Bishop’s Address 2026
College of Coastal Georgia in Brunswick, Georgia
Beloved in Christ,
Since the last diocesan convention, I made 52 visitations. The tour around the Diocese started with Good Shepherd in Swainsboro on the Sunday after our Statesboro convention adjourned. After our worship all were delighted to enjoy the reception in their parish hall that was newly in use after a long process to get it rebuilt after Hurricane Helene. I know others here understand well what that was to navigate insurance and contractors. The year of visits ended where my ministry in the Diocese began at the church Victoria, Griffin, and I worked with others for a decade to plant, King of Peace in Kingsland. It was 26 years to the day after our first Eucharist that included my first baptism as a priest with Emily became the congregation’s first adult baptism. This past Sunday, we marked All Saints with the Rev. Dr. Aaron Brewer baptizing another Emily into new life in Jesus Christ. Since the last convention, I also made my visitation to Episcopal Day School in Augusta, took part in leading worship in two churches in our Companion Diocese of the Dominican Republic, and met for a Sunday morning worship named 1Lord, 1Faith, 1Convocation. The churches of the Southeast Convocation met together for a Eucharist in a gymnasium in a park in Brunswick, that was followed by lunch in the gym.
My charge spelled out in the canons of our church is to share the state of the diocese with you in this address, including the work undertaken since our last convention and plans for the coming year and I want to set this past year in a broader context.
Victoria and I love, love, love the variety of churches in the Diocese, the different buildings, the variety of music, and, we most love the wonderful people in every place. We are currently the only two people who have visited every church in this Diocese and we get to go to every one of them again and again, which is a great source of joy. Like every Episcopal Bishop, most every week we are visiting a congregation with 50 or fewer in worship. In 2025, the median-size Episcopal Church across the denomination has 38 people in church on an average Sunday. That number for the Diocese of Georgia is 36. Of course, for many visitations there are no initiation rites, and it is a joy to worship with the congregation and to talk with parishioners over the meal that follows.
The data we track also shows how our contexts do vary. While most Episcopal Churches have fewer than 50 people on a Sunday, most individual Episcopalians attend a church with more than 100 people on Sunday. This is true across the denomination. While most congregations are small in size, larger churches have so many parishioners that they are where the majority of people worship on a typical Sunday. The 12 congregations in this Diocese with more than 100 people on a Sunday are 20% of our congregations yet account for 56% of our Sunday attendance.
This said, I see how much of what challenges us are the same issues presenting in different ways depending on the size of the congregation. First, there is much in common about what it means to be an Episcopalian in Central and South Georgia where other churchgoers are not sure we are Christian. Beyond this, maintenance costs are burdensome to every size congregation. Big ticket items like a roof or new heating and air units can be crippling to a small congregation and these same costs are writ large when a church has multiple buildings. For those with staff, the benefits costs, especially health insurance, are driving down the staffing we can afford. This is nowhere more painful than for the congregations that have enjoyed having a full-time priest for generations who can no longer cover those costs.
Concerning health insurance costs, I am joining with other bishops in raising this concern at the denominational level as our current plan required by the canons is harming our ability to staff rightly. And concerning the issue that holds true across the Episcopal Church that more congregations can only call a priest to a part time position, I have been working with the Commission on Ministry and the Standing Committee in our Holy Orders process to raise up and form priests who can take these calls. We have eight people earning Master of Divinity degrees planning to be available for part time calls, and I have just ordained the Rev. Ben Jones to the priesthood at St. George’s in Savannah, where he will serve as a rector in a part time capacity. This follows faithful work begun with Bishop Henry Louttit and continued by Bishop Scott Benhase to provide formation for those in part-time calls. For these calls to thrive, we need bi-vocational congregations where other lay leaders step up to do parts of what a full-time priest would handle. Otherwise, we place a person in a call with limited hours for work while keeping the same expectations on those priests. This is a recipe for burnout. We need a larger group working together for the church to be able to sustain a part-time rector.
Yet, for some of our congregations in our smallest of towns where children tend to grow up and move away, it can become too much to continue. This fall, the congregation of Holy Trinity in Blakely decided to close. Do know that vestries lead their own congregations, and it is a decision of the leaders of a church to close, not something that I as bishop or anyone else at the diocesan level decides. The Standing Committee and I accepted Holy Trinity’s decision. They had not been able to hold a regular worship service since my visit in December 2025 and the Revs. Richard and Geri Nelson celebrating Christmas there last year. I had reported at the last convention the decision to close Holy Spirit in Dawson. Victoria and I were with them in January of this year for a final Eucharist in that lovely church.
