Presiding-Bishop Elect Sean Rowe signaled a move toward strategic planning and more clearly defined roles in an October 31 orientation session for Executive Council, the 40-member elected body that oversees the implementation of the Episcopal Church’s programs.
Executive Council will hold its first sessions under Rowe’s leadership November 7-9 in New Brunswick, New Jersey, just after his investiture at the church center’s Chapel of Christ the Lord.
“I think this could be quite an adventure the next several years. I expect it to be enriching for all of us, enlivening. I think we’re really going to get to participate in mission in a profound way,” he told council members near the end of the session, which he mostly led, with some assistance from Kent Anker, the church center’s chief legal officer.
Rowe said important conversations about the church’s strategic direction would begin at next week’s meeting, and the church center’s strategy should determine its approach to finances and programs.
“We need to look at finance in terms of strategic direction, to ask, ‘How is our financial strategy in conversation with a budget?’ [Otherwise] you end up with the tail wagging the dog. What we do is determined by the budget,” Rowe said. “But we want to have a strategy which the budget serves.”
“You can only have a helpful evaluative structure if you have a strategy to evaluate,” he added. “Otherwise you end up with what each individual board member thinks is important, a recipe for chaos.”
He also noted that “the staff reports to the CEO, not the board. This has been clear in our canons, but not in practice.”
Several experienced lay members of the council pushed back against the style and substance of Rowe’s proposals in the occasionally contentious online meeting. These include a bylaws revision which delegates much of the council’s work to committees, limits the council’s interaction with church center staff, and says transparency “does not mean that everyone knows everything.”
“The transparency piece landed as exclusionary,” said council member Annette Buchanan of the Diocese of New Jersey. “The way that hit me was that we are staying in our lanes, in our silos, and not being expansive in terms of sharing information … that some folks have information and others don’t.”
Buchanan also said she believed that direct involvement between council members and church center staff led to “more robust conversations,” and she criticized Rowe’s emphasis on the negatives of the church’s organizational structure. “To say that the [current] structure was ineffective, or not effective at all, that’s not a good characterization.”
Several council members questioned aspects of the proposed committee structure, and Betsy Ridge of the Diocese of Massachusetts said she was concerned that proposals to create committees for finance and governance alongside ad-hoc bodies would lead to “a council with first-class and second-class citizens.”
The testiest exchange was between Rowe and outspoken council member Sandra Montes of the Diocese of Texas. Montes criticized the church center’s mishandling of Spanish translation, and said worship at church events “has not been diverse, not a good representation of all of us.”
“Probably we will never meet your standards, Sandra,” a clearly frustrated Rowe retorted, a remark that Montes described as “really patronizing and diminishing what I am saying.”
“This is not going to continue in this space, white people talking back to me,” she shot back.
“You are direct and so am I, so I’m going to tell you the truth as I see it, so that we can have this important dialogue,” Rowe said. Promising that staff “were going to work really hard” to improve the translations, he brought the exchange to a close.
Council member Larry Hitt of the Diocese of Colorado, the diocesan chancellor, expressed firm support for Rowe’s new direction.
“I like the changes to the bylaws, and I will be voting in favor of them. I think, while everything we do at every level, including [governance] and finance, is ministry, I think it’s great that most of the ministry reports will be in plenary sessions. In most of the Executive Council sessions, this is the most uplifting thing that we leave with,” he said.
Rowe, who earned a doctorate in organizational learning and leadership from Gannon University, pioneered major structural change in his ministry as a diocesan bishop. He was a leader of the 2015 TREC Commission, which proposed a series of changes to save money and streamline the church center’s work, most of which were rejected by General Convention.
Rowe told TLC’s Kirk Petersen in an interview just after his election last summer as presiding bishop that “my particular role is to help us reposition,” and said strategic planning that acknowledges the reality of church decline would dominate his work.
“The question for me more is, can we get to a level, to a greater level of effectiveness, and can we lay the groundwork in which to grow? But that doesn’t happen overnight. We’re talking about a multi-decade process here of rethinking, to use an old term, how we prosecute the mission of the church,” he said then.
Executive Council has faced significant internal division since 2022, when a new and more outspoken group of council members began challenging senior leaders more directly.
The church center’s chief operating officer, Jane Cisluycis, was approved on a rare divided vote at the body’s February 2023 meeting after criticisms by council members that the slate of candidates was insufficiently diverse. Seven months later, the church’s presiding officers issued a letter admonishing council members to treat church center employees with more respect.
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.
