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Presiding bishop affirms support for church planters as they worry about future of network, grants
- The Carrasco Chronicle
- Mar 20
- 11 min read
By David Paulsen
[Episcopal News Service] The Rev. Lauren Grubaugh Thomas is in the early stages of forming a new worshiping community in Sterling Ranch, Colorado. It would seem to be an ideal location – a rapidly growing suburb of Denver with a high concentration of young families. Grubaugh Thomas says she couldn’t hope to do it alone.
The same goes for the Rev. Carl Adair, who is developing a new Episcopal congregation in the diverse neighborhood of Sunnyside, Queens, five years after the Diocese of Long Island closed a longtime church there. Like Grubaugh Thomas, Adair’s initial efforts at church planting have been nourished by local and denominational grants, guidance from churchwide staff members and his participation in a grassroots network of enthusiastic church planters.
As a churchwide realignment begins to take shape, however, Adair, Grubaugh Thomas and others who spoke to ENS say they are worried about the future of their network and denominational support. “That network has been absolutely crucial in my ongoing formation as a priest, as a disciple, and I can’t imagine myself doing any of the things we’re trying here without the ongoing support of this nationwide cohort,” Adair told Episcopal News Service in a phone interview.
Recent examples of church-planting starts are plentiful across The Episcopal Church, from a family-friendly dinner church in the Diocese of Georgia to an Episcopal community serving the unhoused in the Diocese of Western Oregon. Innovative Episcopal clergy have launched more than 200 new worshiping communities since 2000 – many of them in the past decade, during which The Episcopal Church has awarded more than $9 million in grants to support that work while developing and expanding its churchwide infrastructure. No figures were immediately available on how many of those new worshiping communities remain active today.
This triennium, changes are underway. The priests involved in this work, who already were uncertain about the status of an additional $2.2 million budgeted for church planting and revitalization in 2025-27, told ENS they are eager for clarifying details about Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe’s plan to realign churchwide operations to better serve dioceses. Last month, Rowe laid off 14 churchwide staff members in the first phase of his restructuring plan, including the two church employees who have developed and overseen the network of Episcopal church planters: the Rev. Tom Brackett, manager for church planting and mission development, and the Rev. Katie Nakamura Rengers, staff officer for church planting.
Though church planting is one of the departments being reorganized or phased out, “our commitment to church planting and redevelopment is undiminished,” Rowe said in a Feb. 20 letter to the church outlining the structural realignment. “In the months to come, we will be reorganizing this ministry and the ways it supports and serves our dioceses.”
The changes also could impact the churchwide grant program that invests in new congregations. It is facilitated each triennium by an advisory board, which has not yet been appointed for this cycle. Rowe says he and House of Deputies President Julia Ayala Harris are now working on those appointments, which were on hold until the staff realignment.
In a March 10 Zoom interview with ENS, Rowe affirmed that he is not abandoning the church’s ongoing investment in church planting. He said the detailed way forward will be worked out through collaborative conversations with dioceses and the priests who have been active in the churchwide network.
“Part of the plan for the future is convening people, consulting widely, hearing what the needs are and then pivoting to those,” Rowe said, to “begin to think about how are we going to meet these needs differently.”
When asked whether the former structure had not been meeting the church’s needs, Rowe emphasized a new diocese-centered approach “rather than us running some kind of parallel structure” at the churchwide level.
“How can we help dioceses realize their local vision for church planting, for redevelopment at the local level?” Rowe said. “I think it will allow for more effective use of resources over the long run. … That’s to be determined, but I think what we want to do is have more integration.”
After Rowe released the initial details of his realignment plan, ENS invited general comment on the plan from members of Executive Council, the church’s governing body between General Convention. Many of those who responded acknowledged some anxiety across the church over the staffing changes but pledged their support for Rowe’s focus on assisting Episcopal dioceses and congregations. Other Executive Council members suggested to ENS that Rowe had not yet been sufficiently forthcoming with details, including about church planting.
“Who will take on that mission work, or are we abandoning this area entirely?” Joe McDaniel, a lay member from the Diocese of the Central Gulf Coast, said about church planting in an email to ENS.
ENS also sought comment on Rowe’s realignment plan from the Rev. Tim Baer, the rector of a well-known and successful church plant, Grace Episcopal Church in the Diocese of Oklahoma. Baer said he is in favor of efforts to change church structures to support mission and ministry at the diocesan level. At the same time, he said he would welcome more clarity about how church planting will be affected.
“I’m eager to hear what that plan is,” Baer said, adding that some churchwide coordination is necessary. Without that support, he said, the capacity for church planting “is near zero in most dioceses.”
