The Rev. Robert Fruehwirth joined us as interim associate rector (half-time) in September of 2025 after serving as rector of St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church in Hillsborough. Joining us half-time at St. Paul’s provides Fr. Robert an opportunity to offer his gifts directly in a parish setting, while also building a ministry to serve our whole diocese and region. In addition to his time here, he is also building a parachurch ministry that will offer, as he describes it, “individual spiritual direction, spiritual director training, and intensive formational programming alongside parishes with the aim of supporting clergy vocations and lay leadership.”
Robert’s most prominent gifts in ministry are preaching/liturgical leadership, spiritual formation, and pastoral care. Those are the areas in which he’ll be supporting St. Paul’s most regularly. Fr. Robert is also deeply committed to the hard, deep work of anti-racism. He has done phenomenal work with St. Matthews as they have reckoned publicly and spiritually with the fact that their church building was built by enslaved people whose slave “masters” were among the founding members of their parish. St. Matthew’s is now actively engaged in making reparations in various ways, including supporting the work of the Stagsville Descendants Council (Durham), many of whom are descendants of the enslaved people who built St. Matthew’s church.
Here’s a note from Fr. Robert:
I am delighted to be joining the clergy and lay leadership at St. Paul’s and delighted to be working under your interim rector, the Rev. Sarah Phelps. Most recently, I served as the rector at St. Matthew’s in Hillsborough, as associate rector at St. Michael’s in Raleigh, and before that at St. Peter Mancroft, a parish in Norwich, England, where I also served as the priest director of a pilgrimage site there — the Shrine of Blessed Julian of Norwich. My passion in ministry is adult spiritual formation, something I explored through twenty years in an Episcopal monastic community and through training and practice in therapeutic counseling. Now married, I live in Chapel HIll with my two children (Corinne, 12 and Sebastian, 10) and my wife, Jane, who works as a research professor in Economics at the University of North Carolina. I love preaching, prayer, conversation, and fellowship that deepens. A published author, I write daily and am currently working on my third book, Wholly Communion: the whole of ourselves given to the whole of God. I enjoy running, poetry, tinkering around the house, and riding bikes with my kids.