Despite two congregations deciding to close in the past two years, please don’t hear me saying that the news from our data is of decline. It is not, at least not in the aggregate. We have been through a time of decline and, for now, the Diocese has been holding steady for the past three years. When you look at our attendance in worship on an average Sunday, we had been in steady decline from 2010-2016. That trend dipped sharply from 2017 to 2019 when we lost a thousand people in Sunday worship in three years. Then came the global pandemic. We weathered that crisis as best we could and climbed back to just 600 fewer for in person worship on a Sunday in worship in 2026 compared to 2019. And we did this while increasing the number of people who also worship with us online. That online worship was always needed for those who are housebound who wanted to not just have a Lay Eucharistic Visitor or a priest or deacon bring communion. They also wanted to be more connected to their congregation. In this new normal, we have about 4,000 people in worship on a given Sunday. I believe we can build from this level.
As a Diocese, we are working together on this through our strategic plan to Encourage one another to try new ways of being church, as we Strengthen areas where what we have been doing needs to change in some way, and all of this in service of Love as we more fully live into our love of God and our love for our neighbors who need our witness to the Gospel. I called for this plan at our 2023 convention, which we worked on in 2024. In the listening sessions, you named what you needed – greater connections among congregations, more responsive support from your bishop and staff, increased visibility for the Episcopal Church and inviting people to join us, increased engagement with children, youth, and college students, as well as support in revitalizing our congregations. Last year, we launched this strategic plan.
In the past year, that has meant adding connecting leaders through the Vestry Retreat at Honey Creek. The Diocesan staff put this on with me and the three canons then on staff—Joshua Varner, Loren Lasch, and Andrew Austin—putting on common programming and worship while giving time for each vestry to meet on their own for some planning for the year ahead. As that weekend was at capacity last year, we have scheduled two weekends—one in early January and the other in late February. Similarly, we have been enhancing the abilities for you to connect to others across the Diocese through the online offering of BeingWith, the 1Book1Diocese studies, the Lay Worship Leaders’ conference, and the Lay Ministers’ Conference, which this year featured Dr. Beth-Sarah Wright, who connected well with leaders across the Diocese. We are seeing Cursillo thriving once more and in the past year, Canon Joshua Varner has been exploring how to expand his already considerable work as our Canon for Congregational Vitality. We are looking at the College for Congregational Development working well in other dioceses and how we can assist in interested lay and ordained leaders getting to these existing trainings, as close as our neighboring Diocese of Atlanta. We will use the Spring Clergy Conference to bring a taste of the training to the Diocese.
We are looking for elegant solutions using what we have now where we are now. The word elegant originally meant “Needing nothing more.” This is still true in mathematics where referring to some proof as the elegant solution, it means solving an equation as simply as possible. In keeping with the strategic plan that called for support for multi-lingual ministries, I appointed five priests to a Latino Ministry Commission in May asking them to invite an equal number of lay leaders to join them. We can’t fix this with our budget funds. But, this does not mean we can’t do more than our current sole Spanish language liturgy at St. Paul’s in Savannah. The Commission almost immediately began to name possibilities with the resources on hand to create Spanish language gatherings, that include a Cursillo weekend or gathering to bring lay and ordained leaders together for whom Spanish language and Latino culture are what speaks to their hearts. We are also identifying opportunities for additional worship enculturated for Latinos as well as Spanish language worship. We will seek grant funds to make these ideas possible so that we can welcome more of our neighbors to the life-transforming Good News of Jesus through worship in an Episcopal Church.
In our efforts to assist our people and congregations in vitality, the Episcopal Church is working together on some of our goals in new ways with the leadership of our Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe. He is leading a churchwide strategic planning process, that will put significant resources behind starting new churches and increasing the health of existing ones even as he is working on a comprehensive strategy to position our denomination publicly with a campaign to increase awareness of the Episcopal Church including national advertising and resources for churches to use at the local level.
Bishop Rowe is also pointing us to important work that can be done in every congregation to secure a better future for your church. Encourage parishioners to include your church in their will. Bishop Rowe recommends that all consider having a percentage of the remainder of the estate go to their church, so that if you have given 5% of your income in life, please give 5% of your estate to your church. Bishop Benhase promoted what we then named the Legacy Society of the Diocese of Georgia, which was always about supporting estate gifts to your congregation. Churches that invested time and care into promoting will inclusion 20 or more years ago are seeing gifts routinely come in to support their ministry into the future.
Bishop Rowe is also leading bishops to greater uniformity in how we raise up and train people called to be deacons and priests. This effort has led the Commission on Ministry to approve our partnering with Bexley Seabury Seminary’s Deacons’ Formation Collaborative in preparing those called to the servant ministry of a deacon. Following closely on the ordination of three deacons at our convention last year, we have four people entering formation for the diaconate in January. The Rev. Deb Luginbuhl is overseeing our move into this new way of forming deacons, that is very much in continuity with the program the Rev. Ri Lamb ran with the support of other deacons.
