Western New York's Bishop Admits His Diocese Is in Decline

The national numbers say he is describing the whole church

By David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueonline.org  | July 23, 2026

The Rt. Rev. Stephen T. Lane, Bishop Provisional of the Episcopal Diocese of Western New York, has done something bishops in his church rarely do. He has told his people the truth.

In a pastoral letter to the diocese, Lane laid out, without spin or evasion, why there are no priests coming. Not why there might be a shortage. Why there are none.

"The Boomer generation has now largely retired, and the flow of aspirants has slowed to a trickle. We need about twice as many candidates for the priesthood. At the same time, more than half of our congregations cannot afford a full-time priest."

Give the man his due. That is a bishop describing an institution in liquidation, and doing it in his own name, over his own signature, to the people who will pay the price. Most of his colleagues prefer the language of "adaptive change" and "new expressions of ministry" — the ecclesiastical equivalent of a hospice brochure written by the marketing department.

The bishop's own account

Lane's letter is a short and unsentimental history of how his church got here, and it deserves to be read on its own terms.

Forty percent of Episcopal churches, he notes, were built in the 1950s, '60s and '70s. Postwar demand for clergy outstripped a recruitment system that depended on bishops, so the church shifted recruitment to congregations and clergy. Then, especially after the approval of women's ordination, came the flood. Lane himself was one of thirteen men and women at his 1975 ordination conference in the Diocese of Rochester. Only two were accepted.

That is the hinge of the whole story, and Lane names it plainly. With aspirants to spare, the church went into what he calls "selection" mode. Ordination conferences became screening conferences. Applicants were told to go get some life experience and come back later.

"They did as they were told — got educations, spouses, families and careers — and never came back."

Read that again. A generation of vocations was turned away at the door by a church confident there would always be more. There were not. The average age of ordinands climbed until, by the 1990s, new ordinands were as old as the clergy already in orders. The priesthood became a Boomer occupation with no one behind it.

To loosen the logjam, The Church Pension Fund offered a 55/30 plan — retire at fifty-five with thirty years of service, on full benefits. Lane's verdict is that it never really caught on, functioning as a safety valve rather than a solution, because the Social Security retirement age of sixty-five kept clergy in post. In plainer English: the richest pension fund in American Protestantism could not persuade its own priests that they could afford to stop working.

By the early 2000s the church saw the dependency on aging clergy and tried to open the pipeline. The diaconate was redefined as a separate and equal order. Commissions on Ministry were told to nurture rather than screen. Too late. By then, Lane writes, the collapse in institutional trust, the clergy sexual abuse scandal, and the two-income household had already taken effect.

The arithmetic of collapse

This is where the national numbers matter, because Western New York is not an outlier. It is a preview.

Church Pension Group tracks every ordination, transfer, retirement and death in The Episcopal Church, and its figures are unsparing. Active priests — those whose employers are still paying into the clergy pension fund — peaked in 2004 at 7,886. They have since fallen to about 5,614. Retired priests passed active priests in number in 2011 and now stand above 8,300. There are roughly 6,700 congregations and fewer than 6,000 active priests to serve them.

The traffic runs one way. Speaking to the Episcopal Parish Network's annual conference in Charlotte this March, Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe put the flow at roughly five hundred priests retiring each year against something near two hundred ordained. That is not a shortage. That is a demographic bleed-out.

The transition data says the same thing from the other end. In spring 2024, diocesan transition ministers covering eight of the church's nine provinces counted an estimated 527 open priest positions. The estimated pool of candidates for them was 122. Half those openings were part-time. Two years earlier, 54 percent of Episcopal priests were already serving part-time — more than double the 26 percent of 2010 — and one congregation in eight was being kept alive by a retiree.

The Rev. Marshall Jolly, an Episcopal rector who has written on the shortage, reports that a full-time rector's post that drew a dozen applications in 2012 now draws three to five. When he advertised a full-time children and youth minister position in 2024 — competitive salary, benefits, housing available, healthy parish, low cost of living — he received exactly one application.

The pews behind the pulpit

None of this is happening in front of full churches.

Episcopal membership peaked in the 1960s at about 3.4 million. It stands today near 1.5 million. In-person average Sunday attendance across the entire denomination was 413,034 in 2024 — essentially flat against 2023, which church officials have taken as encouraging news. Set against the long arc, 413,000 worshippers is what remains of a church that once counted its members in millions.

The median Episcopal parish now draws 38 people on a Sunday morning into a building with a median seating capacity of 165. Ninety-two percent of Episcopal churches have an average Sunday attendance under 150. The church's own general convention officer has conceded the obvious: most Episcopal churches look empty on a Sunday morning.

