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South Carolina capital campaign kicks off churchwide ‘pay it forward’ fundraising initiative

May 28, 2026

[Episcopal News Service] The Diocese of South Carolina is using seed money from The Episcopal Church to launch its first capital campaign since resolving a property lawsuit with a breakaway group in 2022. The new fundraising is seen both as a way to invest in the Charleston-based diocese’s own priorities, like congregational revitalization and racial reconciliation, and as a pilot program for supporting other dioceses’ capital campaigns. “There’s a lot of energy right now in the diocese around finally being in resurrection,” South Carolina Bishop Ruth Woodliff-Stanley said in an interview with Episcopal News Service. Woodliff-Stanley was consecrated as the diocese’s bishop in October 2021. Six months later, a state Supreme Court issued a split decision in the legal battle between the diocese and the breakaway group now affiliated with the Anglican Church in North America. The ruling ordered the return of some church properties to the Episcopal diocese while allowing ACNA to keep other properties that formerly had been occupied by Episcopal congregations. Since then, the Episcopal diocese has developed a strategic plan with three parts: re-establish Episcopal congregations at the properties that were returned, plant and grow new congregations in communities where properties were not returned and support historically African American congregations that have long been disenfranchised because of the diocese’s past complicity with racist systems dating back to the transatlantic slave trade. While the diocese was considering ways to fund its strategic vision, Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe took office in November 2024 and began promoting greater churchwide support for dioceses and congregations. At a House of Bishops meeting, Rowe mentioned to Woodliff-Stanley he was interested in reviving a late 1970s and 1980s fundraising model. Started by then-Presiding Bishop John Allin, it was called Venture in Mission and entailed churchwide staff coordinating more closely with diocesan leaders to meet local ministry needs. Woodliff-Stanley volunteered South Carolina as a kind of pilot program, and the Rev. Charles Robertson, senior adviser to the presiding bishop, was assigned to help. Under the new program, The Episcopal Church has provided the seed money for the Diocese of South Carolina to hire a consulting firm to work with the diocese in developing its capital campaign, from discerning a realistic goal, conducting a feasibility study and then rolling out the campaign in deliberate stages. A church spokesperson declined to specify the amount of the seed money but confirmed that the church’s up-front investment covers the consulting firm’s fee, which is likely to vary by local needs as dioceses engage with this new program. Right now, South Carolina is making direct appeals to potential large-gift donors based on a $3.3 million campaign goal. The public phase, when all members of the diocese will be asked to contribute, is scheduled to run from Aug. 29 through the end of the year. If the campaign is successful, the diocese has agreed to return 15% of its proceeds back to The Episcopal Church, which then will use the money to invest in other dioceses’ capital campaigns following the same approach. “We are helping support this on the front end, and then they, in turn, are agreeing to do a pay-it-forward model,” Robertson told ENS. “We’re able to help dioceses who have a clear vision of where they want to go but don’t have those up-front resources” to launch an effective capital campaign. Robertson added that he is working with other dioceses interested in receiving churchwide fundraising support, including one that likely will be ready to announce its participation in the coming months. For the South Carolina campaign, the diocese started with several months of engagement with church members, who were overwhelmingly supportive of the idea, Woodliff-Stanley said. That encouragement partly reflected South Carolina’s focus on recovering from the years-long effects of schism. The diocese once counted as many as 78 worshipping communities across the southeastern half of the state, including along the Atlantic Coast. Parochial report data show that the diocese’s baptized membership topped 29,000 in 2011, the year before the diocese was upended by theological and doctrinal disputes, especially related to full LGBTQ+ inclusion in the church. In November 2012, led by their bishop, a majority of attendees at a special diocesan convention voted to effectively leave The Episcopal Church. After they departed, Episcopal membership in the diocese dropped below 6,400. The remaining diocese counted 22 continuing parishes and missions. Over the following decade, Episcopalians in South Carolina found ways to worship and serve their communities amid a series of legal victories and setbacks in the church property lawsuit. Then, in April 2022, the state Supreme Court ordered ACNA to return 14 church properties to the Episcopal diocese, as well as St. Christopher Camp and Conference Center on Seabrook Island. ACNA was allowed to keep 15 other properties. That ruling was later revised to allow ACNA to keep several additional properties. As the Diocese of South Carolina began planning for the future of the returned properties and supporting Episcopalians still experiencing loss in other communities, “we recognized that we had an opportunity to set that story inside a larger narrative of disenfranchisement,” Woodliff-Stanley told ENS. Some of the challenges now faced by predominantly white congregations, she said, were quite familiar to the diocese’s historically Black congregations, which still struggle financially from longtime disparities in diocesan resource allocation. After identifying the need to address those racial disparities as part of its strategic vision, the diocese sought projects that aligned with that goal and its other top priorities when developing its capital campaign. The diocese settled on four projects to fund, one of which will pay for facilities improvements for Three Churches United, a coalition of three historically Black churches in Charleston. Two of those churches require significant repairs and upgrades. Calvary Episcopal Church is expected to receive $500,000, and the campaign has budgeted $400,000 for St. Mark’s Episcopal Church. The third church in the coalition, St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, has fewer facilities needs but would receive $100,000 for […]