Emptier Pews, Fatter Mitres

As the Episcopal Church shrinks, its bishops keep getting raises

COMMENTARY

By David W. Virtue, DD · www.virtueonline.org · November 10, 2026

Mainline denominations are dying, and the Episcopal Church is dying faster than most. Its pews are emptying, its parishes are closing, and its dioceses are merging to keep the lights on. Yet one line in the budget continues to climb. The bishops are getting raises.

It is a paradox to end all paradoxes. Men and women who believe little of the faith once for all delivered to the saints, who have no gospel to proclaim and no converts to show for it, are being rewarded as if they were running growing enterprises. In the church's largest dioceses, the median bishop now draws a compensation package of $291,569 a year. The President of the United States is paid $400,000. The bishop of a declining diocese now sits barely $108,000 short of the man who commands the most powerful nation on earth.

If there is a stench in the sanctuary, it is not coming from the candles.

The Numbers Do Not Lie

The figures come from the Church Pension Group's 2025 compensation reports, released in September. CPG does not disclose individual packages, but its medians tell the story plainly enough.

In the largest domestic dioceses, median bishop compensation jumped from $267,400 in 2024 to $291,569 in 2025—a rise of 9 percent in a single year. Across all diocesan bishops, including overseas dioceses, the median rose 6.1 percent, from $184,100 to $195,336. CPG's so-called “Acela Corridor” cluster, the dioceses strung along the Boston–Washington rail line, rose 6.1 percent as well, to $267,748.

Now compare. Consumer prices rose 2.7 percent over 2025. Median compensation for Episcopal clergy as a whole rose 2.6 percent. The priests in the trenches barely kept pace with inflation. The bishops in the biggest sees outran it more than threefold.

Fairness requires a caveat, and I will give it. These are changes in group medians, not raises for named individuals. Dioceses merge, bishops retire, and the size groups shift from year to year. Measured on a domestic-only basis, the typical diocesan bishop's increase was closer to 3.3 percent. But 3.3 percent still beats inflation, still beats the clergy, and still lands in the pockets of the people least affected by the decline they preside over. Institutional belt-tightening, it seems, comes in different sizes.

The Bishop and the Rector

Consider the gap between the man in the cathedral and the priest in the parish.

The median domestic diocesan bishop received $197,672 in 2025. The median domestic priest received $91,732. The bishop takes home more than twice what the priest does. He earns 54 percent more than the senior rector of a large parish and 131 percent more than the solo rector who preaches, visits the sick, buries the dead, fixes the boiler, and chairs the vestry meeting—often all in the same week.

And compensation is not the whole bill. CPG's definition of compensation already includes salary, housing or a housing allowance, utilities, retirement contributions and bonuses. On top of that, the diocese pays an 18 percent pension assessment. Apply that to the large-diocese median and the cost rises to roughly $344,000 a year—before health insurance, travel, staff, and the rest of the episcopal apparatus.

That money does not fall from heaven. It comes from parish assessments, from endowments built by the faithful dead, and from the offering plates of congregations that are themselves struggling to pay a half-time priest.

Shepherds of a Vanishing Flock

Here is what the Episcopal Church's own attendance tables show over the past decade:

• Connecticut: average Sunday attendance fell from 13,271 in 2016 to 8,036 in 2025, down 39.4 percent.

• Chicago: 12,048 to 7,289, down 39.5 percent.

• Massachusetts: 15,234 to 9,709, down 36.3 percent.

• Virginia: 22,792 to 15,507, down 32 percent.

• North Dakota: 638 to 430, down 32.6 percent.

• Northern Michigan: 471 to 333, down 29.3 percent.

Chicago managed a 3.8 percent uptick in 2025, and its spin doctors will no doubt call that renewal. It is a dead cat bounce after a decade in which four of every ten worshippers walked out the door.

The arithmetic is not complicated. If a diocese loses 30 percent of its Sunday worshippers while the cost of its bishop holds steady, the cost per person in the pew rises by about 43 percent. If the cost of the bishop rises, the burden on each remaining worshipper rises faster still. Endowments may cushion the blow for a time. But every dollar spent sustaining a diocesan office is a dollar not spent on a parish, a mission, or a soul.

