Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe took office Nov. 1 after his election and confirmation in June at the 81st General Convention.
[Episcopal News Service] Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe on Dec. 4 chaired his first meeting of the House of Bishops since taking over as the denomination leader a month ago. Afterward, Rowe said the one-day meeting in suburban Minneapolis, Minnesota, marked a significant step in his continuing efforts to realign churchwide staff and governance to better support dioceses and congregations.
About 85 Episcopal bishops attended the meeting in person at the DoubleTree by Hilton Minneapolis Airport, and an additional 55 joined the conversations online. Rowe, in an end-of-day Zoom news conference, described the meeting as “a good time for us to gather and talk about the future of the church, for me to talk a bit about how we might reorient our churchwide structures to serve diocese and congregations and to get bishops to provide their feedback.”
The meeting’s discussions were led partly by representatives from Compass, the contractor hired by the church to study the church’s staffing structure and help facilitate changes under a “structural realignment” that was requested by Executive Council in its last term. (The bishops’ sessions were closed to reporters and other observers.)
Compass had this fall previously surveyed the churchwide staff, led focus group discussions and engaged with other stakeholders, including Executive Council at its November meeting. Compass also surveyed the bishops earlier about the needs of their dioceses, and their gathering in Minneapolis was an opportunity to offer additional, direct feedback in response to Compass’ initial findings.
“This meeting with the House of Bishops is the final meeting in a long series of meetings that started with stakeholders around the church,” Rowe said. “Now we’ll synthesize that and create a plan.”
The realignment plan, which Rowe expects to present to Executive Council in February, will seek to achieve at least two objectives: staffing cost reductions and an increased focus on strengthening local church ministries.
The first objective was identified by the 2025-27 churchwide budget plan, as recommended by Executive Council and approved in June by the 81st General Convention. It called on the new presiding bishop to develop a plan to save $3.5 million on staff over three years, or about 5% of the church’s total personnel costs. The budget doesn’t specify the shape or scope of that “staff restructuring,” other than suggesting that it be achieved through “attrition, restructuring and other reductions TBD by management.”
Separately, Rowe has emphasized both after his election in June and at his investiture on Nov. 2 that the staff restructuring will be an opportunity to rethink how the church can better support dioceses and congregations. That goal figured prominently in the bishops’ discussions at their meeting this week.
Indianapolis Bishop Jennifer Baskerville-Burrows, vice chair of the House of Bishops, said during the post-meeting news conference that she and her fellow bishops embraced the call to greater collaboration, sharing of resources and drawing on churchwide leaders who have expertise in certain key areas.
“We would be more effective in our witness if we were able to better use the wisdom in the room,” Baskerville-Burrows said. “There’s a lot of wisdom around the church, but we don’t know how to get it.”
The bishops identified three initial areas where the support from the presiding bishop’s staff could improve the effectiveness of local operations: administering Title IV clergy disciplinary canons, strengthening the training and guidance offered by the church’s College for Bishops and rethinking how General Convention responds to local needs.
Rowe acknowledged that those three areas may not be at the top of parishioners’ minds at the congregational level, but bishops said such improvements could free them to focus more on pressing local ministries while growing those ministries’ capacity.
Minnesota Bishop Craig Loya, who hosted the day’s meeting, said during the news conference that maintaining an infrastructure to receive and respond to Title IV complaints is canonically required of every diocese, and fulfilling those requirements sometimes “can be overwhelming in terms of its administrative burden.”
“For a diocese to faithfully operate a Title IV process is really costly in terms of people, money and expertise,” Loya said. “The work is very important, the stakes are high.” Many dioceses, particularly the smaller ones, he added, “often have a hard time adequately developing the capacity to do it effectively and well.”
He and other bishops are hopeful that such challenges can be addressed with churchwide solutions, possibly involving collaboration between dioceses.
All the bishops’ discussions were framed around the question, “How is the church to be an effective witness to Jesus Christ?” Baskerville-Burrows said, and improving operations and governance can play a key role.
“There are things that get in the way. It’s just the way the institution is situated, that we’ve got to deal with those things,” she said. “But the heart of the matter was, we want to be able to have The Episcopal Church, both in the aggregate and each diocese, be given every bit of steam it can have to make an effective witness for Jesus Christ.”
Loya agreed.
“Our core work is now, as it has always been, sharing the Good News of Jesus Christ with a world that is broken and hurting,” he said. “Most of our conversations about the other topics flow from that core.”
– David Paulsen is a senior reporter and editor for Episcopal News Service based in Wisconsin. He can be reached at dpaulsen@episcopalchurch.org.