[Episcopal News Service – Linthicum Heights, Maryland] The Episcopal Church Archives would move to a new permanent location at a church property in the Diocese of Atlanta under a plan authorized June 24 by Executive Council, the church’s interim governing body.

The resolution adopted by Executive Council directs church leaders to conduct final negotiations to purchase and redevelop the 3.5-acre property in Oakwood, Georgia, formerly St. Gabriel’s Episcopal Church, which closed in October 2023. Documents and artifacts detailing centuries’ worth of Episcopal Church history are preserved by the Archives, which currently occupy a leased warehouse space in Austin, Texas.

“We are hopeful at the prospect of making St. Gabriel’s the future home for The Episcopal Church Archives,” Chief Financial Officer Christopher Lacovara told Episcopal News Service. “We plan to approach negotiations balancing market realities with our responsibility for stewardship of church resources and the need to preserve our shared stories.”

The Archives vote occurred on the final day of Executive Council’s June 23-25 meeting here at the Maritime Conference Center in suburban Baltimore. Presentations and council business this week also included updates from church leaders on the ongoing churchwide staff realignment, the future of Episcopal Migration Ministries, upgrades to the church’s financial management systems and the work of Episcopal Relief & Development.

“We’re in the midst of a serious reallocation of resources to invest in mission … so that we can be heard [by the world] and our very powerful witness can be most effectively carried out,” Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe said June 24 in his formal report to Executive Council on the realignment and other changes since he took office last fall.

In addition to endorsing the Archives plan, council voted this week to finalize the elevation of the church’s Navajo Nation mission to the new Missionary Diocese of Navajoland by accepting the new diocese’s constitution.

And council elected two new Episcopal members to the Anglican Consultative Council: Puerto Rico Bishop Rafael Morales Maldonado and Diocese of New York lay leader Yvonne O’Neal. They will join the Rev. Ranjit Mathews of the Episcopal Church in Connecticut on the ACC, one of the Anglican Communion’s four Instruments of Communion. The three Episcopal members will participate with members from the other 41 Anglican provinces around the world at the next ACC meeting, scheduled for summer 2026 and hosted by the Church of Ireland.

Executive Council also paid tribute to the Ven. Stannard Baker, a member and deacon from the Diocese of Vermont who died of an apparent heart attack overnight after participating online June 23 in the meeting’s first day. On June 25, council voted for a resolution named in Baker’s honor that backs the creation of a working group to improve churchwide support for deacons. Council concluded its work by approving a courtesy resolution remembering Baker and standing for a moment of silence before Rowe offered a final prayer.

Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe gives a report to Executive Council on June 24 at the Maritime Conference Center in suburban Baltimore, Maryland. Photo: David Paulsen/Episcopal News Service

Executive Council is the church’s governing body between triennial meetings of General Convention. It is responsible for managing the churchwide budget, adopting new policy statements as needed and providing oversight for the work of the program and ministry staff that reports to the presiding bishop.

The presiding bishop chairs Executive Council, and the House of Deputies president serves as its vice chair. Its 38 other voting members are a mix of bishops, other clergy and lay leaders. Twenty are elected by General Convention to staggered six-year terms, or 10 new members every three years. The Episcopal Church’s nine provinces elect the other 18 to six-year terms, also staggered.

Its next meeting is in October at Kanuga, the Episcopal conference center in the Diocese of Western North Carolina.

The Archives vote was Executive Council’s central action on its final day of this meeting, following a presentation in closed session about financial considerations and other details related to the Diocese of Atlanta site. Selecting a new location brings the church a major step closer to concluding its nearly 20-year effort to find a new home for The Episcopal Church Archives.

General Convention passed a resolution in 2006 initiating efforts to relocate the Archives, and in 2009, The Episcopal Church purchased a parking lot across the street from St. David’s Episcopal Church in Austin, intending to develop part of the lot for the Archives. In the subsequent decade, the value of real estate in Austin surged, and in late 2018, the church chose to sell the undeveloped lot, realizing a net investment return of several million dollars.

The Archives have been without a long-term home since 2021, when they moved out of space they had occupied for 60 years at the Seminary of the Southwest. The church had been keeping about 6,500 cubic feet of material on the third floor of the seminary’s Booher Library, including letters, diaries, photographs, motion pictures, plans, maps, certificates of ordination, journals of every diocese, various periodicals and magazines, church newspapers, paintings and parish histories. An overflow of additional archival materials was kept in rented storage at three offsite warehouses.

