Steve Ruttan, a 17-year veteran Canadian Armed Forces armored crewman and current DP1 instructor at the Armored School in Gagetown, New Brunswick, shares how his Christian faith shapes his military career, family life, and daily walk with Christ.

Faith Journey
Raised by a bold, Gospel-sharing mother and mentored by a faith-filled boss, Steve recommitted his life to Christ around age 21 after recognizing God’s protection during his challenging Katimavik youth volunteer year and after losing his best friend in a car accident.

Family & Church Life
Steve and his wife Megan are active at Oromocto Baptist Church (just five minutes from home), where he’s known for greeting newcomers and making coffee. They pray with their daughter nightly, and the church has connected them with other military families.

Faith in the Military
In his early years in Petawawa (2009–2015/16), Steve kept his faith mostly private amid the intense Afghanistan-era tempo. Now as an instructor in Gagetown, he openly shares how prayer and trust in God give him calm, positivity, and strength—especially during exhausting ruck marches, competitions, and high-pressure training with live weapons and heavy armored vehicles.

Real-Life Examples
Steve points to multiple “close calls” on the range and in training where God clearly protected him and his students (including a near-miss with a live grenade). He credits these moments—and his improved work-life balance since moving to Gagetown—to God’s faithfulness.

Daily Walk
Steve maintains his relationship with Christ through early-morning prayer walks (often to work), family prayer time, and regular church attendance. He encourages others facing “the wall” in training or life to turn to prayer and rely on God’s power rather than their own.

Overall, the episode presents Steve as a humble, steady example of quiet Christian witness in uniform—showing how faith brings peace, protection, purpose, and encouragement in the demanding world of military service and family life. Warm, practical, and encouraging.

In the second part of the interview, Canadian Armed Forces member Peter Richardson shares how he transitioned from the Kingdom of Darkness to the Kingdom of Light and sustains his faith as a soldier attending Oromocto Baptist Church. He keeps Bibles with him everywhere—including in a pistol case in his car—engages daily with Scripture, and prays the Psalms to stay close to Christ, viewing the Word as his spiritual weapon. Raised in a Christian home with believing parents and brother, he notes relational friction with non-believing family members who preferred his former self, responding by authentically living out his faith, praying for them daily, and trusting God as the Good Shepherd. Military life’s uncertainties have taught him reliance on divine provision—often at the last moment, like the parting of the Red Sea—while workplace challenges include pervasive profanity, culture shifts, and pressure to affirm unbiblical lifestyles such as LGBTQ ideologies; he counters these by respecting all people as image-bearers of God, refusing to compromise truth, and working “heartily as for the Lord” as both employee and leader who also tends to others spiritually. His desk Bible opens faith conversations, where he advises listening empathetically twice as much as speaking, and he maintains an adaptable early-morning devotional routine of prayer and Scripture reading in a distraction-free space (often with a physical Bible in airplane mode) to prioritize God before the day’s demands take over, remaining flexible even on deployments to avoid mechanical ritual.

Peter Richardson, a 19-year veteran career officer in the Canadian Armed Forces, shares his faith journey on the DP1 Podcast. Raised in a Christian home and having prayed the sinner's prayer as a young child after watching a Jesus film, he later drifted into skepticism and materialism during his teens and early adulthood, influenced by secular education, unanswered questions about science and faith, and a lack of satisfying answers from churches. Over time, especially amid the social divisions, institutional distrust, and moral upheavals of the early 2020s—including Canada's pandemic response and the trucker convoy—he lost faith in people, systems, and traditional anchors like family and country. Reaching a personal low point of isolation and despair, he began noticing what appeared to be a pervasive spiritual conflict in the world, marked by seemingly gratuitous evil and an inversion of biblical values in culture and media. Exposure to C.S. Lewis's *The Screwtape Letters* via YouTube proved pivotal, as its depiction of unseen malevolent forces aligned strikingly with his observations, ultimately dismantling his materialist worldview. Late one night, he knelt, confessed his sins, surrendered to Christ, and sought forgiveness as the prodigal son. He later reconnected with a longtime Christian friend who had prayed for his salvation daily for over a decade, confirming his return to faith amid subsequent trials.