EPN speakers press Christians to resist anti-democratic movements as church plans for future

Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe and author Jonathan Rauch participate in the opening keynote conversation at the Episcopal Parish Network conference on March 4 at the Sheraton Charlotte Hotel in the Diocese of North Carolina. Photo: Rickland Young/Atlantic Mountain Media

[Episcopal News Service – Charlotte, North Carolina] Keynote speakers at the Episcopal Parish Network conference underway here this week emphasized the importance of The Episcopal Church’s faith-based witness in the public sphere. The church, they said, has both the privilege and the responsibility to counter movements toward Christian nationalism, a political ideology that distorts Christian beliefs, and to oppose the Trump administration’s attacks on American democratic norms.

“What the country needs more right now is in your teaching,” Jonathan Rauch told the hundreds of conference attendees gathered for his March 4 keynote conversation with Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe.

Rauch is a Brookings Institution fellow and writer for the Atlantic who recently published the book “Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy.” He is Jewish and describes himself as an atheist but told the conference crowd that in his research he has come to believe that the core teachings of Jesus, though often distorted by people in power, are closely aligned with the goals and practices of liberal democracy.

Jesus taught his followers not to be afraid, even in defeat, Rauch said. He taught that all humans should be treated equally. And he taught forgiveness, even of one’s enemies. “It’s not about destroying the other side. It’s about living together and finding paths together,” Rauch said. “That’s why the country needs your voice; not a political voice but a biblical voice.”

Later in the day, civil rights lawyer and law professor Sherrilyn Ifill made a similar call for Episcopalians to follow their faith into the public sphere, saying that American political freedoms are inseparable from religious freedoms.

“You are privileged to exercise your faith in a democracy. You have a responsibility to democracy,” Ifill said. “I do believe in this country that many of our faith institutions have betrayed our democracy and believe that they have no role to play and that they have no obligation to uphold democracy.”

Ifill argued that “everyone has a role to play,” though she clarified that how to fulfill that obligation must be specific to the institution. “I’m not asking clergy people to become civil rights lawyers,” she said. “Do the thing that you bring to the table.”

Faith institutions, for example, can prioritize ministering to the victims of anti-democratic government actions. She spoke of the recent escalation of federal immigration enforcement actions in the streets of Minneapolis, Minnesota, where communities of support formed to serve those targeted by federal authorities. When detained individuals were released unexpectedly from detention facilities into the cold Minnesota winter, volunteers were waiting outside to provide them with warm clothing and other assistance.

“That feels like ministry to me,” Ifill said.

Although the March 4 keynotes focused on direct appeals to Episcopalians’ moral courage in the face of secular threats, they were balanced by more nuts-and-bolts workshops for which the Episcopal Parish Network is known. In ballrooms in the Sheraton Charlotte Hotel, participants heard presentations and panel discussions on stewardship, building maintenance, endowment growth, leadership development, faith formation and ministries focused on racial justice and LGBTQ+ inclusion.

During one of the workshops scheduled between the two opening-day keynotes, Jim Lamm, parish administrator at St. David’s Episcopal Church in Austin, Texas, led a presentation on a major maintenance project at the historic parish. Representatives from the church’s architecture firm described their process for returning the worship space to its historical appearance, using a framework Lamm called a “phased preservation master plan.”

Church leaders attend a March 5 workshop on church endowments during the Episcopal Parish Network conference in Charlotte, North Carolina. Photo: David Paulsen/Episcopal News Service

On March 5, another workshop focused on ways of establishing, growing and making effective use of endowments built on financial gifts to parishes.

Rebecca Lilly, a vice president and financial adviser with Morgan Stanley, told attendees that a great generational transfer of wealth is expected to occur in the next 10 years, with the passing of the baby boom generation. Many of them are church members who may consider bequests as part of their estate planning. “These are conversations that should be talked about now,” Lilly said.

The Episcopal Parish Network, or EPN, is the largest annual gathering within The Episcopal Church, and the largest overall church gathering other than the triennial meetings of General Convention, the church’s primary governing body. This year’s EPN conference was promoted with the matter-of-fact tagline “Where the Church Gathers.”

