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Sean Rowe, 49, from western Pennsylvania, has been elected because the youngest chief within the historical past of the Episcopal Church.Rowe voiced the church’s want to handle an “existential disaster” akin to the Rust Belt’s metal business collapse.He’ll succeed Bishop Michael Curry in November because the Episcopal Church’s chief pastor, president and CEO.
Sean Rowe, a 49-year-old bishop from western Pennsylvania, on Wednesday grew to become the youngest particular person ever elected as chief of the Episcopal Church.
He instantly issued a sobering name for the church, which has confronted division and persistent membership loss, to confront an “existential disaster” that he in contrast with the metal business collapse in his native Rust Belt.
Rowe, who leads two small dioceses alongside Lake Erie, will succeed Bishop Michael Curry, the primary African American to carry the place, when Curry’s nine-year time period ends on Nov. 1. The presiding bishop serves because the denomination’s chief pastor, president and CEO.
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Rowe was elected on the primary poll within the Home of Bishops, which convened behind closed doorways Wednesday within the Episcopal cathedral in Louisville. Rowe obtained 89 votes, the required majority, with different votes broadly dispersed among the many different 4 candidates.
This picture supplied by The Episcopal Church exhibits Episcopal Diocese of Northwestern Pennsylvania Bishop Sean Rowe in his official 2024 church picture. Rowe, a 49-year-old bishop from western Pennsylvania, on Wednesday grew to become the youngest particular person ever elected as chief of the Episcopal Church. (The Episcopal Church through AP)
The Home of Deputies, consisting of clergy and lay individuals, confirmed his election with 95% of the vote, adopted by robust applause.
The one presiding bishop to take the publish at a youthful age than Rowe was the primary one, William White, who was 41 when he served briefly in 1789 when there was no management election.
Rowe was 32 in Might 2007, when he was elected bishop of the Diocese of Northwestern Pennsylvania, primarily based in Erie. For nearly 12 years, he was the youngest bishop within the Episcopal Church.
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In 2019, he additionally started overseeing the Diocese of Western New York, primarily based in Buffalo. The adjoining dioceses, with lower than 10,000 members between them, have been collaborating on ministries in recent times.
He mentioned that kind of collaboration is only one instance of how the church must adapt to new realities.
“It’s not too robust to say that we’re going through an existential disaster,” Rowe instructed the Home of Deputies after his election. “It’s not as a result of our church is dying, or as a result of we’ve misplaced the idea within the salvation of God in Jesus Christ, however as a result of the world round us has modified and continues to vary. It adjustments on a regular basis. And God is looking us ever extra deeply into the unknown.”
The Episcopal Church is an offshoot of the Church of England in the USA and has been the religious residence of lots of the American founding fathers and U.S. presidents.
However as with different mainline Protestant denominations, membership within the Episcopal Church has been declining for many years. After peaking at 3.4 million in 1959, it had fallen to 1.9 million when Curry was elected chief in 2015 and dipped to underneath 1.6 million in 2022. Common Sunday church attendance for Episcopalians nationwide was 614,241 in 2015; by 2022 it had dropped to 372,952.
Rowe in contrast the church’s challenges to the collapse of the metal business, which had employed his grandparents, when he was rising up in Pennsylvania.
“I’ve been round to see issues that I like go away,” he mentioned. “I watched all the pieces that I had recognized evaporate.”
He cited tensions inside the denomination, with out giving specifics, and known as on members to be extra gracious and forgiving towards one another. He known as on them to show their “anger at injustice as an alternative of turning it inward on one another.”
Nonetheless, he supplied reassurance by quoting the late Catholic monk and writer Thomas Merton — a favourite son of the conference’s host state of Kentucky — about continuing in religion regardless of uncertainty.
“You don’t want to know exactly what is going on” to embrace challenges “with braveness, religion, and hope,” he mentioned.
On a sensible degree, Rowe known as for the church to keep away from top-heavy constructions and steer extra of its funds and assets towards native and diocesan ministries.
Born in Sharon, Pennsylvania, Rowe graduated from close by Grove Metropolis Faculty in 1997 with a bachelor’s diploma in historical past.
He graduated from Virginia Theological Seminary in 2000, earlier than returning to western Pennsylvania.
The bishop is thought for his analysis and work on organizational studying and adaptive efficiency within the church. He earned a doctorate in organizational studying and management at Gannon College in Erie in 2014.
After the election, Curry praised his successor in a information convention. He credited Rowe with each “a imaginative and prescient and a way of the mechanics that can assist us get there.”
Curry, in opening remarks to the Common Conference on Sunday, urged delegates to stay optimistic.
“This Episcopal Church is stronger, extra sturdy and has a future that God has decreed and that God has discovered,” he mentioned. “Don’t you are worried about this church. Don’t you weep and don’t you moan. Simply roll up your sleeves and let’s get to work. That’s our future.”
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All through his ministry, Curry has been an outspoken chief on a spread of difficult points, together with racial reconciliation, local weather change, immigration coverage, and LGBTQ+ equality. Amongst his favored causes: establishing ecumenical summer time day camps for kids, creating networks of day care suppliers, and inspiring massive investments in city neighborhoods.
In 2018, he grew to become a worldwide star with a stirring sermon on the broadly televised royal wedding ceremony of Britain’s Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.
Curry, 71, has battled a wide range of well being issues since Might 2023, when he was hospitalized for remedy of inside bleeding and an irregular heartbeat. In March, medical doctors efficiently surgically inserted a pacemaker as a part of ongoing remedy.
