The bishops and deputies at the 74th General Convention, meeting in summer 2003, embraced a bold new initiative dubbed the “20/20 vision.”
Its broad scope sought to refocus the church in nine areas, from congregational development to funding and reporting. The boldest goal of the 20/20 initiative: to double the size of the church by the year 2020.
One of those deputies, attending General Convention for the first time, was a young man representing the Erie-based Diocese of Northwestern Pennsylvania. The 28-year-old deputy had called that corner of the state home all his life. It was where a college history professor had first introduced him to The Episcopal Church. By 2003, the Rev. Sean Rowe had been an Episcopal priest for less than three years, yet as rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Franklin, Pennsylvania, he already was leaving a mark on his parish and its community.
And Rowe loved being a parish priest. The salary was an afterthought. “The first three years, I thought I should pay them,” Rowe told Episcopal News Service in an hourlong interview this month.
That first parish also would be his last as a priest. In 2007, Rowe was elected bishop of Northwestern Pennsylvania at age 32, becoming the youngest member of the House of Bishops. Today, he is a respected 17-year veteran of that body. In June, he was elected The Episcopal Church’s 28th presiding bishop on the first ballot by his fellow bishops and confirmed overwhelmingly by the House of Deputies at the 81st General Convention in Louisville, Kentucky. On Nov. 1, Rowe, 49, will take office as the church’s denominational leader.
The denomination that Rowe soon will lead, however, looks nothing like the former 20/20 vision of a church doubling in size. Instead, in the past two decades, membership has dropped from about 2.3 million to under 1.6 million, mirroring trends in other mainline Protestant denominations. Sunday attendance across the church has fallen even further to under 400,000 – less than half the number of people churchwide who used to attend Episcopal worship services when Rowe was a parish priest.
Rowe accepts there are no easy solutions. “We wouldn’t be in this situation if the problem was a technical one,” he said in an Oct. 4 speech at the Diocese of Wisconsin’s convention. About 300 people had filled a hotel ballroom in Stevens Point to listen to Rowe speak on the topic of “Leadership for God’s Mission.” At one point, the presiding bishop-elect invoked General Convention’s 20/20 vision as an ambitious historical example and a cautionary tale.
“If we had a way out of this, we would have done it,” he said.
Rowe clearly loves a challenge.
His record as bishop includes four years leading both Northwestern Pennsylvania and the Diocese of Bethlehem, which he served as bishop provisional from 2014-2018.
For the past five years, Rowe has served as bishop of both Northwestern Pennsylvania and Western New York through an innovative partnership between the two dioceses.
As presiding bishop-elect, he now faces a bigger challenge: How can a denomination in decline restructure and realign itself to survive and even thrive in its Gospel ministry at the local level and in Episcopal dioceses around the world?
That evolving challenge, in Rowe’s view, won’t be solved with more priests, better preaching, new programs or a lot of prayer. Instead, he sees a way through this “existential moment” by experimenting bravely. That is the approach followed by his own two dioceses, and now by Wisconsin Episcopalians, who reunited their three dioceses into one this year. The church must strengthen its local ministries, Rowe said, while also ensuring its structures are “adaptive” to today’s realities.
As a bishop unafraid to experiment – and sometimes fail – Rowe is now calling his church to try new things, lots of them. Some just might succeed.
“We have to learn. This is the adventure we’re on with God,” he said. “God is with us now and is calling us into a new way.”
An active childhood in a community facing economic upheaval
Rowe spoke in Wisconsin for about a half hour, then spent another half hour taking questions. Topics ranged from the money that dioceses contribute to the churchwide budget to the importance of the church’s various ethnic ministries. Toward the end, Jolene Schatzinger, a vestry member at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Ripon, rose to ask Rowe about his vision, his faith and his personal story.
“Is there anything else you can share about yourself?”
With time winding down in his Q&A, Rowe’s brief response was short on biographical details, though he has shared more about his early life in other forums. His story is rooted decades ago in the economic upheaval of the former steel town of Sharon, Pennsylvania.
Sharon, a city of about 13,000, sits on the Ohio state line, a half hour from Youngstown, Ohio, and about halfway between Cleveland and Pittsburgh. Rowe, born in Sharon in 1975, comes from a working-class family. His grandfathers were steelworkers. His mother was an auto plant employee, and his father worked for the state Parole Board. Growing up in Hermitage, a small city just east of Sharon, many of his friends’ parents earned their livings from the local steel industry, until major plant closures disrupted the community’s stability.
Those experiences helped shape his approach to church leadership, Rowe said on June 26, when he addressed the 81st General Convention after his election as presiding bishop. His wife, Carly Rowe, and their 11-year-old daughter, Lauren, now 12, stood by his side on the podium.