The Episcopal Church supported this year’s conference as a $50,000 sponsor and by providing various church staff resources through a formal agreement with EPN.

Between workshops and keynote discussions, representatives from parishes, dioceses, seminaries and other Episcopal institutions mingled in hotel halls and an exhibitor space featuring booths promoting everything from clergy vestments for sale to Middle East pilgrimages.

The exhibitor space at the Episcopal Parish Network conference features a wide variety of displays, including the one at left by Kanuga, the Episcopal camp and conference center in the Diocese of Western North Carolina. Photo: David Paulsen/Episcopal News Service

EPN Executive Director Joe Swimmer, in introducing the opening keynote on March 4, said more than 850 people had registered for this year’s conference, filling rooms in several hotels along the edge of Charlotte’s central business district. Those numbers make this year’s EPN conference “the largest of our gatherings yet,” Swimmer said.

EPN also offers free webinars on similar topics throughout the year for all church leaders, without an EPN membership required. Those webinars drew about 25,000 participants in the past year, Swimmer told Episcopal News Service. The next in-person conference is planned for Denver, Colorado, in 2027.

At last year’s EPN conference, Rowe was the featured guest in a keynote conversation that took place four months after he took office as The Episcopal Church’s denominational leader and days after had announced a major staff realignment.

This year, Rowe was part interviewer and part interviewee, as he and Rauch talked through what is at stake for the church in the secular political world.

“I really think that The Episcopal Church is positioned now to provide a moral voice, moral courage and clarity in this time,” Rowe said.

The strain of the faith aligned with Christian nationalism in support of President Donald Trump tends to be a faith “mediated through political ideology,” Rowe said, and he cautioned The Episcopal Church not to fall into the same traps. “Often, rather than speaking out of a grounded place, we also can speak and use our political ideology as a filter to speak about faith.” Instead, “we need to challenge all the way around, for us to find that moral clarity and vision.”

“What we’re called to do is find Christ in us and take that to the world around us,” Rowe said. That requires humility and a rejection of the temptations of power. “I think we have to be prepared in this moment to lose everything we have for the sake of the Gospel in Jesus Christ.”

Rowe and Rauch speak to a crowd of hundreds at the Episcopal Parish Network conference on March 4. Photo: David Paulsen/Episcopal News Service

The site of the conference was once part of a thriving historically Black neighborhood called Brooklyn. Filled with more than 1,000 households and more than 200 Black-owned businesses, it was leveled in the 1960s as part of the federal “urban renewal” programs of that time. Only four buildings from the original neighborhood remain standing today, the Rev. Greg Jarrell, a Charlotte-based author and community organizer, said March 5 as part of a panel discussion with other local leaders.

A dozen Black churches also were displaced by the city’s redevelopment of the Brooklyn neighborhood, Jarrell said, and at times, civic planners applied a spiritual lens to convince residents the changes were warranted and inevitable. “Even the language of ‘urban renewal’ has theological echoes to it,” he said.

The impact was felt by an Episcopal congregation, St. Michael and All Angels, which was forced to sell its building in 1968. Today, the stadium where the Carolina Panthers football team plays its home games sits partly on the church’s former property. Parishioners often speculate that their pews would be where the 50-yard line now cuts across the field, senior warden Pamela Hunter told the crowd in the EPN conference hall.

Now, after decades of making do with transitional or temporary worship locations, most recently at a local Episcopal school, St. Michael and All Angels is taking steps to purchase property in Charlotte and build a new church it can call home permanently.

“It has been a very, very long arduous process,” Hunter said. Some older members of the congregation are no longer alive to see the fruits of their labors, but the remaining congregation is looking forward to finally having a church home again. “We are hopeful and we are prayerful that God will see our vision for it.”

– David Paulsen is a senior reporter and editor for Episcopal News Service based in Wisconsin. He can be reached at dpaulsen@episcopalchurch.org.