Instead of building a new facility, Archives staff oversaw renovations of a rented 10,000-square-foot former furniture store in Austin to include a lunchroom, bathrooms, a shipment receiving area and an archival reading room. That facility helped address storage constraints but was never seen as a permanent solution.

In January 2024, Executive Council authorized negotiations for a potential long-term lease of space at the DeKoven Center in Racine, Wisconsin. The DeKoven Center, with an 11-acre campus overlooking Lake Michigan about a half hour south of Milwaukee, originally was founded by Episcopalians in 1852 as Racine College under Bishop Jackson Kemper. Today, it is operated by a nonprofit of the same name as a retreat center and a popular site for weddings and other events.

When Executive Council discussed that plan again in April 2024, however, members concluded the meeting without finalizing a lease agreement, and church leaders instead began researching a broader range of potential sites for consideration.

Several options were presented to Executive Council at its meeting this week, though the Diocese of Atlanta site was the only recommendation, receiving unanimous backing of the Archives Advisory Committee and two committees of Executive Council. The final council vote also was unanimous.

“We concluded that [the DeKoven Center] site was too expensive, did not have room to grow and would not have been owned and controlled by the church since occupancy would have been subject to a long-term lease,” the committees said in their explanatory text attached to the resolution.

“The site in the Diocese of Atlanta offers more benefits at a lower cost than other sites, with the significant advantage of a reasonable purchase price so that the church owns and controls it indefinitely. … The new Archives facility shall be constructed to incorporate nationally recognized and designated professional standards.”

The DeKoven Center responded with a statement calling the decision “a deep disappointment” while taking issue with Executive Council’s description of the center’s site and negotiations. “The original proposal more than doubled the current archival capacity, with assurances for additional campus space and flexible, cost-conscious buildout options. At no time did DFMS express a requirement for ownership.”

“While disappointed, The DeKoven Center acknowledges the importance of the Episcopal Church Archives securing a permanent home and offers congratulations on this milestone,” the center said in its statement. “However, the center laments that the Archives will not benefit from the unique offerings of The DeKoven campus — tranquil surroundings, historic Episcopal character, spiritual and missional alignment, and a deeply rooted tradition of hospitality.”

The Executive Council resolution did not specify the estimated purchase price for the property nor what it would cost to redevelop the site to house the Archives. Lacovara, the church’s chief financial officer, said church leaders are still considering whether it would be most appropriate to renovate and expand existing structures on the property or pursue new construction for the Archives.

Chief Finance Officer Christopher Lacovara on June 23 makes his first presentation to Executive Council since he was appointed to the church’s top finance job in March. Photo: David Paulsen/Episcopal News Service

[Episcopal News Service – Linthicum Heights, Maryland] The Episcopal Church must remain committed to Christian witness in increasingly troubling times, Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe said June 23 in his opening remarks to Executive Council, and the church’s new chief financial officer outlined accounting upgrades to help bolster the church in that mission.

Rowe opened this June 23-25 meeting by inviting prayers for the Middle East amid recent attacks between Israel and Iran and the June 22 U.S. bombing of Iranian nuclear sites. He said he was in contact with Anglican Archbishop Hosam Naoum of the Diocese of Jerusalem, who asked Episcopalians to be peacemakers in the face of his region’s continuing conflict.

“Please continue to pray for all God’s people in those places,” Rowe said.

The presiding bishop also lamented political divisions and recent violence in the United States, where a Minnesota lawmaker and husband were assassinated this month and where the Episcopal cathedral in Utah offered shelter for protesters when gunfire broke out during a rally.

“I do not need to tell you that these are challenging times for the church we serve and God’s people in our communities,” Rowe told the council members, who were gathered online and in person at the Maritime Conference Center in suburban Baltimore. “Many of our dioceses and congregations are responding to unprecedented need, feeding people who are hungry, comforting those who are afraid, struggling to find new models for ministries and to hold onto hope for the future of the church.”

He acknowledged the fine line that he and other church leaders must walk in speaking out on national and global issues, with some people calling on the church to respond more publicly to the day’s issues and others accusing the church of meddling too much in politics.

