A Funeral Procession With Better Bookkeeping

The Episcopal Church's budget chair admits the old books didn't tell the whole story — and offers new software as the cure

By David W. Virtue, DD www.virtueonline.org  November 12, 2026

There is a moment in every long decline when the people in charge stop pretending. They don't announce it. They tuck it near the end of a long letter about accounting software, and they hope you are too bored to notice.

That moment came for The Episcopal Church on November 5, when the Rt. Rev. Diane Jardine Bruce, chair of Executive Council's Joint Budget Committee, released a letter introducing the draft 2028–2030 churchwide budget. It is long, cheerful and relentlessly upbeat. Twice it calls a new way of doing things a "game changer." It praises the Chief Financial Officer, Chris Lacovara, as "a gift... to the whole church." It extols the virtues of a cloud accounting platform called Sage Intacct as though it were the Holy Spirit's latest gift to the Church.

And then, almost in passing, the bishop quotes a member of Executive Council, the Rev. Teddy Brooks, who spoke of "the funeral procession that this church has been on for too long."

She calls it a striking image. It is more than that. It is the truest sentence in the whole document.

What the Letter Doesn't Say

Read the letter twice and you will notice something remarkable. It is a letter about a budget, and it contains no numbers.

There is no total for the triennium. There is no revenue projection. There is no word on the diocesan assessment rate, no deficit, no staffing figure, no draw on the endowment. Not one dollar sign appears except a passing reference to roughly $1 million in United Thank Offering grants.

This matters, because the last time around the numbers were the story. The 2025–2027 draft was a $143 million plan built on a 15 percent assessment of diocesan income — assessments that supply nearly two-thirds of the churchwide budget. And the committee began that cycle staring at a $12 million shortfall, which Episcopal News Service described as reflecting long-term structural deficits.

So where are we now? How much smaller is the budget? How many dioceses are still paying the full assessment, and how many have quietly asked for waivers? What are the revenue assumptions after another three years of falling attendance?

The letter does not say. When a budget chair writes some 1,800 words about charts of accounts and says nothing about the bottom line, the bottom line is the story.

A Confession Dressed as Reform

Strip away the warm language and here is what Bishop Bruce is telling the church.

For years, the budget that General Convention debated and adopted — a spreadsheet of nearly 700 lines — did not reflect everything the church spent. Grants and scholarships funded by trust funds were left off. So was most of the United Thank Offering. So were all the operations of the Episcopal Church Women, income and expense alike.

When the committee asked why, it was told that some expenses were "simply too unpredictable to budget for," and that they appeared instead in the consolidated financial statements — statements, the bishop concedes, "that very few deputies or bishops read."

Worse, the Church Center ran separate accounting and reporting systems "that did not communicate with one another well," and the budget itself did not match the chart of accounts used to record the money. Comparing what was budgeted with what was actually spent, she writes, was "very difficult." Leadership could not get "a clear, consolidated picture of the church's financial position."

Consider what that means. The governing body of a national church, with hundreds of millions of dollars in trust assets, was voting every three years on a document that did not describe the whole church — and its own leaders could not easily tell, at any given moment, how the church was doing.

The bishop is careful to say that "all funds were ultimately accounted for and used properly." I take her at her word. But the reassurance is not the point. A budget that leaves out whole ministries is not a budget; it is a brochure. And a church that cannot match its spending to its plan is not stewarding its resources. It is guessing.

This is offered as a triumph of reform. It is in fact an admission of how badly things had been run — by the very structures that have spent decades lecturing the rest of us about accountability.

Whatever Happened to Line 164?

Now comes the part that should make every deputy sit up.

Under the new structure, individual programs will no longer have their own budget lines. They will be gathered into broad categories with names such as "Contracted Services," "Marketing and Events," and — my favorite — "Other Program-Specific Expenses." Ministry-area heads will receive an allocation for their "broader needs" and the freedom to move money around as "circumstances change and new priorities emerge," without the months-long wait for Executive Council approval.

The bishop anticipates the objection with disarming candor. "What happened to line 164?" she imagines the faithful Episcopalian asking. "That was my project... Where did it go?"

Her answer: those projects "have not necessarily disappeared."

Read that word again. Necessarily.

