Fourteen employees at Episcopal Church Center were terminated February 20 as part of a realignment plan for the church that will reduce overall staff numbers from 143 to 110 and save the church approximately $2.13 million per year in personnel costs.
In a letter to the church about the changes, Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe called the action “the first major milestone” in steps that “will position us to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ more effectively in the world that we see emerging.”
This, he said, fulfilled a promise he made when elected as Presiding Bishop last summer: “It’s time to reorient our churchwide resources – budgets and staff – to support dioceses and congregations on the ground where ministry happens. We must reform our structure and governance so that our essential polity, in which laypeople, clergy and bishops – all of us together – share authority, does not collapse under its own weight.”
“I know that our church is undertaking realignment in the midst of a challenging time in the United States,” Rowe told TLC through a spokesperson. “The decision to make these staff cuts was a very difficult one, and the human cost of it weighs heavily on me. We have made provision for those who are departing, including severance packages based on years of service, individualized outplacement assistance, and access to health coverage and other benefits.
“I understand that this is a very painful time for these former employees and those who love them and served with them. We have worked hard to ensure that they will have the resources they need to find employment that is worthy of their gifts and skills, and we will continue to support them and pray for them as they transition to new ministry opportunities.”
In addition to the terminations, 16 employees near retirement age accepted early retirement incentives, and another 13 positions will remain unfilled. In addition, 17 employees will be invited to participate in a program that will help them transition to new roles or responsibilities.
Episcopal News Service reports that the “development, formation, pastoral development, transition ministry and church planting departments are being phased out,” and that the functions they carry out will be filled in different ways within the new structure.
When all the transitions now underway are complete, the church will have a workforce of 95 full-time equivalents. Approximately 15 additional hires are expected in coming months, partly to enable new initiatives, resulting in a final staff count of 100 full-time equivalents.
While this action has been shaped by Presiding Bishop Rowe’s priorities, Executive Council commissioned an adaptive realignment of the Episcopal Church Center’s staff in 2023. The triennial budget for 2025-27 approved by last summer’s General Convention required a $3.6 million reduction in staff costs in the three-year period.
The staffing plan now being implemented is expected to exceed that goal, saving about $2.13 million in both 2026 and 2027. Cost savings in 2025 will be lower as severance and retirement incentives are paid out. Estimates include projected costs for positions that are known to be needed in coming months.
A diversity analysis prepared by the Compass division of Insight Global, which has been guiding the realignment plan since last September, showed relative stability in age, gender, and racial diversity between the head counts at the beginning of the first quarter of 2025 and after this week’s transitions.
The most significant change was in employees at the beginning of their careers. The percentage of staff ages 24 to 36 decreased from 36 percent to 23 percent, while staff ages 37 to 49 increased from 26 percent to 36 percent.
A church spokesperson said that the age shift was mostly unrelated to the realignment, and was driven instead by Episcopal Migration Ministries’ layoff of 22 staff members, who were disproportionately young, after the Trump administration’s pause on refugee resettlement.
The percentage of women and men on the staff shifted by 5 percent, with women now comprising 64 percent of the staff instead of 69 percent. The percentage of Hispanic and Latino staff increased from 13 percent to 14 percent and the percentage of Asian staff from 4 percent to 5 percent, while the percentage of white staff decreased from 62 percent to 60 percent.
Over the last several months, church center staff completed several different surveys, and participated in focus groups with consultants from Compass. Currently serving bishops were surveyed about their needs and the effectiveness of the services provided by the church center, and Executive Council has devoted substantial time at its meetings in November and February to provide feedback.
“Bishop Rowe has been very clear on his refocusing to the dioceses,” said Heidi Kim, a member of Executive Council.
As a former staff officer for racial reconciliation, Kim said she knew “Thursday was a really hard day.”
Kim’s five-year tenure at Episcopal Church Center included the transition from Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori’s leadership to Bishop Michael Curry’s.
Everyone knew then, she said, that there could be a job change. “The Presiding Bishop has the ability to completely remake the staff,” she said.