The church’s first allegiance, Rowe said, is not to world leaders or political parties. Though Episcopalians are not of one mind politically, “we are all followers of the risen Christ.”

“We can resist the urge to give ourselves over to the excesses of one party or another, or one country or another,” he said. “We’re a living laboratory for how to build community with the risen Christ at the center. … When we are at our best, we can make a powerful witness to the world through our unity.”

House of Deputies President Julia Ayala Harris also alluded to contemporary issues, tensions and challenges in her opening remarks.

“The global disruptions we are witnessing are not abstract. They have names, faces and sacred dignity,” she said while sharing the story of a transgender teenager named Finn who was troubled by the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision allowing states to ban gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors.

“He challenged me to bear witness to trans joy,” Ayala Harris said, and she invoked a resolution adopted in 2022 by the 80th General Convention affirming that people of all ages should have access to gender-affirming care.

“To every transgender person hearing or reading these worlds: I see you. I love you,” Ayala Harris said. “You are wonderfully made in the image of God, crafted in sacred dignity. You are not a mistake.”

Executive Council is the church’s governing body between the triennial meetings of General Convention. It is responsible for managing the churchwide budget, adopting new policy statements as needed and providing oversight for the work of the program and ministry staff that reports to the presiding bishop.

The presiding bishop chairs Executive Council, and the House of Deputies president serves as its vice chair. Its 38 other voting members are a mix of bishops, other clergy and lay leaders. Twenty are elected by General Convention to staggered six-year terms – or 10 new members every three years. The Episcopal Church’s nine provinces elect the other 18 to six-year terms, also staggered.

Executive Council typically meets three times a year. The three-day meeting this week is its first since Rowe announced in February a series of layoffs and retirements as part of a major churchwide staff realignment partly intended to achieve personnel cost reductions requested by General Convention.

Some of the most significant staff changes occurred in the Finance Office, where longtime Chief Financial Officer Kurt Barnes announced plans to retire once the church hired his replacement. He continues to advise Executive Council as the church’s elected treasurer.

In March, Rowe and Ayala Harris nominated and Executive Council appointed Christopher Lacovara, a longtime Episcopalian with decades of financial management experience, as the new chief financial officer. On June 23 he gave his first presentation to Executive Council.

“We are stewards of the church’s resources in a frankly very challenging environment,” Lacovara said. “We still have to take what we have and to maximize what’s available, to maximize ministry.”

Overall, the church remains in a stable financial position, with revenues and expenses for 2025 so far mostly tracking the $46 million budgeted, Lacovara said. The downsizing of churchwide staff that started in February will begin realizing long-term cost savings in the second half of the year.

Lacovara noted that the church’s administrative costs and other non-program expenses total 44% of its budget, significantly higher than the commonly accepted goal in the nonprofit sector of under 25% for those expenses. Some of the church’s administrative costs relate to its canonical structure, particularly its governance functions mandated by General Convention, Lacovara said, though he told Executive Council that one of his top objectives will be to find ways to increase the share of the church’s spending on its ministry priorities.

“Our goal, at least our financial goal, should be to plow every dollar we can into service,” he said.

One crucial step will be to improve the church’s financial management systems and accounting, from largely manual operations currently to more automated functions handled by customizable software, making it easier for both program staff and the Finance Office to do their jobs, he said.

“There are computer systems that have been doing that for quite a while,” Lacovara said, citing the church’s expense reimbursement process as one example. “The goal is that this is going to free up a lot of time for our staff … rather than having to devote so much time to the paper [trail].”

Newer financial management systems will allow the church to produce digital dashboards to provide information and regular reports for review by departments, Executive Council and the wider church, ensuring greater transparency about how closely operations are in line with budget expectations.

Lacovara also said he and other church leaders are applying greater scrutiny to the costs and benefits of maintaining the Episcopal Church Center at 815 Second Avenue in New York, New York. With the staff restructuring, the church needs much less office space than it once did, and the building is running an annual deficit of $2.5 million, with expensive improvements needed.

“The status quo is not attractive,” he said. That doesn’t necessarily mean it is time for the church to sell the building, he said, though he expected some changes will be necessary, such as renting more of the building’s space to outside tenants to help offset costs.

– David Paulsen is a senior reporter and editor for Episcopal News Service based in Wisconsin. He can be reached at dpaulsen@episcopalchurch.org.