Formation Into What?

The Episcopal Church has a sound discipleship program, a Presiding Bishop who backs it, and $4 million to spend. It is still dying. Here is why.

COMMENTARY

By David W. Virtue, DD www.virtueonline.org  November 2, 2026

Let me begin with a confession. When I first examined RenewalWorks, the discipleship ministry of Forward Movement, I assumed I was looking at a faithful initiative that the Episcopal Church's leadership had shunted aside. Here, I thought, was a program that spoke of Jesus, of Scripture, of spiritual growth, and here was a Presiding Bishop and a House of Bishops too preoccupied with property sales, strategic plans, and progressive causes to notice it.

I was wrong. The truth is worse.

Sean Rowe has not ignored RenewalWorks. He has embraced it. He sits as honorary chair of Forward Movement's board. He has asked it to write formation and evangelism resources for the whole church. In March of this year, the Episcopal Church and Forward Movement launched a formal partnership. A video course on the sacraments followed in May. Another, on the baptismal promises, is on the way. A New York foundation has put $4 million behind the effort.

So, the question is not why the Episcopal Church refuses discipleship. The question is why a church that has bought, funded, and blessed a discipleship program keeps emptying its pews. The answer goes to the heart of what has gone wrong with American Episcopalianism.

A Ministry Worth Taking Seriously

Credit must be given where it is due. Forward Movement is no fly-by-night outfit. It was chartered by General Convention in 1934, in the depths of the Depression, under Bishop Henry Wise Hobson of Southern Ohio, to reinvigorate a struggling church. For nine decades it has published Forward Day by Day, the little devotional that has sat on the kitchen tables of countless faithful Episcopalians. Its executive director, the Rev. Scott Gunn, is a serious churchman who talks openly about Jesus in a denomination that often prefers not to.

RenewalWorks itself began on July 1, 2013. Its founder, the Rev. Jay Sidebotham, was a rector north of Chicago and a former animator on Schoolhouse Rock! He borrowed a research tool developed at Willow Creek Community Church and adapted it for Episcopalians. The method is simple. Parishioners take an online spiritual life inventory. A parish team works through four workshops on the results. The congregation then draws up a plan to help its people grow. The program now claims data from more than 350 churches and 29,000 Episcopalians.

None of that is foolish. Measuring where people actually are, rather than where clergy imagine them to be, is wise. Many evangelical churches would profit from the same exercise.

The Promise of 2013

At the launch, Gunn did not set a modest goal. RenewalWorks, he said, could change lives, grow churches, and "reverse the decline in numbers in the Episcopal Church."

Thirteen years on, the numbers have delivered their verdict. In 2014, in-person average Sunday attendance stood at roughly 605,000. By 2025, it had fallen to about 407,000. Membership in 2025 was about 1.425 million, nearly 350,000 fewer than a decade earlier. The median Episcopal congregation now gathers 38 souls on a Sunday morning. When the 2024 Parochial Report was released, it did not even include a total membership count.

To be fair, no single program could have reversed that slide alone, and RenewalWorks has reached perhaps 350 of more than 6,700 congregations, roughly one parish in twenty. It is voluntary, donor-funded, and depends on a rector willing to open his or her people to scrutiny. Most never did.

But scale is not the real problem. The real problem is what RenewalWorks found, and what the church did with it.

The Data Indicted the Clergy

In 2018, Forward Movement released a summary of its research from 12,000 Episcopalians in more than 200 congregations. Read it carefully, because it is one of the most damning documents the Episcopal Church has ever published about itself, though it was not intended that way.

Only four percent of Episcopalians surveyed qualified as "Christ-centered", meaning that a relationship with God in Christ was the most important relationship in their lives. Four percent. Eighteen percent were still "exploring", and the researchers noted that some of these had been sitting in pews for decades. Only fourteen percent read Scripture daily.

Yet here is the striking thing. Sidebotham reported "great spiritual hunger among Episcopalians." Some sixty percent said they wanted their leaders to help them grow closer to God. They wanted to be challenged.

And who was holding back? The clergy. The researchers observed anxiety among Episcopal clergy about the gloomy statistics, and a resulting reluctance to challenge their people to go deeper. The sheep were asking to be fed. The shepherds were afraid to feed them.

RenewalWorks named four catalysts for spiritual growth: engagement with Scripture, the Eucharist, a deeper prayer life, and the heart of the leader. Note that last one. The program's own research located the crisis in the pulpit. No survey, no workshop, no facilitator's guide can fix a priest who no longer believes what he or she was ordained to proclaim.

