Latest News

In this issue: Prayers concerns from Global Mission, Annual Conference registration opens March 5, disabilities leader to present Ministers' Association pre-Conference event, BVS "Visionary Voices" speaker series, job openings, National Council of Churches prayer webinar, Green Lectionary podcast for Lent, Seven Weeks for Water Campaign from the World Council of Churches.

Ambassador Amira Hanania, a Palestinian diplomat and media veteran, serves as the representative of the Higher Presidential Committee for Church Affairs in Europe. A Christian from Bethlehem, she has dedicated her career to journalism and diplomacy. Recently, she completed a documentary titled “Via Dolorosa: The Path of Sorrows,” which sheds light on the history of Christians in Palestine and the challenges they face. 

The shocking realities of war and how Hope Lebedyn are supporting orphans as a declaration of God's love and protection

The March offering from the Ventures in Christian Discipleship program at McPherson (Kan.) College will be “Acknowledging Grief, Claiming Hope: Reflections from Around the Church of the Brethren” to be presented by Dava Hensley, Church of the Brethren ordained minister and 2025 Annual Conference moderator.

Tim Button-Harrison has announced his retirement from leadership of the Church of the Brethren’s Northern Plains District. At the Feb. 7-8 meeting of the district board, it was announced that he will retire on Dec. 31, 2025, after having served the district for more than 19 years.

The Susquehanna Valley Ministry Center (SVMC) has hired Audrey Hollenberg-Duffey as the new director, beginning May 1. Prior to May, Hollenberg-Duffey will be working with retiring executive director Donna M. Rhodes to provide a good transition.

[Episcopal News Service] The realignment plan for churchwide operations that Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe unveiled last week was primarily focused on reorienting and, in some cases, phasing out departments and staff positions as a part of Rowe’s vision of an Episcopal Church that better serves its dioceses. At the same time, another level of church governance remains in a prolonged state of transition: the church’s canonical leadership team. The Episcopal Church is incorporated in the state of New York as the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society, or the DFMS. Episcopal Church Canons and the DFMS’ Constitution specify at least five individuals serve as the institution’s officers, starting with the presiding bishop and the House of Deputies president. The other three positions named as officers are the church’s chief financial officer, its chief operating officer and the secretary of Executive Council. In recent years, the secretary role has been held by the executive officer of General Convention, who also has served as secretary of convention. All of those positions are now in transition. Kurt Barnes, the church’s current chief financial officer, announced in December that he plans to retire after 21 years. He agreed to remain on staff while the presiding officers – Rowe and House of Deputies President Julia Ayala Harris – recruit and nominate Barnes’ successor. The canons give Executive Council the authority to appoint the presiding officers’ nominee. “We have had a quite tremendously diverse pool of applicants for the position,” Rowe told Executive Council on Feb. 19, the final day of the governing body’s three-day meeting last week. In consultation with current and former Executive Council members, Rowe said he and Ayala Harris have narrowed the field to four finalists. After picking their nominee, they expect to call a special meeting of Executive Council in March for an approval vote. A day after council’s meeting, on Feb. 20, Rowe issued a letter to the church summarizing a series of staff cuts, including 14 layoffs, as well as department reorganizations and changes to certain staff’s titles as he carries out the first phase of the realignment. One of the positions affected was chief operating