Selling the House, Losing the Soul
The Episcopal Church's new strategic plan has everything in it but the Gospel
By David W. Virtue, DD
October 21, 2026
On Monday, October 19, inside the building it is about to sell, the Executive Council of The Episcopal Church adopted Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe's strategic plan and authorized officers to negotiate the sale of the Episcopal Church Center at 815 Second Avenue. Rowe, never short of a phrase, summed up the whole enterprise in one sentence: "I am selling the actual house to do it."
He meant it as resolve. It reads like an epitaph.
Give Rowe His Due
Let me say at the outset what is true. Sean Rowe is the most capable manager The Episcopal Church has had in a generation. He ran two dioceses at once. He restructured the Church Center staff within months of his investiture. He commissioned research, held listening sessions in all nine provinces, and looked squarely at aging, finances, and migration patterns. He has even said aloud what his predecessors would not: "we cannot bring everyone back to the pews."
That is candor, and candor is rare at 815. His question, "What if, for once, the church was ahead of the curve instead of finding itself surprised by change?" is a fair one. A church that has closed hundreds of congregations in two decades ought to have asked it long ago.
But a fair question can still get the wrong answer.
The Vocabulary Is There
Read the plan carefully and you will find Christian words. The church is "the body of the risen Christ." It must be "rooted in the sacraments and our tradition." There is to be a "churchwide evangelism and visibility campaign." Rowe even invokes the Paschal mystery: "We are living in Holy Saturday. But we know how the Easter story ends."
So, nobody can say the language is absent. The question is what the language is doing. And here the plan gives itself away.
Easter, in Rowe's telling, is not the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. It is a metaphor for institutional survival, a reason to be optimistic about the endowment. Evangelism is yoked to "visibility," which is the vocabulary of a marketing department, not of the Apostle Paul. The plan calls for "a Christianity that is authentic, expansive, beautiful, and unafraid." Those are adjectives. They are not a gospel. Authentic what? Expansive toward what? Unafraid of what? Proclaiming what?
The words are ornaments hung on a real-estate and governance plan. Take them out, and the plan does not change by a single line item.
What Is Missing
Now read the plan again and look for what is not there.
There is no sin. There is no repentance. There is no cross. There is no atonement, no conversion, no new birth, no call to discipleship, no holiness, no judgment, no heaven, no eternal life. There is not one sentence about a lost man or woman being reconciled to God through Jesus Christ. There is not a word about taking up one's cross, about losing one's life for Christ's sake and the gospels in order to find it.
Instead, the verbs tell the story: convening, coordinating, resourcing, connecting, managing relationships, discerning sustainable structures, reforming and streamlining governance, real estate analysis. The plan promises to "reduce relational conflict and Title IV burden." It promises to help dioceses "manage crises." It proposes that "climate-related trends" and migration patterns guide where new churches are planted.
So, churches will be planted where the demographics and the weather point, not where the lost are. Climate trends never saved a single soul.
I sat in Lausanne in 1974 when evangelicals from across the world defined evangelism. It was, they said, the spreading of the good news that Jesus Christ died for our sins and rose from the dead, and that he now offers forgiveness and the Spirit to all who repent and believe. John Stott, whom I knew and loved, shaped that statement. There was nothing about visibility campaigns in it. There was a cross at the center of it.
The Numbers Do Not Lie
The plan's own urgency comes from the numbers, and the numbers are brutal.
By the church's 2023 Parochial Report, The Episcopal Church had 1,547,779 active baptized members and an average Sunday attendance of 410,912 across 6,754 congregations. That is roughly 61 worshippers per congregation on an average Sunday. In 2024, for the first time in a decade, total expenses exceeded total income.
The Episcopal Church is not poor. It sits on billions in endowments, trusts, and real estate. Nearly three-quarters of its congregations’ report having an endowment or investment account. What it lacks is people, and what it lacks even more is a message that would bring them through the door.
Rowe himself warns of "a version of the next 15 years in which we miss this moment." He is right. But the moment he is missing is not a strategic one. It is a spiritual one.
Laodicea on Second Avenue
The risen Christ once dictated a letter to a church very much like this one. "Because thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked" (Revelation 3:17). Laodicea had a sound balance sheet. It did not have Christ at the table. He was standing outside, knocking.
The plan directs that most of the net proceeds from the sale of 815 go into a trust whose income will fund church planting, revitalization, and redevelopment. That sounds like mission. It is not, unless something is being planted. A new congregation carrying the same gospel-less message will decline the same way the old ones did, only faster, because it will have no memory of anything else. Church planting without the gospel is not mission. It is franchising.
Holy Saturday
Rowe says we are living in Holy Saturday. Let us take him at his word.
On the first Holy Saturday the disciples did not hold strategy sessions about the tomb's property value. They hid. The women waited to bring spices to a corpse. Nobody had a plan. Easter came not as the reward for good stewardship but as an act of God that broke into a dead world and raised a dead man. "If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable" (1 Corinthians 15:19).
That is the hope the plan never mentions. It is not the hope of a church built to last. It is the hope of eternal life in the One who has already conquered death. Without it, Holy Saturday is not a waiting room. It is a grave.
What Does It Profit
Open hearings on the plan will be held on Zoom on November 18 and December 9. The budget that funds it goes to the 82nd General Convention in Phoenix in July 2027. There will be resolutions, amendments, and votes. None of them will touch the real question.
Our Lord asked it plainly: "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" (Mark 8:36). The Episcopal Church will not die poor. It may well die the richest church on the planet, a portfolio without a pulpit, an endowment without an evangel.
What does it profit a church to have billions in the bank and lose its soul?
Rowe is selling the actual house. The house can be sold. The soul cannot be bought back.
David W. Virtue, DD, is founder and managing editor of VirtueOnline. His writings can be found at www.virtueonline.org, where you can subscribe to receive his free biweekly VIEWPOINTS. His Substack on the Middle East can be viewed here: davidvirtue2.substack.com
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