Here is the plain meaning. Under the old system, if Church Center staff wanted to kill a program, someone had to delete a line, and someone at General Convention might notice. Under the new system, a program can wither inside "Other Program-Specific Expenses" and no line ever has to vanish. The money simply goes elsewhere. Where it went will be explained — if it is explained — in a narrative "budget handbook" written by the same people who moved it.

The committee calls this transparency. It is the opposite. The budget may be more complete, but it is far less granular. More dollars are on the page; fewer decisions are visible. This is of a piece with February's decision to release the annual budget as a single page, which ENS reported drew mixed reviews.

The bishop insists that "the goal is not to reduce accountability." But accountability to whom? Greater flexibility for ministry heads means less control for General Convention — the body that, in Episcopal polity, is supposed to hold the purse. Power moves from the elected deputies and bishops to staff, and from staff upward to the Presiding Bishop's office. The letter says as much: the budget was built in collaboration with Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe and designed to serve the church's new strategic plan.

The Women's Money

One detail deserves a closer look than the letter gives it. The United Thank Offering and the Episcopal Church Women are, for the first time, being folded into the churchwide budget.

The UTO, begun in 1889, has been for well over a century the gift of Episcopal women — coins dropped into blue boxes on kitchen tables, given in thanksgiving and distributed in grants. ECW has long operated as a world of its own. Bringing both onto the central books may be nothing more than good housekeeping. It may also be the first step toward central management of money that generations of churchwomen regarded as theirs.

The budget handbook should tell us which. Deputies should read it closely — and ask.

The Funeral Procession

Which brings us back to the Rev. Teddy Brooks and his funeral procession.

Give the man credit. That is an honest image, and Bishop Bruce deserves credit for quoting it. For years the instinct at 815 Second Avenue — a building the church is now selling — was to explain decline away as demographics, or a phase, or a problem of marketing. Now Executive Council itself is speaking of a hearse.

But listen to the cure. "We cannot simply continue down the same road," the bishop writes, "making incremental adjustments, and expect a different future." And what is the different road? A new accounting system. A common chart of accounts. Monthly variance reports delivered "just days after the close of each month." Fewer lines marked "This line intentionally left blank."

These are not bad things. Any parish treasurer would welcome them. But they are not a resurrection. You do not interrupt a funeral procession by giving the undertaker a better spreadsheet.

The Episcopal Church is not dying for want of Sage Intacct. It is dying because, in the main, it has stopped believing and proclaiming the faith once delivered to the saints. It has traded the authority of Scripture for the authority of the moment. It has spent its moral capital on causes and its financial capital on lawsuits against the very congregations that wanted to remain faithful. It has lost the young, the families, and the conviction that Jesus Christ is Lord and that it matters eternally whether anyone knows it.

Nowhere in this letter is there a word about conversion, evangelism or the gospel. There is a great deal about "aligning resources with mission." But what mission? The letter never says, and neither, as I have argued before, does the strategic plan it serves. A budget, the bishop rightly says, "tells us what we value." This one tells us the church values tidy books for a shrinking enterprise.

Questions for November 18

The Joint Budget Committee will hold hearings on November 18 and December 9 and invites questions by email. Here are a few worth asking:

- What is the total proposed 2028–2030 budget, and how does it compare with 2025–2027?

- What diocesan assessment rate does it assume, and how many dioceses currently pay the full rate?

- What draw on the endowment does it require?

- How many Church Center staff positions does it fund, compared with the current triennium?

- Which programs that had their own lines in 2025–2027 receive less money, or none, in the new structure?

- Will the UTO and ECW retain independent control of their funds?

If the answers show real cuts, then the funeral procession has already turned down the next street, and the church deserves to be told plainly. If they don't, then the church has spent three years and a new software system learning how to describe its decline more efficiently.

Either way, Bishop Bruce has done us a service. Buried in a letter about bookkeeping, she has let Executive Council say out loud what the pews have known for a generation.

The procession is real. The only question left is whether anyone at the front of it is willing to stop, turn around and ask where it is going — and whether there is still a gospel in the coffin, waiting to rise.

David W. Virtue, DD, is the founder, managing editor, and publisher of VirtueOnline. His writings can be accessed here: www.virtueonline.org His writings on the Middle East can be viewed here: davidvirtue2.substack.com