Our traditionally African American congregations that suffered for many years with no diocesan support at a time when other congregations received mission funds, are another area where we are doing what we can with existing resources and seeking grants to do more. During this convention, RacialJusticeGA is holding a brief Black Church Summit following an earlier gathering of the same churches apart from convention. Dwala Nobles of Good Shepherd has led the effort to care for the schoolhouse in Glynn County, where our patron saint, Deaconess Anna Alexander served. Diocesan staff worked with Dwala and RacialJusticeGA to secure a $50,000 grant from the National Trust for Historic Preservation African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund. We put that money to work stabilizing the schoolhouse and engaging an architect with expertise in historic preservation to develop a plan for restoration. That detailed plan, together with the $70,000 we earmarked for this work from funds called for in Bishop Benhase’s last address to convention in 2019 allowed us to pursue larger grants. We have just learned that the schoolhouse rehabilitation project has been awarded a $750,000 grant, which will make it possible to completely restore the historic schoolhouse. This was made possible by the African American Civil Rights grant program through the National Park Service, which is funded by the Historic Preservation Fund. We leveraged the money the Diocese committed to get far more resources to create a historic site that will educate future generations using the example of a dedicated deaconess who lifted up the children of the Pennick Community, something that was only possible because of her faith in Jesus. I am so grateful that the congregation of Good Shepherd is with us in this convention. Y’all please stand.
I named a Honey Creek Sustainability Task Group to find a sustainable path forward or to admit that we do not have one. They did an immense amount of work that made it crystal clear that working harder at our current business model could never work. If we doubled or quadrupled use of the retreat center, the marginal amounts we net from each event would not move the needle enough to make it sustainable. In May, we reported in From the Field on the three options they saw. The first was to continue as we are now and increase the amount contributed through the diocesan budget. The second option was to sell the entire property to create an endowment to assist in putting these events on elsewhere. They recommend more work on the third option of leasing about a third of the property to a compatible use while raising gifts for upgrades and improvements. That work is bearing fruit, though it is still too soon to know for sure if the proposal will prove viable. Two developers responded to our efforts to find partners. I have reported to Diocesan Council, Clergy Conference, and the Convocation Council this past month, on a promising possibility with a developer with a great track record. Please know that a lot of deals that look mutually beneficial at this point, don’t come together. But the current concept that has us working with a well-known and respected company whose coastal work several of us know well and trust seems promising. The Standing Committee looked at it and agreed with me that this is the right path forward. Additional evaluation and study must and will occur before further detail can be officially presented. As we bought and developed the property by act of Bishop and Standing Committee and we are the ones charged by the canons with approving any buying, selling, or leasing property, we will make that decision. But in doing so we will keep you all fully informed as we are able to do so while negotiating the possible lease.
Our diocesan youth missioner, Mary Grace Wynn has been strengthening our Youth Programs. She brought back the Acolyte Festival, which has always been a great first diocesan event for a young acolyte who then gets inspired to go to Summer Camp. In my ongoing commitment to youth ministry as the front lines of our mission to build up the Body of Christ, I will join the Rev. Larry Jesion as the Spiritual Directors for the Happening coming up later this month, led by the teen rector, Ryan Grant. In both New Beginnings and Happening, the core of the weekend are talks given by teens to teens about their life in Christ in the real world. I encourage you to get your youth to these and the other youth events of the Diocese. As a church planter in Kingsland, I began with two teens. We went together to diocesan youth events and met with the teens in the other two Camden County congregations, Christ Church in St. Marys and St. Mark’s in Woodbine. In this way, we started with who God had sent our way. Connecting to the diocesan programs made what we did in Kingsland stronger. I saw the teens we sent gain a deeper faith in Jesus through participating in these events.
Working together like this can be fostered at the diocesan level and we work to do that, but so much more can happen in your convocation. The Deans are the priests that I have appointed to assist me in the oversight of the Diocese through gathering clergy together routinely and, when possible, supporting other local collaboration. A great example of this is the Kids Camp held in the Episcopal Center, our diocesan offices in Savannah. Seminarian Susanne O’Day who works for St. Peter’s in children’s ministry had the idea and she got support from John Audette, who is in the same position at Christ Church in Savannah. The idea was a Kids Camp that would allow congregations with only a few kids or even one to offer a Vacation Bible School experience. They put together a great group of volunteers for five days of inspiring fun centered on our faith in Jesus. Do not wait for someone else if you have an idea, even one you could never pull off on your own. Contact your convocation dean and see what congregations in your area can do together for the glory of God and building up the church.
In closing, please know that the longer I have been blessed to serve as your chief priest and pastor, the more I find myself grateful to serve with you all on this team. Amen.