And they are old. Political scientist Ryan Burge, whose work surfaced at that same Charlotte conference, found that two-thirds of adult Episcopalians have passed sixty, while just six percent are under thirty. Anglican Watch, working from the 2024 parochial data, puts the average Episcopalian at sixty against a national median age near thirty-nine.

There is a further tell in the 2024 report. For the first time, the church published no churchwide membership figure at all. Revised questionnaires produced numbers so inconsistent that the topline was unusable. A denomination that has counted its members without interruption since the eighteenth century could not say in 2024 how many members it had!

Congregations, meanwhile, close at a steady drip: 6,754 parishes and missions in 2023, 6,707 in 2024. That is roughly one Episcopal church closing every week of the year — which is precisely how it feels in rural New York, rural Nebraska, and rural everywhere else.

Western New York in miniature

Now put Lane's diocese against that backdrop.

Western New York reported 9,336 members in 2015 and 6,014 in 2023. In 2024 its 51 filing congregations recorded an average Sunday attendance of 1,646 — an average of about 31 souls per church — on plate-and-pledge income of $4.48 million. This is the diocese founded in 1838, the first ever divided out of another, whose cathedral still stands in downtown Buffalo as a monument to an era when Episcopalians in that city commanded real cultural authority.

Until 2024 the diocese shared a bishop and staff with Northwestern Pennsylvania under a cost-cutting partnership. That bishop was Sean Rowe. When Rowe was elected Presiding Bishop on the first ballot in Louisville, the architect of the arrangement went to New York and the logical endpoint of the partnership — merger — went with him. Lane, who was Bishop of Maine from 2008 to 2019 and Bishop Provisional of Rochester from 2022 to 2024, now holds the diocese while it searches for a successor.

Three provisional arrangements in seven years. That is not a diocese. That is a receivership.

Money was never the problem

Here is the fact that should end the conversation about resources.

As of March 31, 2026, The Church Pension Fund's investment portfolio stood at an estimated $19.2 billion. Churchwide congregational income in 2024 came to $2.5 billion. Nearly three-quarters of Episcopal congregations report holding an endowment or investment account.

Nineteen billion dollars cannot manufacture a single aspirant. It cannot fill a single pew. The Episcopal Church is not dying of poverty; it is one of the wealthiest religious bodies per capita in the United States. It is dying of something money has never been able to buy.

What the bishop does not say

Lane's letter is honest about mechanism and silent about cause. He gives us demography, economics, cultural distrust, and the abuse scandal — all real, all documented. What he does not ask is why anyone should give his life to this particular institution.

The whole business of being a priest is no longer a career, let alone a ministry. And if a man has no gospel of God’s grace to pronounce from the pulpit — only a rotating liturgy of the causes of the age — he will not fill a church, and he will not persuade his son to follow him into the work. Eulogizing same-sex marriage has not filled a single pew. Two decades of experiment have established that with the finality of a laboratory result.

The evidence for this is not mine; it is the church's own. Jolly, writing from inside The Episcopal Church, says decades of denominational data show that the parishes which grow share four traits, and he lists Jesus-centered strong preaching first. Not inclusion statements. Not building-use partnerships. Preaching.

The Anglican Church in North America is the control group. Its 2025 Mission Index reports attendance up 38 percent since 2022; in 2024 it counted 1,027 congregations, 130,111 members, and average attendance of 96,148, its highest ever. ACNA has its own severe troubles — 73 percent of its congregations run under 100 on a Sunday, burials outpace marriages, and its archbishop faces trial — and I have written about them here without pity. But no one in ACNA is being told to get some life experience and come back in a decade. Men are being ordained because there is something for them to preach.

The withered vine

The deeper truth is that Western New York is every diocese, and every diocese is the national church. Rural churches close by the week. The new mission, long since departed from the Great Commission, is housing. Add a saloon, a hair salon, an art co-op in the undercroft, and in time the church simply disappears into the neighborhood it was meant to convert.

In March, Presiding Bishop Rowe told 850 clergy and donors in Charlotte that the story of terminal decline is a lie from the pit of hell. He is right that the Body of Christ will not perish. He is wrong if he imagines that the promise attaches to this institution, on these terms, with this message.

This is not a Samson moment, pillars coming down in one great crash. It is the withered vine. Being the richest church in America will not save it. Lose the message, or keep a thoughtless orthodoxy with no repentance in it, and you may as well be the Lions Club at prayer.

No gospel, no future.

David W. Virtue, DD, has covered Anglican and Episcopal affairs for over thirty-five years. He is founder and editor of VirtueOnline. Some 21,000 stories are archived at virtueonline’s website. His Substack on the Middle East can be found here: davidvirtue2.substack.com