In his Feb. 20 letter to the church, Rowe said The Episcopal Church can “make an even stronger and more effective witness to the Gospel of Jesus Christ” by changing some core staff priorities. Under the new operational structure, church planting becomes part of the expansive portfolio of the Rev. Lester Mackenzie, whom Rowe hired as his chief of mission program, a newly created position.
“Church planting cannot be about institutional survival. I believe it must also be about discipleship, deep community and the Spirit’s movement,” Mackenzie said in a written statement to ENS for this story.
“One invitation is a call to cultural humility in mission. How might we shift from expansion to incarnation – showing up, listening and co-creating with local communities? How do we look afresh where God is already at work and join in? I think that this is one way we can approach church planting and redevelopment, one where people don’t have to leave behind their cultures and histories to belong.”
Seeds for today’s church planting network date back as far as 1990s
Such issues are top of mind for priests like Grubaugh Thomas in Colorado and Adair in Long Island who are just beginning to grow new congregations.
Grubaugh Thomas did not yet think of herself as a church planter when she and her husband first relocated to Colorado in 2019. Instead, she began serving as associate rector at St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church in the southern Denver suburb of Littleton. After they moved a bit farther south to Sterling Ranch, a community so new it didn’t have any churches yet, Grubaugh Thomas sensed an opportunity.
Sterling Ranch, billed as a “master-planned community,” didn’t exist a decade ago and the project’s developers expect it will grow to over 30,000 residents once its new homes are fully built out over a 20-year period.
In getting to know her neighbors, “it was really clear people were hungry for community and connection,” Grubaugh Thomas said, and they were intrigued by The Episcopal Church’s reputation as inclusive toward LGBTQ+ people and engaged with justice issues through the Christian call to love one’s neighbor and respect human dignity.
Though more than half of Colorado residents identify as Christian, the state’s Episcopal diocese has not opened a new church in about 15 years, Grubaugh Thomas said. Diocesan leaders encouraged her to see what the Holy Spirit was up to in Sterling Ranch and in 2021, participated in one of the discernment retreats on Zoom that had been organized by churchwide staff.
Grubaugh Thomas, with grant support from within the diocese, now leads services in Sterling Ranch three times a month for a nascent worshiping community called Holy Companion. In this initial phase, she said, encouragement from churchwide staff and the wider network of church planters has been invaluable. “It has been lifesaving for me,” she said.
Like Sterling Ranch, that robust network of Episcopal church planters didn’t exist a decade ago, though its seeds had been planted at least since the 1990s. At that time, The Episcopal Church had declared a “Decade of Evangelism.” In 2003, the development of new congregations was identified as one priority in a series of proposals, known as the “20/20 Vision,” that set even more ambitious goals, including doubling church membership by 2020.
Rowe has expressed skepticism toward those past efforts to grow the church.
“The Decade of Evangelism, how’d that work? Not well,” Rowe said Feb. 26 in a keynote conversation at the Episcopal Parish Network conference in Kansas City, Missouri. “We spent 10 years on evangelism. That’s a good thing. But we have no idea why that didn’t work.”
By numbers alone, the effort to double membership was a clear failure – in the past two decades, The Episcopal Church has dropped from about 2.3 million members to under 1.6 million, according to parochial report data, mirroring trends in other mainline Protestant denominations – though church leaders today still debate the initiatives’ relative merits and legacies.
The Rev. Kevin Martin remembers those old initiatives positively, as a time when the church was developing real momentum in its evangelism. Martin, the retired dean of St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Dallas, Texas, previously led church planting efforts in the Diocese of Texas and served on the task force in the early 2000s that helped develop the 20/20 proposals.
“There’s a narrative out there: ‘We had the Decade of Evangelism that didn’t do anything good for us.’ But that’s actually not true,” Martin told ENS. Those initiatives may not have doubled the church’s membership, but the church was starting to develop new approaches to evangelism, some of which bore fruit.
One lesson, Martin said, was that the church couldn’t expect any and every effort at evangelism to produce results. “There are not 100 ways” to plant a church, he said. Rather, church leaders learned that a handful of proven methods, identified through experimentation and innovation, could be deployed successfully in different contexts across all Episcopal dioceses.
In the 2000s, General Convention passed resolutions every three years that incrementally advanced denominational church planting efforts, and in 2008, Brackett was hired to join the churchwide evangelism staff, specializing in church plants, and that October, he helped convene a first-ever conference of Episcopal church planters in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Then in 2012, the Standing Commission on Mission and Evangelism submitted a report to General Convention that analyzed the denomination’s continued decline, partly a factor of a membership that remained mostly white and economically privileged. It suggested a path to reaching underserved communities by emphasizing church development and redevelopment.
“Our neighborhoods and local settings have changed dramatically over the last few decades, and in many ways they are as foreign as a land thousands of miles away,” the commission said. “There is no reason to scrap all that we’ve known, done and loved. There is an urgent need to translate it, creating spaces that serve as ‘mission laboratories’ where the ancient meets the future, where the traditions meet the margins.”