officer. The church’s last permanent chief operations officer was the Rev. Geoffrey Smith, a deacon who retired at the end of 2022. Then-Presiding Bishop Michael Curry and Ayala Harris selected Jane Cisluycis, a former Executive Council member, as their nominee to replace Smith, but when some members of Executive Council objected to the recruitment process, Curry and Ayala Harris agreed to change Cisluycis’ title to acting COO. Executive Council, though still divided over the nomination, approved Cisluycis in February 2023. In his Feb. 20 letter, Rowe stated, “our realignment process has indicated that, at this time, we do not need to fill the role of chief operating officer.” Instead, Cisluycis will remain on staff with the new title of senior director of operations, Rowe said. Cisluycis will retain most of the former responsibilities of the COO, including information technology, human resources, archives, and building services. Rowe did not say when, if ever, the COO position would be filled again, as outlined in the canons – which also leaves vacant one of the officer positions mandated by the DFMS Constitution. The canons say, “upon joint nomination by the Chair and the Vice-Chair [the two presiding officers], the Council shall appoint a Chief Operating Officer who shall serve at the pleasure of, and report and be accountable to, the Chair [the presiding bishop].” As for the Executive Council secretary, permanently filling that position is complicated by the fact that, in the past, the role of secretary has been filled by the person serving as executive officer of General Convention. General Convention’s last executive officer, the Rev. Michael Barlowe, retired at the end of the summer 2024 after 11 years in that office. During the ongoing transition, Barlowe’s former deputy, the Rev. Molly James, was named by Curry and Ayala Harris as interim executive officer, and for now, James also is filling Barlowe’s former role of Executive Council secretary. Barlowe, as head of the General Convention Office, had been the central churchwide official responsible for the administration of church governance. The General Convention Office’s duties have included negotiating contracts for venues and accommodations at each General Convention, coordinating the meetings of all the church’s interim governing bodies, receiving and tallying parochial report data from dioceses and congregations, facilitating the consent process for bishop elections, and ensuring the church has the technology needed to achieve all those goals. Initially, Curry and Ayala Harris announced a timeline for replacing Barlowe that would have culminated in the presiding officers presenting a nominee for Executive Council’s approval this month. That timeline no longer pertains. Rowe was elected the 28th presiding bishop in June 2024 and took office Nov. 1, and one of his first actions as presiding bishop was to propose a new committee structure for Executive Council, including the creation of a committee “to examine the role, function and canonical structure of the position of the executive officer of General Convention.” That newly formed committee, led by Katie Sherrod of the Diocese of Texas, produced a four-page report that was presented and discussed by Executive Council when it met last week in suburban Baltimore, Maryland. “The vacancy in the position of Executive Officer has afforded an opportunity to provide clarity for the church in the search for the right person for that role,” the report says.  “It is challenging to understand because it always has been entangled with the canonical positions of the Secretary of the House of Deputies, the Secretary of the General Convention, and the other offices held, ex officio, by the Secretary of the General Convention.” The role, if it were a painting, “would be by Picasso during his Cubism period,” the committee added. The committee suggested three possible paths to pursue: Separate the duties of secretary and executive officer, completely integrate the duties of the two […]