“This one hurt because 14 people lost their jobs,” Kim said. “Many things are changing. The Presiding Bishop is carrying out what Executive Council said, in 2023, needed to happen.” A desire to make changes was also reflected in many discussions at General Convention in 2024. “He’s carrying this out, too,” said Kim, now interim canon for discipleship in the Diocese of Virginia.
During the February 18 Executive Council meeting, Rowe outlined some areas where bishops have identified needs that the church center is best equipped to fill. These include enhanced support for crisis communications, the church’s disciplinary structure for clergy (Title IV), and taking the lead on long-desired reforms to make bishop searches faster and to “reinvent” General Convention. Existing staff may be retrained to support these new roles, and others will probably require new hires.
Sessions presented by Compass at Executive Council meetings in November and February have also indicated major problems in the church center’s workplace culture that the realignment hopes to address.
Korryn Williamson of Compass told council members on February 18 that many staff were unable to identify priorities for their work, and that there were problems with “low standards.” She also noted that surveys had “uncovered a lot of trauma from past institutional failures, and a lack of trust or willingness to collaborate.”
In November, Williamson and Compass staffer Bethany Cabreja identified three sets of related strengths and weaknesses in the staff culture that been uncovered in their analysis.
Staff, they said, have a strong passion for their work, rooted in a sense of spiritual call, but this passion is linked with a suspicion of change and a tendency of strong individual opinions to outweigh group dialogue. One staff member described a culture dominated by “fear of change and the enormity of the task — not taking ownership of what needs to be done to enact change.”
The staff reported a group culture that was generally “respectful, welcoming, and supportive,” but that tended to avoid authentic communication and offer constructive feedback. One staff member said on a survey, “There seems to be a lack of enforcement of the policies and procedures by our leaders.”
A third set of strengths and weaknesses was linked with the staff’s organizational structure, which tends to encourage mentoring and sharing knowledge within departments, while discouraging collaboration and fostering competition between them.
Williamson told council members in February that employees were excited about Rowe’s leadership, and ready to adapt to the church’s needs.
“There was a really strong desire for change, so people were excited, like ‘We’ve never heard priorities before, but we really want priorities. We’re excited to move in the same direction, and we want to dig in deeper,’” she said.
Next stages in the realignment will include a “staff in-house” gathering April 23-24 to provide more detailed orientation to the new staff structure. Department leaders, Williamson said, have already begun identifying priorities, and a more robust structure for performance evaluation and team-building will be implemented.
Rowe’s letter also announced new roles for several senior staff, who will be deeply involved in implementing the new system.
Rebecca Blachly, who has led the Episcopal Church’s Office of Government Relations for almost a decade, will join the senior team.
She will oversee the Office of Government Relations and the Episcopal Church’s presence at the United Nations. She also will assume responsibility for Episcopal Migration Ministries, global partnerships, and ecumenical and interreligious relations.
The Rev. Canon Chuck Robertson will serve as canon and senior adviser to the presiding bishop.
A member of the church center staff since 2007, Robertson will lead work with the Episcopal Church’s affiliated theological seminaries, and support the Presiding Bishop’s ministry across the Anglican Communion. He will also coordinate the work of staff and governing bodies to assist the Diocese of Haiti and its ministries and design new models for development and fundraising to support diocesan and church center ministries.
Rowe’s letter said that significant changes are expected in the way the church has structured its work in evangelism and Christian formation, with a move away from producing new resources at the churchwide level to “pilot[ing] new ways to invest in strong formation and evangelism resources developed by dioceses.” An active partnership with Forward Movement in this work is planned.
A new leadership development department, still being formed, will take on the work previously carried out by the Offices of Transition Ministry and Pastoral Development, which oversee calling clergy and bishops.
On the radar for the next few months is reorganizing church planting and redevelopment.
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly characterized Heidi Kim’s position on staff realignment. We apologize for the mistake.
The Rev. Meredyth Albright is a longtime journalist and rector of St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church in Rhinelander, Wisconsin.