In response, General Convention called for the creation of a fund for “mission enterprise zones,” or hubs for experimentation in congregational development. The churchwide budget for 2013-15 included $2 million to establish those zones and support creation of new churches.
Three years later, in 2015, General Convention authorized $5.8 million for church planting support and an expanded grant program, and it called for creation of a new churchwide network of church planters.
Two of the leading voices in favor of those efforts were priests who had successfully planted new churches in their dioceses. Both would soon be elected and consecrated as bishops.
After decades of investment in church planting, changes are underway
The Rt. Rev. Susan Brown Snook, now bishop of the Diocese of San Diego, previously served as a priest in the Diocese of Arizona. In 2006, she planted the Episcopal Church of the Nativity in the Phoenix suburb of Scottsdale, and within a decade, the new congregation had grown from a small group of families meeting in homes to a full brick-and-mortar parish with Sunday attendance averaging around 200.
In 2015, she called on her fellow deputies at General Convention to adopt her proposal for a large churchwide investment in church planting: “It is time for us as The Episcopal Church to put our money where our mouth is, to be bold, daring and passionate in the belief that we have something to offer every community, every culture, every place where we are The Episcopal Church.”
General Convention initially included $3 million in the 2016-2018 budget for church planting. It added an additional $2.8 million on the urging of a deputy from the Diocese of Georgia, the Rev. Frank Logue.
Logue, now bishop of Georgia, also had experience as a church planter. In 2000, he began laying the foundation for a new congregation in Kingsland, Georgia, near the Florida state line. By 2004, the growing congregation of King of Peace Episcopal Church had built its own church and a preschool, and it eventually would reach nearly 150 people worshiping on a typical Sunday.
Logue saw 2015 as “a potentially historic moment.” He told ENS in an interview last week that a large budgetary commitment to church planting was a crucial step forward that year, but the needs were more than financial.
“I was as interested in getting infrastructure at the churchwide level to support church planters, knowing how lonely it can be,” Logue said. “They needed a community of support.”
Snook agreed. “We wanted to see a churchwide network of leadership training and equipping of plants, and of course funding of new church planting of all kinds,” Snook said in a recent ENS interview.
The Rev. Jane Gerdsen, a church planter from the Diocese of Southern Ohio, was named chair of the Advisory Group on Church Planting, which solicited applications and recommended grants for 2016-18. In those three years, 21 new church plants were funded, as well as 22 new mission enterprise zones and hybrid missional communities, though it is unclear how many of them achieved sustainability.
Gerdsen, in an interview with ENS, underscored how critical such efforts are to any strategy for reversing denominational decline.
“It’s an investment in the future of the church,” Gerdsen said. “If we want to grow the church, sometimes church plants reach people who wouldn’t walk through the doors of a traditional church.”
The Rev. Mike Michie, hired in 2017 as the church’s first staff officer for church planting infrastructure, echoed Gerdsen’s point. “I’m convinced that the only reason for our church’s [membership] decline is its failure to start new churches in the last 25 years,” Michie told ENS this month. Dioceses need to partner in this work, he said, but broad success isn’t possible without strong churchwide leadership.
Michie was tasked with developing the network that now supports today’s Episcopal church planters. He stepped down in 2019 to return to parish ministry in the Diocese of West Texas, and Rengers, a church planter from Alabama, replaced him on the churchwide staff.
Rowe, who took office Nov. 1, is now four months into his nine-year term. Snook and Logue expressed confidence that the new presiding bishop will continue to prioritize church planting as he moves forward with a structural realignment. Michie, too, said he trusts Rowe’s commitment to church planting is genuine, though “I would love to know what that looks like.”
Adair also is eager to learn how “the gifts of these networks” will be preserved. As he prepares to launch a weekly worship schedule this September at the Episcopal Mission in Sunnyside, he had been energized by the frequent in-person and online gatherings organized by Brackett’s team. “The conversation was about what new and exciting thing is God drawing us into, if we can loosen our grasp and be led like the first apostles were,” Adair told ENS.
The last round of churchwide grants was in October 2023, and Adair received a $15,000 “seed” grant for his work. Adair said he feels privileged that he also has financial support from the Diocese of Long Island to explore how best to connect his neighbors to The Episcopal Church. Even so, an additional churchwide grant would be “very much a part of the long-term plan” for growth.
Grubaugh Thomas, the Colorado priest, called church planters a “scrappy” bunch. They are “people worth investing in,” she said, because they feel a call to this work as their vocation. “It is so life-giving. It is so joyful. And it’s worth it.”
– David Paulsen is a senior reporter and editor for Episcopal News Service based in Wisconsin. He can be reached at dpaulsen@episcopalchurch.org.
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