John Crawford Bauerschmidt (born 1959) is an American prelate of the Episcopal Church who is the eleventh Bishop of Tennessee.
[1] He was consecrated as bishop of Tennessee on January 27, 2007, after an unusually lengthy election process, requiring several sessions to complete.
He came to the Tennessee diocese during a particularly tumultuous period in its history, with strong polarization between conservative and liberal factions instigated partly by his predecessor, a strong advocate for conservative Anglicanism who started several missions (mainly in the Nashville metropolitan area) with a sharply Low Church or Evangelical bent, most of which were opposed to then-current theological and ethical trends in the larger Episcopal Church.
Bauerschmidt, considered a moderate by those standards, helped reduce significantly some of the tensions besetting the diocese, aided in part by the withdrawal of the more staunchly conservative individuals (and some churches) to either the Continuing Anglican or Anglican realignment movements in the late 2000s and early 2010s.
Bauerschmidt chairs the board of The Living Church[3] and serves as a trustee of The Anglican Digest.