The Episcopal Church’s retiring chief financial officer, Kurt Barnes, was honored for 21 years of service at the final day of Executive Council’s sessions on February 19, which also included updates on hiring for key staff positions and the forgiveness of a $2.68 million loan to the Diocese of South Carolina.
This followed a briefing the afternoon before by leaders of the church’s public policy and refugee ministries about how they are responding to actions by the Trump administration in the areas of focus identified by General Convention.
Julia Ayala Harris, president of the House of Deputies, presented Barnes with the President’s Service Award in recognition of his commitment to “the values of stewardship, integrity, wisdom, and faithfulness.”
“His strategic foresight and unwavering commitment have helped shaped the long-term sustainability of this church — whether overseeing investment strategies, managing the church’s financial health through times of uncertainty, or ensuring transparency and accountability. Kurt has been a steadfast guardian of the church’s financial well-being,” she said.
Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe told council members that the search for Barnes’s successor has been narrowed to four candidates since his retirement was announced in December, and that he will convene a special meeting of Executive Council in March to confirm the recommended candidate.
He said there had been “a large and diverse pool of applicants for the position,” and that the church has worked with a search firm that was “paying attention to diversity across multiple variables of difference.” Tension over a perceived lack of diversity in hiring troubled the selection of the church’s acting chief operating officer, Jane Cisluysis, in 2022.
Council member Katie Sherrod of Texas, chair of a committee working on the selection of a new Executive Officer of General Convention, discussed challenges the committee faces in preparing to search for a successor to the Rev. Michael Barlowe. He stepped down as executive officer and as Secretary of General Convention after last summer’s convention. Barlowe’s former deputy, the Rev. Molly James, is filling the role as an interim.
The executive officer is responsible for overseeing logistics for the church’s triennial legislative gathering and for assisting the work of the governance structures that function between conventions to carry out the legislation it approves.
Ever since this appointed and compensated role was created in 1970, Sherrod said, it has been “entangled” with the much older elected (and not necessarily compensated) role of Secretary of General Convention.
Barlowe and all his predecessors held both roles concurrently, and Barlowe was also secretary of Executive Council and of the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society, and was chair of the committee charged with the selection of locations for General Convention. The staff overseen by the General Convention Office, she said, carry out many of the canonical duties of the Secretary of General Convention.
“If it were a painting, it would be by Picasso during his Cubist period,” Sherrod quipped.
At a time when “reinventing” General Convention is a stated goal of the church’s realignment, Sherrod hinted that her committee would need to move carefully. Decisions will eventually need to be made about whether the executive officer and secretary roles should be formally combined or vested in two different people, and the reporting and accountability structure for the job need to be clarified.
“Our goal is to provide clarity for a position that has grown over the years into its present complicated and confusing state. Anyone interested in this job deserves to know exactly what they’re getting into,” she said.
The morning session also included the approval of a proposal from the council’s finance and governance committees to forgive the principal and accumulated interest on a loan of over $2 million owed by the Diocese of South Carolina.
Executive Council made these funds available to sustain a common ministry for congregations in Lowcountry South Carolina that were committed to remaining within the Episcopal Church after many of the churches in the diocese voted in 2012 to withdraw from the church.
Since 2019, the withdrawing congregations have been known as the Anglican Diocese of South Carolina, a diocese of the Anglican Church in North America. Litigation between the two bodies over property ownership and rights to the name Diocese of South Carolina lasted for nearly a decade, but relations have been more amicable since Bishop Ruth Woodliff-Stanley and her ACNA counterpart, Chip Edgar, began their tenures in 2022.
Finance chair Timothy Gee of South Carolina noted that both committees had met with Woodliff-Stanley, and that the decision was “an investment by us in the stability and future of that diocese.”
Governance chair Larry Hitt of Colorado reported that a subcommittee working on a permanent location for the church’s archives, which are housed in a temporary storage space in Austin, Texas, had found only “very low-level interest” from potential sites.
The committee is working on developing a term sheet and letter of intent that could be used if new options emerge, mindful of 2024 General Convention Resolution A016, which requires that a new permanent location for the archives be identified by July 1.
The Ven. Stannard Baker of Vermont, the only deacon serving on Executive Council, spoke about the plan for a working group of the finance committee that will evaluate the changing role of deacons and how best to support it.
General Convention Resolution D023, he said, required that the group be established, and in his conversations with members of the Association of Episcopal Deacons, they identified this as their highest priority. The resolution had also requested a one-time allocation of $200,000 for the association’s work, but at Executive Council’s November meeting, Gee said that the finance committee had denied the request because “it was unclear to the committee as to the intent of how that money was to be used.”
The association, Baker said, has focused on defining competencies for deacon training, preparing discernment materials about the diaconate, and gathering deacons for fellowship, but that the organization is struggling, and going through its own time of realignment.
Baker said he sees the diaconate “moving from what I like to think of as the complaining victim stage to owning our power in our church as a holy order and not being defined by what we can’t do, but being defined by what we do,” and that he hopes the working group’s efforts can help.
Public Policy Briefing
At their afternoon session on February 18, council members heard presentations by staff from the church’s Office of Government Relations (OGR) and Episcopal Migration Ministries (EMM), as well as Kent Anker, the chief legal officer, who discussed a lawsuit to which the church is a party that challenges the Trump administration’s decision to lift the “sensitive locations memo,” which made churches off-limits for immigration enforcement.
“We’re living in the first 100 days of the Trump administration, the most active and scurrilous part of a presidential administration,” said Troy Collazo, OGR’s immigration policy adviser.
He said the church’s near-term advocacy goals, which are set by more than 50 General Convention resolutions about immigration policy, focus on protecting churches from Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and securing humane treatment for those who are detained.
The church is also urging the government to preserve Temporary Protective Status, which allows citizens from more than a dozen countries with human-rights abuse records who are already in the U.S. to remain here. The Trump administration recently lifted the status for Venezuelan and Haitian nationals, making them eligible for deportation.
Since mid-January, OGR and EMM have hosted weekly webinars about immigration issues that have been attended by over 1,700 people. They have also circulated action alerts about immigration issues that have helped Episcopalians send 10,200 messages to members of Congress.
The Rev. Sarah Shipman, EMM’s director, said the entire refugee resettlement system was dealt a severe blow by President Trump’s executive order on January 20 to pause all refugee admissions. Staff around the world have been laid off because of immediate funding cuts, she said.
“Even if President Trump tomorrow were to say, ‘We’re going to let refugees come back into the U.S. and get rid of the suspension,’ there’s no longer any overseas infrastructure at this moment to do that work.”
She said that EMM received resettlement grants from three different federal agencies. The largest funding stream, from the Department of Health and Human Services, supports resettlement. It has been completely shut down, and reimbursements submitted to the department for work in recent months remain unpaid.
Two smaller funding streams, which provide support for some refugee families, are still flowing. One of these is an employment program, while the second provides “intensive case management services for people who are considered more vulnerable.”
Shipman affirmed, in response to a council member’s question, that EMM has so far been able to fulfill the financial commitments made to all refugees it has resettled up to the point when resettlement was paused on January 23.
She added, though, those whose TPS status has been revoked will be unable to work legally, and this was likely to increase the burdens of local ministries focused on feeding and clothing people.
Rebecca Blachly, the church’s senior director of public policy, said she believes “it will be challenging for us, at least for the next two years.”
“We absolutely know that is transformative work that needs to be done and social change,” she added. “More than fifty percent of Americans in September [said] that they supported mass deportation. That makes for bad politics.
“For the comprehensive immigration reform that our church has called us to advocate for, we need there to be a different public conversation.”
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.