Diagnostic, Not Prescriptive

Gunn once offered what he thought was the program's highest praise. RenewalWorks, he said, is "diagnostic, not prescriptive."

There, in three words, is the whole problem.

Consider how RenewalWorks describes itself: a discipleship initiative to help churches "grow in love of God and neighbor within their unique contexts and needs." Read that sentence again. It is not a statement of faith. It is a statement of method. It does not mention sin. It does not mention the cross. It does not mention repentance, the resurrection, the authority of Scripture, or the judgment to come. "Love of God and neighbor" is the summary of the Law, and a glorious one, but stripped of any doctrinal content it can mean whatever a given parish wants it to mean. "Unique contexts" is the escape hatch through which every theological conviction can quietly leave the building.

A diagnosis without a prescription is a death notice. A doctor who tells you that your heart is failing, and then declines to tell you what to do about it because he respects your unique context, is not a physician. He is a coroner in waiting.

The Episcopal Church does not lack information about its spiritual condition. RenewalWorks has supplied a mountain of it. What the church lacks is a gospel clear enough to act upon.

Willow Creek's Borrowed Clothes

There is an irony in the program's lineage that should not be missed. RenewalWorks was built on the REVEAL research at Willow Creek, Bill Hybels' megachurch outside Chicago. In 2007, Willow Creek's leaders made a startling public admission: their busy calendar of programs was not, by itself, producing mature disciples. More church activity did not mean more spiritual growth.

That was an honest confession, and to its credit RenewalWorks learned from it. But Willow Creek's research sat on top of an evangelical conviction: that people must be converted, that the Bible is the word of God, and that Jesus is the only way to the Father. The Episcopal Church imported the instrument and left the convictions in Illinois. It borrowed the stethoscope and threw away the textbook.

And Willow Creek itself offers a warning. In 2018, Hybels resigned amid allegations of misconduct, which he denied. The church that had been held up as a model of evangelical success went into steep decline. Methods do not save churches. Technique is no substitute for truth, and sociology is no substitute for sanctification.

Formation Into What?

This brings us to the deepest question. When Sean Rowe and the House of Bishops speak of discipleship, what do they mean?

Rowe has said that helping people grow as disciples "is exactly the work our church needs at this time." I believe he means it. But look at what the church is being formed toward. At their September gathering at Camp Allen, the bishops received his strategic framework, Our Courageous Witness, which calls for a Christianity that is "authentic, expansive, beautiful, and unafraid." General Convention's standing priorities are racial healing, evangelism, and creation care.

Every one of those words has been thoroughly redefined in the Episcopal Church. "Expansive" is the code word for a faith with no boundaries. "Unafraid" means unafraid of the culture's applause, never unafraid of its contempt. A disciple, in this vocabulary, is a person of deepening spirituality and progressive public witness. He or she is not a sinner rescued by grace, called to die to self, and bound to obey the word of a holy God.

You cannot form disciples of a Christ you will not define. You cannot call people to follow Jesus while refusing to say where He is going. You cannot ask Episcopalians to read their Bibles daily and then preach from the pulpit that the Bible does not mean what it says on marriage, on sexuality, on the uniqueness of Christ. The parishioner who takes RenewalWorks seriously, who begins to read Scripture each morning, will sooner or later notice that the book in his hands contradicts the church that handed it to him. That is when he leaves. Many already have.

The Verdict

Forward Movement has given the Episcopal Church good tools. Prayer. Scripture. The Eucharist. Honest self-examination. These are the ancient means of grace, and there is nothing wrong with them. RenewalWorks did not fail because it was a bad program. It failed because it was placed in the hands of a church that no longer believes the things that make those tools work.

A thermometer cannot cure a fever. A map cannot make a man want to travel. And a discipleship survey cannot revive a church that has decided the gospel is negotiable.

Five hundred and nine years ago, a monk in Wittenberg did not commission a spiritual-life inventory. He opened the Scriptures, found the church at odds with them, and said so, at the risk of his life. That is how renewal has always come. It comes when men and women recover the word of God and submit to it.

The Episcopal Church has measured its hunger with great care. It has charted the problem and funded the response, and it has recorded every stage of its own decline. What it will not do is open the Book and obey it. Until it does, all its forward movement will be in one direction only, and it is not forward.

David W. Virtue, DD, is the founder, 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