In his remarks to Executive Council’s Joint Budget Committee, which was meeting here to make final adjustments to the 2025-27 churchwide budget plan, Rowe embraced the church’s call for a “structural realignment,” and he indicated that he intends to move fast.
“The realignment will be underway soon,” Rowe said, adding that he expects potentially substantial changes to churchwide operations in the first quarter of 2025.
Rowe is partly responding to a line in the 2025-27 budget plan, approved in June by the 81st General Convention, that 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 gives no recommendation for the shape or scope of that realignment, though Rowe outlined a preliminary process for considering such changes. It will include conversations and meetings this fall with the more than 140 churchwide employees who carry out the mission and ministry of The Episcopal Church at the denominational level.
Rowe, as he has said in previous remarks to church governance bodies, also emphasized to the Joint Budget Committee that more of the church’s focus and resources should be shifted to the diocesan and congregational level.
“As a church, I think we understand that ministry happens on the ground,” he said. A structural realignment won’t change the church’s top priorities, identified by General Convention as including racial healing, evangelism and creation care, though “the way we put those priorities into practice is bound to change significantly,” he said.
Rowe begins his nine-year term as presiding bishop on Nov. 1, succeeding Presiding Bishop Michael Curry.
Planning for that leadership transition began even before Rowe was elected and confirmed by the 81st General Convention on June 26 in Louisville, Kentucky.
Over the five years starting with 2023, The Episcopal Church has budgeted $230,000 for the presiding bishop nominating process, election, transition and installation.
Two separate committees are helping to guide the transition and plan for Rowe’s installation and a service of investiture, which will be livestreamed on Nov. 2 from the chapel at The Episcopal Church’s New York headquarters.
Rowe was serving as the bishop diocesan of Northwestern Pennsylvania and bishop provisional of Western New York when he was elected. Last weekend, he said goodbye to his two former dioceses to turn his focus to preparing for his term as presiding bishop.
“I’m in love with the region and with the people in it and with the congregations,” Rowe said in a farewell interview posted to the dioceses’ joint website. “I’ve come to know and love them. So I’m sad to leave. And there’s also excitement and anticipation on taking on this new role.”
Rowe already has begun making staffing decisions for the transition. Vanessa Butler, his former diocesan canon for administration, will join the Office of the Presiding Bishop in an unspecified role, according to a diocesan update.
Rebecca Wilson, an Ohio-based communications professional and co-owner of Canticle Communications, was hired by the church as a contractor to advise Rowe during the transition. She attended this week’s Joint Budget Committee meeting with him.
The church, at Rowe’s request, also is contracting with a consulting firm, Compass, with experience in organizational development to help facilitate engagement with the churchwide staff this fall.
Its work will help to inform the structural realignment that Rowe says will be in motion by next year. In the meantime, he asked the Joint Budget Committee not to recommend funding any new staff positions while a staff audit is still underway.
Calls for such a staff audit date back at least to June 2023, when it was a topic of discussions by Executive Council, the church’s governing body between meetings of General Convention. At that time, Executive Council was deliberating over what to do with about $5 million in unspent funds from the previous triennium.
Executive Council agreed to use $2 million to support research into the church’s historical complicity in the federal Indigenous boarding school system.
The remaining funds, about $3 million, were set aside for the church’s presiding officers – the presiding bishop and House of Deputies president – to “conduct strategic adaptive realignment of our institutional structures through such tools as an audit of current Episcopal Church staff and Executive Council responsibilities and an analysis of our work as a granting institution.”
Then in January 2024, the Joint Budget Committee finalized a draft proposal for a 2025-27 churchwide budget plan that included the call for a staffing realignment to “resize” or “right-size” churchwide operations.
That proposal was endorsed by Executive Council later that January and eventually adopted by General Convention in June, with total anticipated churchwide revenues and expenses of $143 million over three years.
The plan gives the new presiding bishop flexibility on the timing and form of the $3.5 million in staff cost reductions over the next three years. Church leaders at the time expected retirements and attrition to account for much of the reductions.
Rowe spoke about his approach to that process on Sept. 23 on the first day of the Joint Budget Committee’s two-day meeting at the Maritime Conference Center in suburban Baltimore.
The primary purpose of the committee’s meeting was to determine how to allocate $2 million that the 2025-27 budget plan set aside for General Convention resolutions that included additional funding requests. House of Deputies President Julia Ayala Harris also joined the discussion by Zoom. Curry did not attend.
Nearly $600,000 was immediately diverted to closing a funding gap created by a higher-than-expected increase in the cost of the church’s denominational health insurance plan. The committee divided the remaining $1.4 million among a range of priorities, with input from Rowe, Harris and members of the church’s executive leadership team.
In response to Rowe’s emphasis on church planting and congregational redevelopment, the committee added $200,000 to the more than $2 million already identified for that work in the three-year budget plan.
On creation care, Rowe affirmed the value of spending $90,000 to establish regional creation care networks, as mandated by Resolution B002. Those networks could become a model for diocesan collaboration toward other goals, Rowe said. The committee also applied $315,000 to help the church meet its goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2030, as requested by Resolution D050.
Rowe, however, indicated he did not favor the funding requested by Resolution A021 to establish a creation care loan program.
“At the churchwide level, I don’t think we have the capacity to evaluate loan applications for programs in our dioceses,” Rowe said, adding that other church-affiliated organizations already have similar loan programs.
His largest request of the Joint Budget Committee was for $450,000 to expand the church’s work with the Hartford Institute for Religion Research and ecumenical partners on more robust churchwide data collection and analysis. That work is intended to help the church at all levels better understand current conditions and where the church and its dioceses are heading. “Good data helps dioceses make good decisions,” Rowe said.
Rowe also endorsed the goals of Resolution D022, which calls for a study of the triennial meeting of General Convention, to ensure that the large, churchwide gathering “works for the church we are today.”
The resolution did not request a specific dollar amount, but Rowe suggested $65,000 should be set aside for a task force to conduct a thorough study and make recommendations that could be tested in 2027 at the 82nd General Convention, to be hosted by the Diocese of Arizona in Phoenix.
Another resolution had asked the church to give $200,000 to the Association of Episcopal Deacons. When asked about that funding request, Rowe said he believes in deacons’ “vital and critical ministry” to the church, yet he wasn’t convinced funding at that level was justified.
Some members of the Joint Budget Committee agreed, saying there may be other ways for Executive Council to show its support for deacons.
The committee will present its revisions to the 2025-27 budget plan to Executive Council at its Nov. 7-10 meeting in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
Executive Council also will vote on a single-year 2025 budget based on the three-year budget plan.
That will be the first meeting chaired by Rowe. Episcopal Church Canons assign the presiding bishop the role of chair of Executive Council, and the House of Deputies president serves as vice chair.