North Dakota now gathers 430 people on a Sunday. That is a single healthy suburban parish. It is not a diocese in any meaningful sense, and it cannot be served by the full-time machinery of one.

And Then the Pension

The salary is only half the story. When a bishop lays down his crozier, the Church Pension Fund picks up where the diocese left off, and it is generous.

The formula is public. A retired cleric receives 1.6 percent of his “Highest Average Compensation” for every year of credited service, plus a small sliver on the first $10,000. That average is drawn from his seven best-paid years across his whole career, which for a bishop means his years in the mitre. And it is built on the same broad definition of compensation described above—salary, housing, retirement contributions, one-time payments—with one addition: if the diocese provides a house, another 30 percent is added on top.

Do the arithmetic.

A bishop with $250,000 in assessable compensation and 30 years of ordained service retires on roughly $123,000 a year, about $10,300 a month.

Give him 35 years and it rises to about $144,000 a year, close to $12,000 a month.

Even the bishop of a small, struggling diocese, assessed at $180,000 with 30 years, walks away with roughly $90,000 a year, some $7,500 a month, for life.

Then come a post-retirement health subsidy, discretionary cost-of-living increases, a Christmas benefit and a resettlement benefit. To buy a guaranteed lifetime income of $120,000 a year at 65 on the open market would cost somewhere between one and a half and two million dollars. That is what “retiring as a millionaire” means here. It isn't a bank balance. It's an income stream any actuary would value at seven figures.

Compare the Church of England, hardly a church of paupers, where a diocesan bishop's pension in 2024 was £20,095 a year.

In any corporation, a chief executive who presided over a decade of shrinking customers, shuttered branches and falling revenue would be shown the door. In the Episcopal Church, he is shown a pension, calculated on his highest salary and paid for life.

Defenders will say bishops do not set their own pay. Diocesan conventions do, and the pension formula is the same for every priest. True. But that is no defense. It is an indictment of the whole system. The very conventions that watch their parishes close keep voting to reward the leadership presiding over the closures. No one is accountable, because everyone signed off.

The pews empty. The parishes close. The pension checks never bounce.

Equity for Thee

There is one more irony worth noting. This is a church that has preached “justice,” “equity” and “inclusion” from every pulpit for forty years. Yet among domestic diocesan bishops, women's median compensation was $191,866 against $202,026 for men—a gap of more than $10,000, or 5 percent. CPG is careful to say the tables do not explain the cause; size of diocese, tenure and geography all play a part. Fair enough. But a church that lectures the nation on pay equity might at least examine its own house before it hands out the next round of raises.

Even the “Orthodox” Dioceses

Lest anyone think this is a disease of the liberal coasts alone, consider the two dioceses long held up as the Episcopal Church's orthodox remnant. Central Florida under Greg Brewer and Dallas under George Sumner were the places evangelicals pointed to when they were asked why they stayed. They have succumbed to the same siren call.

Neither diocese publishes what it pays its bishop. But CPG ranked Central Florida in its top tier of episcopal pay every year from 2021 to 2024, where the 2024 median was $267,400 and the range ran as high as $312,700. Central Florida slipped to the second tier only last year. Dallas sits in the second tier too, in a “Southwest” cluster whose median of $214,232 is among the highest outside the Acela Corridor.

Meanwhile the pews tell the same story they tell everywhere else. Central Florida's Sunday attendance fell from 12,897 in 2015 to 9,023 in 2024, a drop of 30 percent. Dallas fell from 10,656 to 7,985, down 25 percent.

Now read Central Florida's own recommended budget for 2027, which goes before its convention this Saturday. Staff compensation rises 4.3 percent, to $1,375,011. Support for the diocese's own struggling congregations is cut by a third, from $290,007 to $197,133. Aid to struggling parishes falls from $85,304 to $30,000. Revitalization funding falls from $85,000 to $50,000. And the diocese will send $387,548 to Sean Rowe's national church, nearly twice what it spends keeping its own weakest congregations alive.

That is the price of staying. Orthodoxy that remains under the same roof ends up paying the same bills, and keeping the same habits. The creed may be recited more faithfully in Orlando and Dallas than in Boston, but the budget is written in the same hand.

