General Convention elects youngest Episcopal Presiding Bishop on record

Bishop Rowe sailed through Wednesday’s (June 26) House of Bishops’ election with a simple majority on the first ballot. He garnered 89 votes (56%) when 82 votes were needed to secure the Primate’s crozier. At a distant second was Scott Barker (XI Nebraska) with 24 votes (15%); followed by Robert Wright (X Atlanta) with 19 votes (12%); Daniel Gutierrez with 17 votes (11%); DeDe Duncan-Probe with nine votes (6%).

Bishops Duncan-Probe, Gutierrez and Wright all check the various politically correct diversity boxes — gender, ethnicity, and race respectively.

However, none of the lesbian or gay bishops — Bonnie Perry (XI Michigan); Mary Glasspool (New York-assisting); Thomas Brown (X Maine); and Deon Johnson (XI Missouri) — threw their miters in the ring this go around. The next time the Episcopal Church is slated to elect another Presiding Bishop is at the 84th General Convention in 2033. Date and place to be announced.

At the age of 49, Presiding Bishop-elect Rowe will be the youngest top bishop in Episcopal Church history. Church annals apparently also show that at 32 he was the youngest bishop to be consecrated in 2007, as well as the youngest Episcopal priest to be ordained in 2000 at the tender age of 25.

Bishop Rowe, a cradle Episcopalian, was born in 1975. He is a native of northwestern Pennsylvania and in 2007 he became the VIII Bishop of his home diocese — the Episcopal Diocese of Northwestern Pennsylvania. Since 2019 he has also been provisional bishop of the neighboring Diocese of Western New York, and was provisional bishop of the intrastate Diocese of Bethlehem from 2014-2018.

The XXVIII Presiding Bishop-elect earned his B.A. in history from Grove City College, a northwestern Pennsylvania liberal arts college with Presbyterian roots; an M.Div. from Virginia Theological Seminary; and a Ph.D. in organizational learning and leadership from Gannon University. The future Presiding Bishop was also granted an honorary DD from the Virginia Theological Seminary, and he received an appointment to the Theology faculty at Gannon University, a Catholic university in Erie, Pennsylvania.

Bishop Rowe may not have personally checked any of the diversity boxes on his path to the Presiding Bishop’s throne of The Episcopal Church, but he is all in on fully backing the LGBTQ lobby.

He was one of the many Episcopal Church bishops who signed the “Statement from Anglican Bishops and Primates Who Are Keen to Affirm and Celebrate LGBT+ People” at the 2022 Lambeth Conference.

“Neither the Lambeth Conference nor any other part of the Anglican Communion has any authority in the internal matters of the Episcopal Church (or any other member church),” Bishop Rowe posted two years on his blog while on his way to his second Lambeth Conference. “In the Episcopal Church, the General Convention is the highest authority on church policy and canon law, and our General Convention has been clear: ‘Our church is deeply committed to the full inclusion of LGBTQ people in the life and witness of the church and in civil society as well.’ Nothing that happens at this Lambeth Conference or at any other Anglican Communion meeting can change that.”

Sean Rowe will be taking over the reins of a crumbling denomination. Even as he took his first breath in 1975 The Episcopal Church was already starting to see early signs of decline from the high of 3.6 million in 1966 to 2.8 million in 1975, a drop of 800,000 souls (-22%). But since the day of his birth The Episcopal Church has lost fifty percent of its membership dropping from 2.8 million to 1.4 million.

Since then, Episcopal Church numbers have fallen like a stone and are continuing to tumble. In 2007, when Sean Rowe first joined the House of Bishops, there were 2,116,749 Episcopalians worshipping in 7,055 churches in the American church with an ASA of 727,822 and a Plate & Pledge of $1,331,541,000. A little over a third (34.4%) of enrolled Episcopalians were attending church. Katharine Jefferts Schori was Presiding Bishop at the time. Since he joined the House of Bishops, 146 other priests have taken the miter and four more are slated to grab the crozier in the not too distant future.

Now as Bishop Rowe ascends to the top of the Episcopal Church’s hierarchy, he receives from outgoing Presiding Bishop Michael Curry an Episcopal Church with 1,432,082 congregants in 6,249 congregations of which only 26.4% or 349,157 weekly worshippers show up and toss $1,336,308,000 into the collection plate.

Since Sean Rowe has been in the House of Bishops, he has seen the membership of his historic denomination drop by 644,667 (-32.3%) members. There are now 806 (-11.4%) fewer congregations than there were when he joined the HOB with 378,665 (-52%) fewer worshippers attending weekly services. Only the Plate & Pledge shows a modest uptick of $4,767,000 (+0.3%) but that is not enough to keep up with spiraling inflation.

Episcopal Church membership first dropped below two million in 2010 and the ASA dipped below the half a million mark ten years later in 2020 sliding to 458,176, all during Bishop Rowe’s time in the House of Bishops as Bishop of Northwestern Pennsylvania. In 2021 the ASA took a COVID plunge to 292,851, however it has inched up slightly to 349,157 in 2022. Even under Presiding Bishop Rowe’s leadership the ASA may never recover pre-COVID numbers.

Mary Ann Mueller is a journalist living in Texas. She is a regular contributor to VirtueOnline

General Convention elects youngest Episcopal Presiding Bishop on record
Sean Rowe to be elevated to XXVIII Presiding Bishop in November

By Mary Ann Mueller
VOL Special Correspondent
www.virtueonline.org
June 27, 2024

General Convention has spoken in electing Bishop Sean Rowe as the latest in a long line of Presiding Bishops which stretch back to William White in 1789.

As a straight white male, the new Presiding Bishop-elect was able to break out of the woke intersectionality which drove the election of the two immediate past leaders of The Episcopal Church — Katherine Jefferts Schori who broke the through stained glass ceiling (2006-2015); and Michael Curry who pulled down the race barrier (2015-2024).