that left one communion because it would not discipline itself must now prove that it can. That is what is on trial in Charleston. Steve Wood is only the defendant.
David W. Virtue, DD, is founder and managing editor of VirtueOnline. His writings can be found at www.virtueonline.org, where you can subscribe to receive his free biweekly VIEWPOINTS. His Substack on the Middle East is at davidvirtue2.substack.com
I defer to the ecclesiastical court, which I liken to an investigative committee determining violations of employment. An archbisop in the ACNA seems to have more likeness of a presiding bishop than an archbishop as known traditionally in Europe, which seems to take away from a significance were he a traditional European archbishop under trial. Although WO may be a divisive issue, it would seem the support for the traditional biblical moral on homosexual conduct remains and might lead to a loose umbrella, association, of church bodies defending the traditional moral, encompassing, maybe, other denominations which have an interest in perpetuating its defence, i.e. something truly ecumenical. It might reach into denominations where respect for the moral has deteriorated, reaching…