At Provincial Assembly this past June, the Anglican Church in North America elected and approved its third Archbishop, the Most Rev. Stephen D. Wood.
Archbishop Wood had served as the first Bishop of the Diocese of the Carolinas since 2013 while also continuing as Rector of St. Andrew’s Anglican Church in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina.
Under his leadership as Rector, St. Andrew’s grew to a membership of over 3200 and planted two new churches. St. Andrew’s also experienced a devastating fire in 2018.
He shared his testimony as well as his experience of having a severe case of COVID in a conversation during Provincial Assembly that included his wife, Jacqueline. (A video of the full interview is available here.)
Archbishop Wood recalls attending a Faith Alive event as a teenager and hearing the testimonies of lay people.
“What really struck me were people describing a quality of a relationship with Jesus Christ that I did not know,” he explains. While he grew up in a charismatic, evangelical church, “I still had to come to that point of a profession of faith.”
In what later revealed itself to be “a profound prayer of faith,” Wood found himself saying to the Lord, “God, if this is real and if what they’re talking about is real, I want that.”
Archbishop Wood also recounts his experience of contracting COVID in March 2020.
He had not been feeling well for a week when he went to the hospital on a Monday. He often had allergy-induced bronchitis; after a clear chest x-ray and the usual breathing treatment and steroid shot, he went home.
His fever had not broken by that Thursday, so he returned to the hospital. His chest x-ray that day showed that his lungs were, as he describes it, “obliterated.” After attempting various breathing treatments, his doctors told him he needed to go on a ventilator.
“The doctors said we’ve reached the end of the line with what we can do. And they said you need to know if you go on a ventilator, there’s less than a 50 percent chance you’re going to come off.” They suggested he make whatever phone calls he needed to make.
Ten days later he woke up.
After he transferred out of ICU during a second hospital stay, four nurses visited his room. “They said nobody knows this, but when you were in with COVID for the first time, we would come in at night and lay hands on you and pray for you.”
Complete recovery took three years.
“I don’t regret our fire; I don’t regret COVID, because I saw the Lord do extraordinary things that I would have never seen Him do had those events not happened.”
Archbishop Wood grew up in Mentor, Ohio, and earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in History from Cleveland State University. He earned a Masters of Divinity from Virginia Theological Seminary. He and his wife have four sons and eight grandchildren.
Learn more about Archbishop Wood here.