“Over the last 50 years, I’ve been around to see things that I love go away,” Rowe told the bishops and deputies. “In the space of a few years, in the mid-1980s when I was in elementary school, I watched everything that I had known evaporate.”
In fourth grade, after a local Westinghouse Electric Corp. plant closed, he said goodbye to friends who moved to Indiana, where their parents had accepted transfers. The region’s economy was rattled again in 1987 when the nearby Sharon Steel declared bankruptcy. A series of layoffs cost more than 2,500 neighbors their jobs by the time the plant closed in 1992.
“People in our region are resilient, but we spent years resisting the change that was forced on us, wishing we could go back to the way things had been,” Rowe said in his General Convention speech.
Despite the difficulties his hometown faced, Rowe’s family life remained relatively stable. As a teenager, he took on numerous responsibilities in school and at church. He was active in Boy Scouts Troop 7 and earned his Eagle Scout award as a freshman at Hermitage’s Hickory High School.
In his senior year, Rowe was elected class president. His final yearbook from 1993 lists numerous other activities, including choir, forensics, the school newspaper, physics club, drama club and Spanish Honor Society.
A photo in the yearbook shows Rowe, dressed in a red polo shirt and black pants, speaking into a microphone at a class assembly. “Runnin’ the Show,” the photo’s caption says. “Giving words of encouragement to the football players is senior class president Sean Rowe.”
His message to the players: “Win or lose the football game, you will always be number one in our hearts.”
From early faith formation to finding The Episcopal Church
His family’s faith background was a blend of his mother’s Roman Catholicism and his father’s roots in the United Church of Christ. As a child, Rowe, his parents and his younger sister began attending a United Methodist church where some friends were members. At that time, Hickory Global Methodist Church had a large youth group, a gifted pastor and hymns that left him whistling long after the music stopped.
“I loved it all,” Rowe told ENS on Oct. 5 during a sit-down interview in Wisconsin while attending the diocesan convention there. “That was a really important part of my formation.”
Even as a child, Rowe was following a calling to church leadership. He preached for the first time at age 13, for the congregation’s youth Sunday. As a teenager, he served on the church’s governing board. That childhood congregation is “really the reason I’m sitting here,” Rowe said. “It was a church that brought me in.”
After high school, Rowe attended Grove City College about a half hour east of his hometown. As a history major, he initially considered going into politics or law, but “what could never leave me is that call to ministry,” he said.
Grove City College was a conservative Christian school in the evangelical tradition. It had “a very particular worldview and way of thinking about God,” Rowe said. Ultimately, he said, “it lacked the kind of expansiveness that I was looking for.”
His path to The Episcopal Church led through the college’s history department. Its chair was an Episcopal priest, the Rev. Barbara Akin, who also served as vicar at Church of the Epiphany in Grove City.
“She gave me a Book of Common Prayer,” Rowe recalled. “There was something about the liturgy. There was something about the way of thinking. There was something about the expansiveness. There was something about the symbolism. It all fit for me.”
He began attending services at Epiphany, “and that became my home,” Rowe said. “That church adopted me.”
By the time he graduated from Grove City College in 1997, he had discerned a call to the priesthood and soon began attending Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, where he was one of the school’s youngest seminarians.
“It was a big change,” Rowe told ENS. “I said I wanted expansive, and I got expansive. I learned there are multiple ways to read [Scripture], multiple ways to think about this. I learned about the wideness of the spiritual tradition. It was overall a real gift. It also was a challenge. I was having my whole worldview challenged, which was good and helped me grow as a person.”
The Rev. Stacey Fussell was one of Rowe’s classmates. Fussell was in her final year at the seminary while Rowe was in his first. In an interview with ENS, she recalled Rowe, the young seminarian, as an “old soul.”
“He was emotionally and pastorally already very mature,” she said. “He had a strong moral compass.”
And, as with his high school and undergraduate years, he was eager to take on additional responsibilities at the seminary, including the position of sacristan. He was chosen as class president and later president of the student body.
Fussell, who now serves with Rowe as a priest in the Diocese of Northwestern Pennsylvania, said she also could tell back then that Rowe’s heart was in his home diocese. “Sean was determined he was coming back home,” she said. “This was his place.”
From young priest to young bishop, eager to take on more
Kaycee Reib was senior warden at St. John’s in Franklin in 2000 when she got a call from Northwestern Pennsylvania Bishop Robert Rowley Jr. He said he had a promising candidate for rector, and he asked her not to hold his youth against him.
“Once you know Sean, that doesn’t matter,” Reib told ENS. Her congregation found Rowe to be compassionate, funny, “one of the best preachers that I’ve ever heard” and comfortable engaging with people from all generations. “He’s an excellent listener,” she said. “When he’s with you, he’s present. His mind isn’t off somewhere else.”
