3 top Episcopal Church canonical leadership positions remain in varying stages of transition

[Episcopal News Service] The realignment plan for churchwide operations that Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe unveiled last week was primarily focused on reorienting and, in some cases, phasing out departments and staff positions as a part of Rowe’s vision of an Episcopal Church that better serves its dioceses.

At the same time, another level of church governance remains in a prolonged state of transition: the church’s canonical leadership team.

The Episcopal Church is incorporated in the state of New York as the Domestic Foreign Missionary Society, or the DFMS. Episcopal Church Canons and the DFMS’ Constitution specify at least five individuals serve as the institution’s officers, starting with the presiding bishop and the House of Deputies president.

The other three positions named as officers are the church’s chief financial officer, its chief operating officer and the secretary of Executive Council. In recent years, the secretary role has been held by the executive officer of General Convention, who also has served as secretary of convention. All of those positions are now in transition.

Kurt Barnes, the church’s current chief financial officer, announced in December that he plans to retire after 21 years. He agreed to remain on staff while the presiding officers – Rowe and House of Deputies President Julia Ayala Harris – recruit and nominate Barnes’ successor. The canons give Executive Council the authority to appoint the presiding officers’ nominee.

“We have had a quite tremendously diverse pool of applicants for the position,” Rowe told Executive Council on Feb. 19, the final day of the governing body’s three-day meeting last week.

In consultation with current and former Executive Council members, Rowe said he and Ayala Harris have narrowed the field to four finalists. After picking their nominee, they expect to call a special meeting of Executive Council in March for an approval vote.

A day after council’s meeting, on Feb. 20, Rowe issued a letter to the church summarizing a series of staff cuts, including 14 layoffs, as well as department reorganizations and changes to certain staff’s titles as he carries out the first phase of the realignment. One of the positions affected was chief operating officer.

The church’s last permanent chief operations officer was the Rev. Geoffrey Smith, a deacon who retired at the end of 2022. Then-Presiding Bishop Michael Curry and Ayala Harris selected Jane Cisluycis, a former Executive Council member, as their nominee to replace Smith, but when some members of Executive Council objected to the recruitment process, Curry and Ayala Harris agreed to change Cisluycis’ title to acting COO. Executive Council, though still divided over the nomination, approved Cisluycis in February 2023.

In his Feb. 20 letter, Rowe stated, “our realignment process has indicated that, at this time, we do not need to fill the role of chief operating officer.” Instead, Cisluycis will remain on staff with the new title of senior director of operations, Rowe said. Cisluycis will retain most of the former responsibilities of the COO, including information technology, human resources, archives, and building services.

Rowe did not say when, if ever, the COO position would be filled again, as outlined in the canons – which also leaves vacant one of the officer positions mandated by the DFMS Constitution.

The canons say, “upon joint nomination by the Chair and the Vice-Chair [the two presiding officers], the Council shall appoint a Chief Operating Officer who shall serve at the pleasure of, and report and be accountable to, the Chair [the presiding bishop].”

As for the Executive Council secretary, permanently filling that position is complicated by the fact that, in the past, the role of secretary has been filled by the person serving as executive officer of General Convention.

General Convention’s last executive officer, the Rev. Michael Barlowe, retired at the end of the summer 2024 after 11 years in that office. During the ongoing transition, Barlowe’s former deputy, the Rev. Molly James, was named by Curry and Ayala Harris as interim executive officer, and for now, James also is filling Barlowe’s former role of Executive Council secretary.

Barlowe, as head of the General Convention Office, had been the central churchwide official responsible for the administration of church governance. The General Convention Office’s duties have included negotiating contracts for venues and accommodations at each General Convention, coordinating the meetings of all the church’s interim governing bodies, receiving and tallying parochial report data from dioceses and congregations, facilitating the consent process for bishop elections, and ensuring the church has the technology needed to achieve all those goals.

Initially, Curry and Ayala Harris announced a timeline for replacing Barlowe that would have culminated in the presiding officers presenting a nominee for Executive Council’s approval this month. That timeline no longer pertains.

Rowe was elected the 28th presiding bishop in June 2024 and took office Nov. 1, and one of his first actions as presiding bishop was to propose a new committee structure for Executive Council, including the creation of a committee “to examine the role, function and canonical structure of the position of the executive officer of General Convention.”

That newly formed committee, led by Katie Sherrod of the Diocese of Texas, produced a four-page report that was presented and discussed by Executive Council when it met last week in suburban Baltimore, Maryland.

“The vacancy in the position of Executive Officer has afforded an opportunity to provide clarity for the church in the search for the right person for that role,” the report says.  “It is challenging to understand because it always has been entangled with the canonical positions of the Secretary of the House of Deputies, the Secretary of the General Convention, and the other offices held, ex officio, by the Secretary of the General Convention.”

The role, if it were a painting, “would be by Picasso during his Cubism period,” the committee added.

The committee suggested three possible paths to pursue: Separate the duties of secretary and executive officer, completely integrate the duties of the two positions or consider whether some but not all duties of secretary should be turned over to the executive officer.

“Our goal is to provide clarity for a position that has grown over the years into its present complicated confusing state,” the report says. “Anyone interested in this job deserves to know exactly what they are getting into.”

Some of the executive officer’s responsibilities are specified by The Episcopal Church Canons, so any changes to those canonical roles would need to be approved by General Convention, which meets next in 2027 in Phoenix, Arizona.

Rowe discussed the report with committee members when they met Feb. 17. He described the executive officer position and the General Convention Office more broadly as evolving over time to “an island, or maybe a peninsula” that functions largely independent of the rest of the churchwide structures.

One of his primary concerns, he said, is to ensure clear and proper accountability for the executive officer role. Most churchwide departments report to the presiding bishop, but once the executive officer is nominated and appointed, canons specify the position reports only to Executive Council.

“It has to have some supervision, and it needs to be subordinate to the two officers and the council somehow,” Rowe said. “I don’t think we need an independent third officer. … It breeds a lack of clarity in the structure.”

Ayala Harris, who also attended the committee meeting, agreed with Rowe. One option, she affirmed, would be to change the canons so the executive officer reported to the two presiding officers rather than the 38 members of Executive Council.

Annette Buchanan, a council member from New Jersey, countered that if accountability is the concern, there may be better ways for Executive Council to provide oversight for the work of the executive officer without changing the current reporting structure. “That piece to me is fixable,” she said.

Sherrod summarized the committee’s discussions in her presentation to the full council on Feb. 19. She acknowledged that no permanent changes can be made before General Convention meets next, though council may not need to leave the position vacant for two years to begin making changes.

“It may be that the best way to make a new job description effective immediately … is to use a letter of agreement with the chosen candidate that clearly outlines expectations, roles and responsibilities,” she said.

Another committee member, Louisa McKellaston, later told Episcopal News Service in a phone interview that now is “a really good time to look at these more top tier positions.”

McKellaston, a lay member from the Diocese of Chicago, said the church has the opportunity to refocus these top leadership roles and then fill them “in a way that reflects the current reality and needs of The Episcopal Church while also making sure that the essential work gets done.”

– David Paulsen is a senior reporter and editor for Episcopal News Service based in Wisconsin. He can be reached at dpaulsen@episcopalchurch.org.