Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe presented his vision for building “a strong, adaptive” Episcopal Church — by reorienting churchwide structures to support diocesan ministry and modernizing the church’s governance system — to members of Executive Council on November 8.
The Compass division of Insight Global, an Atlanta-based consulting firm, has been working with Rowe since September to analyze the church’s culture, the first step in a process of realigning the church’s vision and staffing structure that is slated to be complete by the end of March 2025.
Executive Council had recognized the need for such a realignment and approved support for it from a church-owned trust fund in 2023, well before the new Presiding Bishop was elected.
Korryn Williamson and Bethany Cabreja of Insight Global presented the results of a series of interviews and surveys with church center staff and bishops, and led an exercise to gather feedback from council members. The Insight Global team will coordinate a similar session with members of the House of Bishops at a special meeting on December 4 in Minneapolis.
Insight Global’s study revealed a passion for the church’s mission among church center staff, coupled with an organizational culture plagued by territoriality and resistance to change. Bishops reported that support from the church center was poorly defined, and that they were especially in need of more support in handling Title IV matters, evangelism, and crisis communications.
‘A Strong, Adaptive Church’
Presiding Bishop Rowe led council members through a review of the vision document. His casual and discursive style, interspersed with sarcastic quips, seemed to resonate with the group.
The vision summary describes “Where We Are Going” as “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.”
Rowe explained: “By strong I mean that we have the capacity to take a risk to do what we need to do without concern entirely that we are going to fail.” Adaptive, he said, means “a church that can change to meet the needs.”
“The demographics of this country are changing. Can we adapt also? But more importantly, can we learn?” he asked.
Rowe said he believed the Episcopal Church has two main strengths: “an incarnational spirituality” and “committed leaders.”
“We have an inclusive theology centered on our relationship with God in Christ, and we understand ourselves to be in relationship with the world,” he said. “And we have committed leaders who are eager to participate more effectively in God’s mission.”
At the same time, he said, “We have a corporate structure that’s largely turned inward and is unaccountable. [Executive Council] needs to create together a culture of accountability for the results that we desire, and to stop that turn inward.”
He said the Episcopal Church’s governance structures were “built for another time and another place,” and the church needs to “reform our structure while preserving our polity, making sure that all voices are at the table, across the orders of ministry. The way that we organize ourselves is that all of us are in this together, which is a unique experiment within Christianity.”
He also decried a “bifurcation of mission and everything else” in the way that some Episcopalians think about the church.
“People will say things like, ‘I care about God’s mission, but not about the institution,” he said, then quipped: “I hear this from clergy and I say, ‘Well then, save your congregation 18 percent and get out of the pension fund.’”
Rowe urged the church instead to “think institutionally,” recognizing that “the institution is really important because it provides a platform for the mission.”
He said that adaptive organizations follow a framework of observe-interpret-intervene, and that in the Episcopal Church, “We start a program and when it doesn’t work, we double down, as if the gospel message is ‘try harder.’” He urged the church instead to respond with ‘This isn’t working, and we’re going to do something different.’”
Church Staff and Bishop Surveys
Williamson and Cabreja presented the results of investigations into organizational culture they had conducted in the last two months with church center staff and all bishops exercising oversight of dioceses. The process, they said, included 15 focus group meetings, 14 individuals, and 230 survey responses.
They discovered three sets of interlinked strengths and weaknesses in the culture of the church center staff. Staff, they said, have a strong passion for their work, rooted in a sense of spiritual call, but this passion is linked with of a suspicion of change and a tendency for 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 to offer constructive feedback. One staff member said, “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.
The survey of bishops asked about the support provided by the church center in eight areas: creation care, crisis management, diocesan administration, diocesan governance, evangelism, formation, racial reconciliation, and Title IV (clergy discipline).
Bishops were asked to use a Likert scale to assess their need for support, and the quality and their “clear perception” of the support currently provided, with a response of 1 indicating “not at all” and 5 indicating a “very great extent.”
Bishops said their needs were greatest in the areas of Title IV, evangelism, and crisis communications, with need for help with the complex clergy discipline system rating 3.58. They rated their “clear perception of support” in all areas very low, a collective 2.01, and had a slightly higher overall rating for the quality of the support, at 2.58.
