Sam Stewart is one of four Wycliffe Advanced Students who recently received a 2024 Ontario Graduate Scholarship. This program provides merit-based scholarships to Ontario’s best graduate students in all disciplines of academic study.
Sam grew up in a Christian home in Stratford, Ontario. He discovered his passion for theological studies as he studied and taught the Bible to children and peers. “I began to ask deeper questions about what I was learning and that process pushed me,” he recalls. “My personal passion became an academic one.”
After completing an MDiv online at Carolina University, Piedmont Divinity School, and an MA at Wycliffe in 2024, Sam began his PhD in Theological Studies. Being onsite gave him a taste of community at Wycliffe. From Theology Pub Nights to ball hockey games and dinner events, Wycliffe’s intentional fostering of community impacted him as much as the quality of faculty scholarship, teaching, and care he has received.
He experienced that faculty care as his interest in academics deepened. “My supervisor Dr Stephen Chester is phenomenal,” he says. “He’s been instrumental in developing my academic and biblical scholarship.”
Living in Toronto, Sam couldn’t help but learn more about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its findings. Wanting to stay in academics and teach in the field of theological education after his studies, he soon realized that wherever God called him, he would want to pay attention and give voice to marginalized peoples, “listening with
ears wide open” to their stories.
He has shifted his PhD research focus to explore decolonization. Through his research, he wants to offer a way forward for future ministry workers to think about language and the unacknowledged dynamics of power in their respective contexts.
