CHARLOTTE, N.C. (RNS) — The presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church is tired of hearing that his church is doomed.

The denomination has lost about half of its baptized membership since the 1960s, declining to about 1.5 million adherents today, and still faces shrinking congregations and aging demographics. But the church is not ready to give up.  

“I believe that — as a final word and as a final story — is a lie from the pit of hell,” a feisty Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe told church leaders in the opening session of Episcopal Parish Network’s annual conference on Wednesday (March 4) in a Sheraton Hotel in downtown Charlotte, North Carolina. “That is not the teaching of Jesus.”

That mix of defiance and hope struck home with the more than 850 clergy and other denominational leaders who came together for the largest regular gathering of Episcopal church leaders outside of the denomination’s General Convention. When asked from the stage if they were optimistic about the future, most in the audience answered with a resounding yes.

“Though it’s going to take a lot of work!” the Rev. Henrietta “Rhetta” Wiley called out from the audience.

Wiley, a former college professor who has been rector of Trinity Episcopal Church in Towson, Maryland, since 2019, said her church experienced some decline in attendance during COVID-19 but has rebounded. The congregation, which runs a thriving preschool and thrift store that serves the community, has begun an outreach to local residents who walk through the church parking lot on the way to work.

But as Episcopalians look to the future, Wiley explained, the denomination is processing grief for what it once was. The inheritor of the dominant Church of England after the American Revolution and the church of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, the Episcopal Church was long a key denomination of the mainline Protestant establishment.

“The hard work everyone in this room is doing is learning how to build community between those folks who are looking backwards and those people who are looking forward, who were all grounded in Christ,” said Wiley.

The EPN started in the 1980s as a group of large parishes and eventually evolved into a gathering for church leaders to talk about what Joe Swimmer, who has been the executive director since 2018, called the “tactical and practical” aspects of running a church.

“Everyone learns from each other,” said Swimmer. “We are trying to be of service to this church, which is rapidly changing.”

A lifelong Episcopalian who grew up in a small congregation in Oklahoma, he said the church won’t ever go back to what it was, he said. “But it still has a vital witness.”

The Rev. Stanford Adams, rector at the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd in Austin, Texas, said the conference is a chance for church leaders to learn from one another and to hear how other churches are reaching their communities. It also gives them a sense of what’s going on in the larger church, said Adams, who served on the conference planning committee.

Adams said Good Shepherd has been drawing about 700 people to worship on Sundays, including a growing number of young people. Many have moved to Austin for work, said Adams, and are looking for “a kind of deeper purpose and meaning that rings true for folks.”

The speakers at the conference’s general sessions defined one of the biggest challenges the denomination faces: Getting church members and leaders to talk more about the Bible and about their beliefs to those outside the church. Church leaders who believe they have an important message to offer are often reluctant to be seen as pushy about faith.

Episcopalians have a culture of Christian niceness, said the Rev. Scott Gunn, and don’t want to be seen as “one of those people” — Christians whose commitment to evangelism overwhelms people’s comfort zones.

“Which is a silly thing,” Gunn, one of the keynote speakers on Friday, said in an interview. “The example I always use is, there are a lot of really terrible drivers on the road, but I’m not going to say, well, I can’t go anywhere because of those bad drivers. I’m going to go do what I need to do.”

Gunn, like many attendees, is bullish on the future of the church. “I see churches, congregations of all sizes and shapes — big, little, liberal, conservative, urban, rural, you name it — we can find examples of churches that are thriving and bursting at the seams,” he said. 

Bishop Rowe also prompted Episcopal leaders to get over their shyness about talking about Jesus or the Bible. On the conference’s opening day, Rowe said during an onstage conversation with author and journalist Jonathan Rauch that their reluctance affects the church’s public witness on social issues.

Rauch, who describes himself as a gay, atheist Jew, said that he once underestimated how much American democracy relied on the values of faith. Without that undergirding of faith, he told the audience, Americans have turned politics into a kind of spiritual warfare, seeking transcendent meaning in electoral wins. That makes political compromise an act of blasphemy, rather than a process for fellow citizens to live together.

“You’re supposed to view your antagonist across the table as fellow citizens — not as the anti-Christ,” said Rauch, whose recent book, “Cross Purposes,” connects the deepening polarization in the United States with the loss of what he calls “thick Christianity.”

Rauch said he has come to see the values of Christianity and the values of democracy espoused by the country’s founders as a pair of wooden boards. Neither can stand on its own, but together they hold the country up. That’s not Christian nationalism, he said, but a recognition of the values undergirding democracy

Rauch pointed in particular to what he called three core teachings of the Bible: Don’t be afraid. Be like Jesus. And forgive one another. “A liberal democracy is not a proposition where, if I win, you have to lose, and I have to dominate and destroy,” he said. “It’s not about destroying the other side. It’s about living together and finding paths together to share your country.”

The presiding bishop said the Episcopal Church had in the past allied itself with those in power and overlooked its own values, comparing his church to present-day evangelical Christians. Even today, Rowe said, when his church speaks about social issues, the focus is more on political policy than on moral clarity. The challenge, he said, is to speak with moral clarity, not to produce more political noise.

Civil rights lawyer and Howard University professor Sherrilyn Ifill, who took the stage after Rowe and Rauch, also urged church leaders to let their faith lead in their response to America’s challenges, while reminding them that they have a responsibility to participate in democracy. “You don’t get to be separate and apart from democracy,” Iliff said. “Everyone has a role to play.”

Iliff, who grew up in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, a historically Black denomination, mourned the loss of norms and the common courtesies that make cooperation possible. “What we have been drawn into is a world that is 24-7 confrontation,” she said. “And it is freaking us out.”

The conference commonly ranges into more prosaic topics such as church property, finances, young leaders and other ministry topics.

On Friday, Brian Steensland, a sociologist at Indiana University in Indianapolis, shared results of a study looking at the role Episcopal parents play in passing the faith from one generation to the next. While parents have a crucial influence over their children’s spiritual development, he said, many outsource it to the church, taking what he calls an “exposure for choice” approach — teaching their kids about religion without making a case for any particular faith.

He suggested that parents try an “equipping for commitment” mindset. Commitment can feel like a constraint, he said, but also opens the door to community and belonging. As for church leaders, he recommended they help parents grow in their faith so that they can better pass that faith on.

The Rev. Penny Bridges, dean of St Paul’s Cathedral in San Diego, California, said she was leaving the conference inspired and ready to pass on what she had learned. She was also looking forward to getting home and talking with her grandson more about the Bible.

But everything she had heard, she said, made her hopeful about the church’s future. “We’ve been floundering around for a long time,” she said. “We know there’s something we need to do differently, and I think we’re gradually getting to clarity about it.”