Rising in Hope — But Hope in What?

The Episcopal Church has drawn up its plans for the 82nd General Convention, complete with new committees on artificial intelligence, racial justice, migration and the Holy Land. A committee for the salvation of souls did not make the list.

By David W. Virtue, DD www.virtueonline.org  October 29, 2026

Every three years The Episcopal Church gathers its bishops and deputies in a convention hall, and every three years its leaders send out a letter telling the church what to expect. I have read more of these letters than I care to count. The latest, issued October 28 by Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe and House of Deputies President Julia Ayala Harris, announces that the 82nd General Convention will meet in Phoenix, July 3–8, 2027, under the theme "Rising in Hope."

I read it twice, looking for the gospel. I am still looking.

Credit Where It Is Due

Let me be fair, because fairness is owed even to those who have squandered the inheritance. There is one genuinely good idea in this plan. Every morning in Phoenix is to be given over to worship, Bible study and small-group conversation, with bishops and deputies seated at the same tables. Minnesota Bishop Craig Loya, who co-chaired the reinvention committee with Forward Movement's Scott Gunn, told Episcopal News Service the aim is to ground the convention in Jesus and in the power of the Holy Spirit.

That is the best sentence anyone has spoken about General Convention in a generation. Scott Gunn, to his credit, has been one of the few voices inside the Episcopal establishment willing to say out loud that the church is shrinking and that something has gone wrong.

But here is the question that will decide whether those mornings mean anything: which Bible, and read how? A church that has already decided what Scripture may not say does not study the Bible. It supervises it. The text is permitted to inspire, never to correct. You can put bishops and deputies at the same table for six mornings running, but if the Word is not allowed to judge them, they are not sitting under Scripture. They are sitting over it.

The Committees Tell the Story

You can tell what a church loves by what it organizes. So look at what is new for Phoenix.

For the first time there will be committees devoted solely to Holy Land and Middle East Engagement. There will be a new committee on Artificial Intelligence and Intellectual Property. Racial Justice and Migration are being split off into committees of their own. Social and Environmental Justice, U.S. Policy and International Policy carry on as before.

Now look at what is not new. Not one of the committees singled out for fresh attention concerns evangelism. None concerns church planting, catechesis, the conversion of the unbaptized, the discipling of the young, or the authority of Holy Scripture. A church that is losing people faster than it can bury them has chosen to sharpen its focus on everything except the one thing it was founded to do.

Consider the Holy Land committee. ENS candidly admits that resolutions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict often dominate discussion of international issues, so the church has given that obsession a room of its own. The one place on earth where a Christian body might reflect on the Jewish roots of its faith, on the God who keeps covenant with Abraham, and on a Jewish Messiah who rose from a Jerusalem tomb, will instead be treated as a venue for drafting resolutions. I have written before about the Episcopal Peace Fellowship's Palestine Justice Network and the one-sided statements that pass for moral witness in these circles. Phoenix now guarantees them a dedicated stage.

Then there is artificial intelligence. Before The Episcopal Church can say anything wise about machines, it might first recover a doctrine of man: made in the image of God, fallen, and redeemable only by grace. A church that can no longer tell you with confidence what a man or a woman is has very little to say about what a computer is.

The Vocabulary of Process

Read the letter closely and you hear the familiar dialect. The convention is to be "a community of discernment." The goal is to create "the conditions for the church to gather." Deliberations are to make room for "conviction, curiosity" and the possibility that listening will deepen understanding.

Curiosity is a fine virtue in a laboratory. In a church entrusted with the faith once for all delivered to the saints (Jude 3), it is no substitute for confession. And "discernment," in Episcopal usage, has long meant a process that ends exactly where it began, with the blessing of whatever the majority already wanted.

Our Lord did not say, "Go and discern." He said, "Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them… teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you" (Matthew 28:19–20). The Great Commission is not a listening session.

The letter's stated hope is a "clear, faithful, strategic direction." Strategic is Bishop Rowe's favorite word. Last week Executive Council endorsed his strategic vision, the same vision that comes bundled with the sale of 815 Second Avenue. The church has a strategy for its real estate, a strategy for its budget, a strategy for its committees. What it lacks is a message.

Even the technology tells the tale. The Virtual Binder is gone, replaced by a new Governance and Legislative System. The Episcopal Church has upgraded its software. It has not upgraded its soul.

The Numbers Behind the "Hope"

Hope, to be honest, must reckon with facts. According to the church's own 2024 Parochial Report, in-person average Sunday attendance across the entire denomination was 413,034. A decade earlier it stood at roughly 600,000. The median Episcopal congregation now draws 38 people on a Sunday, in a building that typically seats about 165.

Thirty-eight. That is not a church rising. That is a church sitting in four-fifths empty pews and calling it hope.

Meanwhile, the Joint Budget Committee chair tells us the overhauled triennial budget was built on "consistency, clarity and transparency" — and Executive Council will get its first look at it in a closed session on November 4. Transparency, it seems, begins after the doors are shut.

What Rising in Hope Actually Means

The irony is that "Rising in Hope" is a thoroughly biblical phrase, if only the church would let it mean what the Bible means. Peter tells us that God "has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead" (1 Peter 1:3). Christian hope rises because Christ rose. It is not institutional morale. It is not a good feeling about a well-run convention. It is the certainty that the tomb is empty and that sinners can be forgiven.

The Anglican formularies once said this without embarrassment. Article XVIII of the Thirty-Nine Articles teaches that eternal salvation is obtained only by the Name of Jesus Christ. Not by the right resolution. Not by the right committee. Not by the right software.

No soul was ever saved by a resolution. No sinner was ever converted by a committee on migration. No prodigal ever came home because a General Convention passed a statement on the Middle East. Issues have their place, but issues never saved a soul. Only the gospel does that, and it is the one item missing from the agenda in Phoenix.

The Episcopal Church says it is rising in hope. It would do better to kneel in repentance. Hope comes after that, not before.

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