A “reinvention” of General Convention, increased support for dioceses in crisis communications and Title IV, and a consolidation of the church’s efforts in mission and advocacy are at the heart of realignment plans presented to Executive Council on February 18.
Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe outlined elements of the refined vision and activation plan developed over the last six months by the Compass division of Insight Global, an Atlanta-based consulting firm, which incorporated feedback from meetings late last year with Executive Council and the House of Bishops.
Equipping Dioceses
A focus on equipping diocesan ministry permeates the plan, embodying the vision Rowe shared last November of becoming a “strong, adaptive church that communicates and embodies the depth of Christian spirituality and works towards the Episcopal Church’s vision of God’s kingdom by supporting ministry on the ground in dioceses.”
The priorities also address areas in which bishops in active ministry said their needs were greatest on surveys conducted by Compass last fall.
“Whether it’s Title IV, a natural disaster, a mass shooting — dioceses are often under-resourced in the area of communication. If they have someone on the staff, often that’s for day-to day communication,” Rowe said. The goal, he said, was “to create the customized materials and toolkits and support for digital evangelism that people are looking for.”
Bishops also identified assistance with Title IV, the church’s disciplinary process for clergy, as a major need. The goal, Rowe said, is that “A call can be made. We can have documents, advice, counsel, lists of things like investigators, intake officers.
“This is a system that works, but you kind of have to be a semi-nerd or be using it all the time, and we don’t want people to have to spend the time they would need to know that process, necessarily. We want to be able to borrow when we need it to get there.”
Rowe said he had also dedicated “a lot of time in the last few months to work through” the backlog of Title IV cases against bishops, demonstrated in recent news about a compromise that led to suspending cases against Bishop Santosh Marray of Easton and Rowe’s urging of an accord to resolve cases against John Howard, the retired Bishop of Florida.
The church will also consider alternative methods of dispute resolution to better handle what Rowe called “conflict that has to be addressed, but that doesn’t violate a canon.”
The church center will set a goal of making bishop searches “less expensive and lengthy for dioceses.” The average bishop search has taken 22 months during the last five years. “We would really like to have that process down to under a year,” he said, adding that the church also needs to work on recruiting more bishop candidates from under-represented groups.
Another major priority is forming a “cross-functional team” of deputies and bishops to “rethink and redesign General Convention,” building on a series of resolutions that have called for reform of this lengthy and expensive triennial legislative assembly.
The team, Rowe said, would consider “the legislative process, schedule, worship, exhibits, and other key elements.” Compass will project-manage the effort so that “people can bring their brilliant ideas, and we can actually have a way to get them implemented and organized.”
Staff Realignment
Realigning church center staff members, and focusing their work more directly on providing resources to dioceses, is also a major goal of the process. Compass conducted extensive consultation with the approximately 140 staff employed by the church center, and a debrief about the challenges they have faced was a major focus of the morning session on February 18.
The realignment plan would consolidate most of the church’s mission and advocacy ministries into two divisions — a Unified Mission Program for Racial, Social and Environmental Justice and a Division of Public Policy, Partnership, and Witness.
The mission program will integrate ethnic, racial justice, environmental stewardship, gender justice, church planting, and congregational development ministries, and staff work will shift “from churchwide-led mission to diocesan-led mission.” Regional working groups that encourage dioceses to “collaborate, share best practices, and access real-time training” will be set up, as well as a “mission resource hub” that gives access to “funding, training, and networking opportunities,” including mentoring.
The new public policy, partnership, and witness division combines the church’s work on governmental relations, ecumenism, interfaith dialogue, and Anglican Communion partnerships.
The division will undertake a “re-envisioning of Episcopal Migration Ministries,” whose primary work in refugee resettlement has been almost entirely shut down by the Trump administration’s decision in January to pause all refugee admission.
The Rev. Sarah Shipman, its executive director, told council members in their afternoon session that there had been major changes to the resettlement program under the Biden administration, with an increasing focus on placing refugees directly into the care of private citizens instead of working through the 10 mostly religiously affiliated agencies that had overseen most resettlement work since the 1980s.
“If and when [the refugee resettlement program] is built back up,” she told council members, “it will be very different from how it is done today.”
Korryn Williamson of Compass also reviewed the sobering results of surveys and focus-group conversations with church center staff and council members.
One survey question, she said, had asked staff members to define the priorities of their work and specify how much time they spent pursuing it. It was “extremely difficult,” she said, for people to define their priorities, because “they were never tasked with having priorities.”
“There was a lot of high drive, but because there weren’t priorities set, it was hard to have high standards … [because] there really weren’t expectations or standards set to achieve any set results. Everyone was just moving in different directions and working really hard.”
The surveys, she said, had also “uncovered a lot of trauma from past institutional failures, and a lack of trust or willingness to collaborate.”
“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,’” Williamson added.
Council members reacted to the findings with a combination of frustration and empathy.
“So what I’m hearing is, there’s no job descriptions. There’s no performance plans that actually measure performance against the job description … there was no overall vision or mission that performance plans were tied to. Well — that doesn’t work,” said the Rt. Rev. Diane Jardine Bruce, Provisional Bishop of West Missouri.
“What ends up happening is you’re floundering and relatively ineffective because you don’t know what the goal is, and if you don’t know what the goal is you’re trying to do and you don’t have a job description, and you don’t have a performance plan that ties your feet to the fire, then nothing can happen.”
“This is not a new problem,” said lay member Dianne Audrick Smith of Ohio. “This is probably a generational problem. It didn’t start with Bishop [Michael] Curry. It didn’t start with Bishop Katharine [Jefferts Schori],” she said about Bishop Rowe’s two immediate predecessors.
Williamson urged a gradual and patient approach in refocusing church center staff. “We don’t want to shoot for the moon and make all these drastic changes overnight,” she said. “It’s going to take time to evolve to where there are focused results.”
“How can we be prioritize these big-picture concepts and break them down into bite-size bits and be very, very clear about where we’re going so that we can achieve more?” she asked.
Council Members Respond
“We had a general sense of hopefulness about refining the structures and the plans laid before us,” said the Rev. Charles Graves of Ohio about the discussion at his table in a response session.
The Rev. Steve Pankey of Kentucky, the Vice President of the House of Deputies, said his table was particularly excited about plans for alternate dispute resolution in the Title IV process.
Larry Hitt of Colorado said his table was concerned that “where seminaries are going or not going in our church” was not mentioned in the realignment plan. “We have an obligation to keep a very well-trained clergy, and we should take a role in trying to assist seminaries as we’re assisting dioceses.”
Bishop Rafael Morales, who serves the dioceses of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Virgin Islands, said he was concerned that the plans “do not mention evangelization and the mission of the church.”
The Rev. Gina Angulo Zamora of Ecuador Litoral said the church needed to take into account the needs of dioceses outside the United States in its plans for the future.
Of the realignment, Heidi Kim of Minnesota said on behalf of council members at her table, “We would hope that this is approached as we approach spiritual formation and transformation, in that it is lifelong and ongoing, and it does not have a beginning or an end.”
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.
