Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe And The Episcopalian Mindset

Episcopal Church Bishop Sean Rowe: It's against what we stand for to help white refugees fleeing South Africa pic.twitter.com/h4LEZaYQt6

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) May 14, 2025

I left The Episcopal Church behind a couple of years before I became Catholic, via a twisted path that involved an unsuccessful attempt by a "continuing Anglican" parish to enter the Ordinariate. On balance, that distance from my Episcopalian days has kept me from thinking very hard about the problems I saw with day-to-day Episcopalianism. An article from Last year in The Critic, which came well before the latest controversy from Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe's statement that it's "against what we stand for" to help Afrikaner refugees fleeing South Africa, gives a conventional picture of TEC's predicament:

The figures are stark. Only 12,000 people were confirmed into the Episcopal Church in 2022.

. . . As those confirmation figures imply, the statistics are far from rosy. In 2022, there were 1.6 million baptised Episcopalians, down 21 per cent from 2013. Attendance collapsed by 43 per cent over the same period, with almost 285,000 fewer churchgoers each Sunday — roughly equivalent to a city the size of St Louis.

But this neglects other trends, such as the increasing average age of the Episcopalian population. Another discussion goes into much more illustrative detail:

One of the most troubling things about the future of the Episcopal Church is that the average member is incredibly old. The modal age of an Episcopalian in 2019 was sixty-nine years old. With life expectancy around 80, we can easily expect at least a third of the current membership of the denomination to be gone in the next fifteen or twenty years.

. . . But, that doesn’t tell the whole story about the future of the Episcopalians. Churches need money to operate and on this measure there’s plenty of reasons to be optimistic. The Episcopalians calculate what they call “plate and pledge,” which is an accounting of not just money dropped in the offering plate, but also the amount that members have pledged to donate in the future.

. . . There’s little reason to expect that the money is going to run out for the Episcopalians anytime soon. In fact, the total amount of plate and pledge has actually risen between 2014 and 2019. In 2014, the denomination received about 1.3 billion dollars from their members. By 2019 that had increased by about fifty million dollars. That’s surprising given that the overall attendance in the tradition has declined during that same time period.

. . . Now, there are two possible explanations that I can think of to explain this trend. The first is that those that remain in the Episcopal Church are incredibly committed to the cause. . . . The other is that many Episcopalians have died in the last few years and they have given a portion of their estate to the church. This would obviously drive up the overall “plate and pledge” donations and possibly inflate these numbers. It may be the case that the average offering in the plate is actually smaller, but that is supplemented by these larger donations from the wills of those who have died in recent years.

The piece goes to ther heart of what isn't wrong:

But, that leaves a bigger question – can a denomination continue when it has money but no people? That’s the future that may be facing the Episcopal Church. According to their finance office, the denomination has $400 million in trust, $11 billion in a pension plan for retired clergy, and another $4.5 billion in assets held at the parish and diocese level. To put it bluntly, money is not the issue. This means that denominational leaders are not going to be forced to disband when the accounts hit zero[.]

What we're looking at -- and what we've been looking at for quite some time -- is a denomination that hasn't needed to worry about money. One thing that's always intrigued me about TEC is the extreme surplus of graduating seminarians each year vis-a-vis the available positions for new associate priests. This is largely because the Episcopal priesthood continues to be a highly prestigious and well-paid occupation, with relatively undemanding duties, especially considering the steady decline in membership, but there's always enough money to pay the clergy -- or at least, those clergy who can find jobs.

Contrast that with the perpetual shortage of Roman Catholic vocations. This spilled over into the Ordinariate; there was an equivalent surplus of Episcopalian seminarians and young associates who suddenly felt the call to cross the Tiber, especially when the Ordinariate was going to be open to married priests. Experience showed quickly enough that Episcopalian vocations don't produce the same quality of men as Catholic.

But reflecting on my Episcopalian days, I've begun to think more and more that money, and the attitudes of the monied, drove much of the Episcopal mindset. I began to see this as I went through confirmation at an upscale parish: at the time, I was working for a bank. I quickly discovered that Episcopalians look down on banks. They're connected with trade. One priest, when he learned where I worked, said, "Oh, I could never work for a bank. I'd just give away all the money!"

I briefly considered suggesting that if he did that, he'd actually be stealing from all the accountholders, but I quickly realized that wouldn't change his mind. Nor would it change his mind if I said the bequests in trust to to the parish, or the funds that will pay his pension, are also held in banks. The preferred job at that parish was with a respectable non-profit.

I met my wife at another Episcopal parish, and as we began to develop our plans to get married, we paid the necessary visit to discuss them with the rector. I'd since left the bank, so that wasn't what disturbed the rector. His problem wasn't so much that my wife was an attorney -- plenty of white-shoe law partners are Episcopalian, after all -- but that my fiancee was a lawyer for an insurance company. He actually believed that what an insurance attorney does all day is find ways to cheat policyholders out of their payments. He seemed sincerely worried that I was making a big mistake.

However reluctantly, he did let us continue with our plans, but this was a real revelation for me. At the first parish, I eventually wound up on the mission committee, which had a modest budget for donations to promote mission. The Episcopal chaplain at the University of Southern California came to make a pitch for his program: he said that given the current academic environment, a university campus should be considered mission territory, and he had concrete proposals for what could be done.

The conmittee had had no other such proposals -- as far as I know, it had just rubber-stamped an annual donation to end apartheid in South Africa, which went to heaven knew what halfway around the world. The committee chair told me that the same old-same old donation to South Africa was far, far more important, and that was that. Somehow I see this week's announcement from Presiding Bishop Rowe that it isn't the church's business to help white South Africans as coming from that same old-same old mindset.

Looking back, I have a hard time explaining to myself why I put up with this as long as I did, except that actually, I didn't. Our last parish, where we were for ten years, which is a third of my time as an Episcopalian, was largely gay, and its big advantage was that it wasn't as stuffy as the others. The plus to the gay part was that they didn't look down on people for working at banks or insurance companies -- they were much less inclined to look down on anyone. And they were Anglo-Catholic, which went a long way to soften me about Catholicism.

But I think the real Episcopalians only tolerate the gays and use them mainly to virtue signal, which the gays actually don't like. The real Episcopalians tolerate them as long as they don't interfere with the money, and that's not so much the dollars and cents, but the mindset. That's The Episcopal Church of which Sean Rowe is the Presiding Bishop. It will keep going until the money runs out, which is likely to be a long time.