Racial reconciliation, a signature emphasis of former Presiding Bishop Michael Curry, was rated highest in both quality and clarity, though bishops ranked it fifth among areas in which they needed more support. Creation care, another of Curry’s priorities, along with Christian formation, also ranked highly in terms of quality and clarity, but at the very bottom in terms of needed support.
Council members worked in table groups to gather responses to the presentations about vision and the survey results.
The Rt. Rev. Deon Johnson, Bishop of Missouri, reported of his group’s discussions, “Reforming the structures — that is one of the biggest things that we need. But we really like the witness of the Episcopal Church — how we do it — but we want to be out in the world a lot more.”
Several groups supported the need for clearer communication about the Episcopal Church’s distinctive gifts. One group suggested replacing Rowe’s phrase “strong and adaptive” with “moved by the Holy Spirit.”
Budget Approval
Council members approved the Episcopal Church’s triennial budget, as well as the budget for 2025. The Rev. Patty Downing, chair of the Joint Budget Committee, briefed the council on progress made by her committee in recent months to adjust the $143 million budget approved by Executive Council in January to accommodate Presiding Bishop Rowe’s priorities for the church, as well as a series of additional funding allocations made by General Convention.
Downing explained that the budget reviewed by General Convention included a $2 million contingency for funding all of the new expenditures, but that the actual cost of the approved expenditures exceeded that number by several million dollars. In addition, the $2 million contingency amount needed to be reduced to $1.4 million because of an unanticipated increase in the cost of health insurance for church center staff.
Bishop Thomas Brown of Maine and council member Timothy Gee, both of whom served on the Joint Budget Committee, reported on the committee’s decisions in the major areas in which new allocations had been made: creation care, racial reconciliation and justice, evangelism, and mental health.
Brown said the committee had observed Presiding Bishop Rowe’s request that it not create or fund new church center staff positions. “If we step up onto the balcony, we’ll see a landscape in which worthy programs are not necessarily funded or implemented by diocesan leaders. They will be funded at the grassroots … so that work at the local level can be prioritized,” he said.
The cuts to additional allocations are largest in creation care projects, which had dominated the General Convention hearing on the budget. The budget committee declined to fund a $3 million creation care loan fund, noting that many government and nonprofit entities also provided financing for creation care projects, and that the church center lacked capacity to evaluate loan applications and collect on payments.
Funding was increased from $90,000 to $195,000 for eco-region creation care networks, which will group neighboring dioceses to pursue joint projects and share best practices. Bishop Brown said the committee increased the funding on the Presiding Bishop’s recommendation that this venture could “help us learn more about how to foster diocesan networks” more broadly.
Gee said the committee declined to fully fund two resolutions on church planting — costing over $2 million — that would have more than doubled funding for the work. It supported allocating $200,000 of a $500,000 request for new bicultural and multicultural church plants. It also declined to increase by $1 million a grant-making program for racial reconciliation projects, determining that the previously allocated $375,000 was sufficient.
A resolution that included an allocation of $200,000 to the Association of Episcopal Deacons was not funded, Gee said, because “it was unclear to the committee as to the intent of how that money was to be used.”
The committee invited the association to submit a more detailed description of how the funds would be used to support the diaconate. Discussions on how best to support and fund the resolution have begun with the Executive Council Finance Committee.
The committee suggested that future drafters of General Convention resolutions work more closely with legislative committee chairs and include more specific language about the use of funds.
Brown also said the revised triennium budget includes $450,000 for data analysis by the Hartford Institute for Religion Research and similar organizations. This was, he said, “to get the data that we need and particularly that the management team and the Presiding Bishop need to make decisions that are data-based.”
Rowe pointed out in response to a question from a council member about the amount of the allocation that the Hartford Institute produces the important FACT (Faith Communities Today) survey, the only major church data research project “that has a grasp on the multicultural nature and the changing demographics in relation to religion, and not only in the U.S., but in other communities.”
Deck Nov 8th Executive Council Meeting 4 by Douglas LeBlanc on Scribd