Seattle, WA—Today, three national and local faith-based refugee-serving agencies and nine individuals won a preliminary injunction in the case of Pacito v. Trump. The ruling came in the first lawsuit challenging President Trump’s Executive Order (EO) suspending the U.S. refugee resettlement program (USRAP), as well as the efforts by the Trump Administration to decimate USRAP by withholding critical, congressionally-appropriated funding ... Read More

[Episcopal News Service — Kansas City, Missouri] The Episcopal Parish Network’s 40th annual conference is underway as Episcopal clergy and lay leaders come together to learn from each other and share best practices for creating vigorous ministries and congregations. “I think every year there’s always something new to learn or something to take home, something to be and someone to be inspired by,” the Rev. Peggy Lo, rector of St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Austin, Texas, and president of Episcopal Parish Network’s board of directors, told Episcopal News Service. “There’s so much going on in the church and lots to explore.” Nearly 700 Episcopal clergy and lay leaders churchwide are gathering at the Westin Kansas City at Crown Center here for the Feb. 25-28 conference. This year’s theme, “Together in Hope: Leading With Purpose,” is intended to inspire Episcopalians to be productive leaders during times of transition, both in the church and society.  Formerly known as the Consortium of Endowed Episcopal Parishes, the Episcopal Parish Network is a national, membership-based organization of clergy and lay leaders representing more than 250 parishes of all sizes and budgets. The network offers peer-to-peer online education and other leadership initiatives throughout the year. Its conference is the largest annual Episcopal gathering. Joe Swimmer, EPN executive director, told ENS that the organization and annual conference focus on local ministries. “I’m most enthusiastic to see how resources that come from the churchwide structure or from dioceses enable parishes and cathedrals to thrive,” he said. “Church is family … and I want The Episcopal Church to thrive so that we can have the impact within society that we should.” The conference officially kicked off on Feb. 25 with the Episcopal Preaching Foundation lunch, followed by a pre-conference session, with topics ranging from effective church communications to endowments and finance. Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe is scheduled to participate in a keynote conversation with Eric Motley, deputy director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and chair of the Chapter at Washington National Cathedral, on the afternoon of Feb. 26. On the topic “Vision for Our Future,” they will look at innovative models of governance, collaboration and ministry to address necessary structural changes. The goal is to ensure The Episcopal Church remains animated and pertinent to a rapidly evolving secular world while compassionately responding to contemporary global challenges, according to the program.  The first full day of the conference, Feb. 26, will start with one final pre-conference session. The Rev. Fadi Diab, rector of St. Andrew’s Anglican/Episcopal Church in Ramallah, West Bank, Palestine, and the Rev. Ranjit Mathews, canon to the ordinary in the Diocese of Connecticut, will lead a keynote conversation on “Hope in the Shadow of Power: Leadership for the Sake of the Gospel and the World.” They will discuss how Episcopalians can be constructive leaders amid times of stress, anxiety and fear-inducing transition through a biblical lens. In all situations, Michael Sullivan, president and CEO of Kanuga Conference and Retreat Center, a nonprofit Episcopal camp and conference center in Hendersonville, North Carolina, and former president of EPN’s board of directors, told ENS that successful congregational leaders must be resilient.  “What is your ability to be agile, to address the situation – not just to maintain the status quo, but to see opportunities that situations bring? How do we as a church bring the Gospel in these places of darkness? Each place of darkness can have different characteristics, so how we do that in context is really important,” Sullivan said. The first series of workshops will begin following Diab’s and Mathews’ keynote conversation. Topics vary, covering multiple aspects of leadership, such as data-driven leadership transition planning and reimagining parish property. After the second round of workshops on the morning of Feb. 27, Bob Kendrick, president of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Missouri, and William Mattox, a board member of The Village Square, a community-based civic organization in Tallahassee, Florida, will lead a keynote conversation on “Building Meaningful Conversations and Community: Lessons for the Church from Civil Society and the Ballpark.” They will share how Episcopal leaders can overcome adversity and build community, connection and resilience. A keynote conversation on “Data, Faith, and Resource Allocation in the Modern Church” will take place on Feb. 28 featuring Ryan Burge, a political scientist and professor at Eastern Illinois University; the Rev. Molly James, interim executive officer of General Convention; and Matthew Price, senior vice president of research and data for Church Pension Group. They will explain the importance of demographic data and trends and how The Episcopal Church can use them to make decisions that will foster proper resource allocation, clergy development and congregational growth. “What is the algebra of the church? I think that as we move into this new era for the church, those are the kinds of metrics that people in our vestries are going to want to know and dive in on,” said Adam MacDonald, director of development of St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, New York City, and co-chair of the conference’s planning committee. “As a church staff person, I’m going to want to be able to report on those metrics.” The Very Rev. Andrew McGowan, dean and president of Berkeley Divinity School and McFaddin professor of Anglican studies and pastoral theology at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, will lead the final keynote conversation on “Shifting Dynamics, Changing Landscapes, and the Future.” He will discuss the realities of declining membership in traditional churches and the cultural shifts that impact religion’s role in modern society. Karen Kraycirik, co-chair of the conference’s planning committee and chief operating officer of Christ Church Cathedral in Houston, Texas, told ENS that the planning committee knew when it began program preparation 10 months ago that participants would arrive at the conference with different emotions and needs. “We are at a time in which the United States and the world are undergoing a lot of […]

Despite the suspension of the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, CWS remains committed to supporting refugee and immigrant families. Through essential services in CWS local offices—ranging from legal aid and housing assistance to medical support—CWS continues to provide a lifeline for newcomers in need. For more than 75 years, CWS has stood alongside refugees and newcomers, working in partnership with communities, ... Read More