Not for Filthy Lucre

The Apostle Peter told the elders of the church to feed the flock of God “not for filthy lucre, but of a ready mind” (1 Peter 5:2). Paul made tents so as not to burden the churches he planted. Peter and John stood at the Beautiful Gate and said, “Silver and gold have I none; but such as I have, give I thee,” and a lame man walked.

The Episcopal bishops of 2026 have the silver and the gold. What they lack is the second half of that sentence. They have nothing to give. They have traded the gospel for a gospel of affirmation that converts no one, and the people have voted with their feet.

The prophet Ezekiel saw this coming. “Woe be to the shepherds of Israel that do feed themselves! should not the shepherds feed the flocks? Ye eat the fat, and ye clothe you with the wool… but ye feed not the flock” (Ezekiel 34:2–3).

When I travelled to Singapore and on to Kuala Lumpur in the early years of the Anglican realignment, I met bishops from the Global South whose dioceses were planting churches faster than ours were closing them. The talk was of evangelism and new congregations, not compensation committees. That is what episcopal ministry looks like when bishops believe they have something to say. In fact a wannabe priest had first to plant a church before being accepted into seminary.

Nor is this simply a mainline malady that no one can resist. The United Methodist Church, hollowed out by the departure of a quarter of its American congregations, faced the same arithmetic. In 2024 its bishops asked that they receive no raise for 2025, and U.S. bishops' salaries stayed flat at $180,900. Whatever one thinks of United Methodist theology, its bishops at least read the room.

Open the Books

The Episcopal Church asks its congregations to make hard choices: to merge, to share clergy, to sell buildings, to settle for part-time priests. It is time its bishops made some hard choices of their own, and made them in public. Every diocese should publish, every year:

• The bishop's full package: salary, housing, benefits, and one-time payments.

• Who set it, and against what benchmarks.

• The share of the diocese's recurring income it consumes.

• Five-year trends in episcopal costs set against attendance and parish clergy pay.

• Whether shared episcopal oversight or merger with a neighbouring diocese would better serve a shrinking flock.

Parishioners should not have to dig through a pension fund's statistical report to discover what their leadership costs them.

The Hireling

Buried in the Church Pension Group's own report is a single figure that tells the whole story. The median bishop in the Episcopal Church's overseas dioceses in Latin America, the Caribbean and Asia receives $36,351 a year. The median bishop in the Acela Corridor receives $267,748. Allow for the cost of living as generously as you like. These are the same church, the same mitre and the same consecration vows, and one bishop is paid more than seven times what the other receives. In this church, the size of the stipend tracks the size of the endowment, not the size of the harvest.

Our Lord had nowhere to lay his head. The apostles left their nets. The martyrs left their lives. The Episcopal bishops of 2026 have left nothing behind: not the housing allowance, not the annual raise, not the pension. They have kept everything except the faith.

A church that will not tell its people what it pays its bishops has already told them something. It has told them whom the church now exists to serve. And it is not the sheep.

Jesus said the hireling flees when he sees the wolf coming, because he cares nothing for the sheep (John 10:12–13). The Episcopal hireling will not need to flee. When the last pew is empty and the last parish sold, he will simply retire on ten thousand dollars a month.

For what the church's money should be doing — reaching the unreached for Christ — see “Where Your Treasure Is” here: https://www.virtueonline.org/post/where-your-treasure-is

Sources: Church Pension Group, 2024 and 2025 Episcopal Bishops Compensation Reports and 2025 Episcopal Clergy Compensation Report (cpg.org, September 2026); Church Pension Fund, Clergy Pension Plan At-A-Glance (cpg.org); Church of England Pensions Board, 2024 clergy pension example calculations; General Convention Office, Average Sunday Attendance by Province and Diocese, 2016–2025, and parochial report data; Diocese of Central Florida, 2027 Recommended Diocesan Operating Budget; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, December 2025 CPI; UM News, “Bishops forgo pay raises to shore up funds” (December 2024); with thanks to Anglican Watch for its analysis of the CPG data. Pension figures are illustrative calculations from the published CPF formula, not reported payments to named bishops.

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