St. John’s welcomed him in summer 2000 while he was still a deacon, and after his ordination as a priest that September, he took over as the church’s rector. He was 25.
“Those were seven tremendously fulfilling years,” Rowe told ENS. “They taught me how to be a priest. I’m very grateful for that time.”
In Franklin, Rowe sought additional roles in the community, including as chair of the Franklin Housing Authority. He ran for and was elected to the Franklin Area School District board.
His tenure at St. John’s also required him to respond to conflict. In 2003, he was among the deputies who voted at General Convention to consent to the Diocese of New Hampshire’s consecration of the Rt. Rev. Gene Robinson, who became the church’s first openly gay bishop.
“That did not play well for some people in my congregation and in that town,” Rowe told ENS, citing his region’s cultural conservatism. “It was a real learning experience for me on how to sit with people in a difficult time, and we worked through that. We did not lose members.” Today, St. John’s is “an affirming, welcoming LGBTQ-friendly congregation,” he added.
After he was elected bishop, Rowe’s consecration was held in September 2007 in Harbison Chapel at Grove City College. Months later, in a profile by the Sharon Herald newspaper, Rowe acknowledged the challenges the diocese’s congregations faced in ministering to an economically struggling region. He called its people “resilient.”
“I believe the church can and will play a role in changing our communities and transforming them to what is next,” Rowe said at the time. “I’m enjoying being a bishop and I’m thankful for the opportunity.”
The article also noted that Rowe, as bishop, oversaw a clergy roster that included his father, Richard Rowe, who had been ordained to the priesthood in 2002, two years after his son. Now 77, the Rev. Rowe is retired but still serves congregations in the diocese as a supply priest.
In 2010, Bishop Rowe was forced to confront a diocesan controversy. He revealed publicly that the diocese had received “four credible allegations of sexual abuse” by one of his predecessors, the late-Bishop Donald Davis. Rowe invited any additional victims to come forward, and he continued to update the diocese as the number of allegations grew.
“Christians tell the truth,” Rowe said in an interview at the time with the Sharon Herald. “That’s what we need to be doing. Repentance means that when you are in the wrong, you have to make amends and be willing to change. And we can’t do that unless we name what we have done.”
Fussell, who now serves as president of the Northwestern Pennsylvania Standing Committee, said Rowe showed he was willing to affirm the principles of his faith despite the potential legal risks.
“He handled it brilliantly, not because he was strategizing but because his heart was right,” Fussell said.
After diocesan collaborations, a new role as presiding bishop
As a bishop, Rowe again found ways to take on more. He earned a doctorate in organizational learning and leadership at Gannon University in Erie in 2014, the same year that the Diocese of Bethlehem elected him as bishop provisional.
“This unique position allows for a perspective that is unparalleled,” Rowe told the Sharon Herald in April 2014. “The hope is that we can create an atmosphere of cooperation between the two dioceses.”
Rowe served Bethlehem until it elected and consecrated its current diocesan bishop, the Rt. Rev. Kevin Nichols, in 2018. Around the same time, Rowe was in conversations with the retiring Western New York Bishop William Franklin and other diocesan leaders about a new partnership.
In October 2018, the two dioceses voted in favor of an agreement to collaborate and share a bishop while remaining separate entities. A year later, Rowe addressed the dioceses’ joint convention and described their partnership’s goal as “privileging Gospel impact over our own provincial and territorial needs and wants.”
The partnership continues today, and some of its experiments have become models for other dioceses considering similar collaborations, including in Wisconsin. With Rowe stepping down from his dioceses on Nov. 1 to take office as presiding bishop, Northwestern Pennsylvania and Western New York are discerning next steps.
Fussell said it has been sad for Episcopalians in that region to say goodbye to Rowe as a diocesan leader. At the same time, “we knew that we had a real gift in him, and that we should share him with the wider church,” she said.
The beginning of Rowe’s nine-year term will be celebrated with a livestreamed investiture on Nov. 2. Rowe and his family plan to maintain their primary residence in Erie, though he has already begun traveling around the church and will continue to visit its more than 100 dioceses after taking office. He has emphasized that his initial focus will be on supporting the church’s ministries at the congregational and diocesan levels.
Mission and ministry cost money, Rowe told ENS, but more important than dollars and cents is to ask the question, “What is best for the Gospel, whatever your context?”
“We’ve inherited a legacy, and we also have a legacy to leave,” Rowe said. “All this talk about organization is only so that we can present a compelling spirituality that meets the needs of the world, that’s centered in Christ, and I think we’re uniquely positioned as The Episcopal Church to provide that.”