The Very Rev. Rob Price, son of a United Methodist minister who fully embraced his Christian faith while studying history at Yale, was elected bishop coadjutor of the Diocese of Dallas during a special convention on May 3.
If Price, dean of St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Dallas, receives consents, he will serve as the eighth bishop of the diocese which ministers to the North Texas area.
“I resist the language of winning. I don’t think that’s the right term,” Price told TLC when asked about the reasons for his election. During the convention held in person at St. Michael and All Angels Church, he received 82 clergy votes out of 134 present, and 77 lay votes with 151 present during the second round of balloting.
Price is the first person to be elected a bishop from within the diocese in more than a century. The Rt. Rev. Harry Tunis Moore was elected bishop coadjutor from within the diocese in 1917, and served as bishop from 1924 to 1946.
Price will be the spiritual and administrative head of a centuries-old institution facing a mix of opportunities and challenges. Founded in the late 19th century, the Diocese of Dallas has more than 60 parishes and ministries. Its geographical borders reach north to Oklahoma, east to Arkansas, south to Corsicana, and west to Tarrant County. The diocese’s 2025 proposed annual budget is slightly over $4 million.
In his essay, available on the election hub webpage, Price cites what he calls “obstacles to flourishing,” foremost among them a “lack of trust,” which he placed in quotation marks.
“I think this is a systemic symptom of weak relational connections with one another and the center of diocesan life,” wrote Price, who was canon for congregations of the diocese during the pandemic. “There is a sense of being isolated, of one’s hard Gospel work not being known and valued, of being an outlier/outsider.”
He added, “This pervasive experience is the key leadership challenge in the diocese.”
Effectively addressing this issue, he wrote, “will require a bishop who is trusted, thoughtful, wary of quick-fix strategies, and able to be in meaningful connection with a wide variety of clergy and lay leaders over the long term.”
In the first round of balloting, with all three coadjutor candidates in the running, he received a majority of the clergy votes.
Becoming a bishop coadjutor-elect marks a new chapter for the ministry of the former college athlete who dabbled in atheism and Marxism as a teenager but experienced a spiritual encounter in his 20s that set him on a path to the priesthood. In his words, “I met the risen Jesus as a young graduate student.”
Matthew 22
Price met his wife of 28 years, Kate, at Stanford University, where he pursued bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history. After graduation, he taught history at a private school in Missouri while coaching the rowing team—the first rung in a career ladder he envisioned would take him to academia as a professor of American history.
“I did the Dead Poets Society thing,” he said. The 1989 film is a coming-of-age drama starring Robin Williams as a teacher who defied conventions at a preparatory school known for its orthodoxies. In 1996, Price was accepted into a graduate program in history, and he specialized in early American and colonial American history.
During student orientation, he noticed fellow students studying Middle Eastern history knew the Quran. “And I thought, If I’m going to be studying the Puritans and the Great Awakening, I should probably have more than my eighth-grade Methodist Sunday School understanding of the Bible,” Price said.
He then began what he didn’t know at the time was a very evangelical reading program, which included reading a chapter of the Old Testament and the New Testament each day. By February 1997, during the first year of his doctoral program, he had read the New Testament at least twice. And then this happened.
“It was a very cold afternoon, and the chapter that was up for that day was Matthew 22,” Price said. In that part of the Gospel, sandwiched between Jesus’ mandate on taxes and his proclamation of the Greatest Commandment, is a confrontation with the Sadducees, who did not believe in the resurrection. “You know neither the scriptures nor the power of God, for God is God not of the dead, but of the living,” Price said, echoing Matthew 22:31–32.
“In that moment, I believed it,” he said. “And I also knew in that moment that the risen Jesus was in the room with me.” Price said that the encounter transformed the course of his life: he believed the Bible and what it says, and for the first time as an adult, he began the practice of prayer. “I was really one of those people who came to church as an adult and belonged before they believed,” he said.
In Missouri, where he worked as a teacher, he began attending Christ Church Cathedral in St. Louis because of the music and community. Price developed a good relationship with the dean, the Very Rev. J.C. Michael Allen.
Allen was once described by the city’s NPR affiliate as a “tireless crusader for justice, particularly in the lives of the poorest and most marginalized among us.” Price considers Allen, who died in 2013, a mentor. Allen told him, “The church is where the action is,” and to get himself there.
After his transformative experience, Price would soon tell Allen of his desire to become a priest in the Episcopal Church (“Your confirmation class has been waiting for you to make this call,” Allen responded), enroll in Yale Divinity School, and volunteer while still a student in the Diocese of Bor in the southern part of Sudan (now South Sudan).
In South Sudan, he felt the kinship of true communion. He saw a church that could form disciples and belong to one another, apart from cultural allegiances. He said it was there that he gained a deeper appreciation for the diversity of people represented in the Anglican Communion. The experience continues to inform his ministry approach today as he assigns significance to partnerships around the Anglican Communion.
“Relationships in the Communion have been, for me, where our faith and our gifts can be exchanged with one another,” he said.
Price, who shows a concern for justice, will soon lead a founding diocese of Communion Partners. Two decades ago, the Diocese of Dallas was one of nine dioceses that protested the election of Gene Robinson as the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church. The majority of the Diocese of Fort Worth, created out of the Diocese of Dallas in the early 1980s, seceded from the Episcopal Church in 2008 because of the issue.
“My prayer for our diocese is that we will be faithful witnesses to Jesus’ suffering love in a very diverse and divided context,” he said, “and that in our trust in Jesus and our trust in one another, we would model a yet more excellent way to the world around us.”
In public speaking, the part of Matthew 22 that led Price to believe in God and his word is called a debate. And with courage, eloquence, and the anointing upon him, it was a debate that Jesus handily won.
The Rev. Dr. Matthew S.C. Olver, publisher of The Living Church and executive director of the Living Church Foundation, was assistant rector at Church of the Incarnation in Dallas in 2006-13 and remains canonically resident in the Diocese of Dallas.
Caleb Maglaya Galaraga is The Living Church’s Episcopal Church reporter. His work has also appeared in Christianity Today, Broadview Magazine, and Presbyterian Outlook, among other publications.
