Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe led his colleagues in the House of Bishops through a day-long discussion of plans December 4 for realigning the Episcopal Church Center’s work. The meeting attracted 140 bishops, nearly every one in active ministry; 85 heard him in person at the DoubleTree Hilton Minneapolis Airport, and another 55 participated virtually.
At a post-meeting press conference, Rowe said that Title IV, the church’s disciplinary system for clergy, dominated discussion, along with conversations about refocusing General Convention and the College for Bishops, an educational program for newly elected bishops.
“We’re asking, What kind of support and resources do you need to carry these [administrative tasks] out? Because I think bishops and dioceses have better things to do and other places to focus their attention than on those kinds of structures. And those are easy ways for us to build capacity at a churchwide level and to work together,” he said.
“Administrative burden strains our capacity at the congregational and diocesan level. It actually inhibits our ability to focus on that core work of sharing the good news of Jesus Christ,” said the Rt. Rev. Craig Loya of Minnesota, the host bishop.
“As a diocesan bishop, I’m really grateful to our Presiding Bishop for this conversation, really talking about how can we work together to minimize that burden on dioceses and congregations so that we can more effectively do our core work.”
The Rt. Rev. Jennifer Baskerville-Burrows of Indianapolis, vice chair of the House of Bishops concurred: “The heart of the matter is we want to have the Episcopal Church — both in the aggregate and in each diocese — be given every bit of steam it can have to make an effective witness for Jesus Christ. We talked about it being a life-and-death matter, because we believe in the dying and rising of Jesus as the core of our faith.”
The day’s conversations were guided by the Compass division of Insight Global, an Atlanta-based consulting firm, which has been working closely with Rowe and his senior team since August to analyze the church’s culture, with the aim of developing a plan for strategic realignment. This gathering was the final step in an information-gathering phase.
Church leaders recognized the need for such a realignment well before Rowe’s election, and Executive Council agreed in 2023 to tap a church-owned trust fund to pay for the consulting work.
Compass invited all bishops in active ministry to complete a survey earlier this fall, using a Likert scale to assess their need for support from the church center in several areas of ministry, as well as the quality and their “clear perception” of the support now being offered. Rowe said that he couldn’t remember a similar survey being conducted in his 18 years of episcopal ministry.
The consulting firm reported to Executive Council last month that bishops said their needs were greatest in the areas of Title IV, evangelism, and crisis communications. They rated their “clear perception of support” in all areas very low, and had a slightly higher overall rating for the quality of the support.
Loya said that the needs for greater administrative support for Title IV was discussed in his table group. Neighboring dioceses in several parts of the church have already developed “Title IV collaboratives” to operate a common disciplinary infrastructure. “Part of the wondering at my table was, What does it look like to scale that up?”
Rowe also said the bishops discussed a common desire to reorient General Convention away from legislative process, considering questions like, How do we spend more time in Bible study, and in deep conversation with each other about the issues that matter to us, as well as how do we bring a greater balance to it?”
“We talked a lot about How do we know who to call when we need help on XYZ? How do we have more natural ways of communicating with each other?” Baskerville-Burrows said.
“There’s a lot of wisdom around the church, but we don’t know how to get to it, and so making clearer the avenues of getting access to the people who have the expertise came up over and over again,” she said.
Efforts to restructure the church center staff to provide “greater capacity” for relieving diocesan burdens will also need to reckon with a mandate from Executive Council and General Convention that $3.5 million in staff costs (about 4% of the total staff allocation) be cut for the 2025-27 triennium.
Rowe said staff restructuring plans were well underway, and that he expected the first round of staff realignment to be in place by the end of the first quarter of 2025.
“I was struck by the amount of alignment and consensus among the bishops about what is the core work in front of us, in this moment, across all our diverse dioceses and diverse contexts. There’s an extraordinary amount of alignment about what are our challenges and what is the call that God has for us in this moment,” Loya said.
He added that the “level of excitement of enthusiasm about Bishop Rowe’s still new ministry” was also striking.
“Many of us were excited about the fact that he has quickly gotten to work doing the very things we elected him to do. And there was a lot of gratitude and energy about the really collaborative way in which the Presiding Bishop is going about discerning the vision and the work, not just with the House of Bishops, but with the whole church.”
The Rev. Mark Michael is editor-in-chief of The Living Church. An Episcopal priest, he has reported widely on global Anglicanism, and also writes about church history, liturgy, and pastoral ministry.