A church in the heart of the city, with a heart for the city

Episcopal Church’s annual budget gets single-page public release, to mixed reviews

February 13, 2026

[Episcopal News Service] Churchwide leaders have unveiled a new, one-page format for The Episcopal Church’s annual budget document. They say the concise format — compared to past budgets exceeding 20 pages — is now more accurate, as well as more transparent in providing useful information about churchwide expenses, such as personnel, staff travel, contracted services, IT support and marketing. Described as a “consolidated” budget, it provides precise detail on certain overall spending categories. At the same time, the single page omits line-item details historically included in annual budgets. Those budgets formerly mirrored the equally dense triennial spending plans that were closely reviewed, debated and then adopted by the House of Bishops and House of Deputies at General Convention. The new annual format took effect with the 2026 budget, which was approved by Executive Council on Dec. 11 and posted online in January. “All of the reporting at the department level is now standardized, and that is rolling up into what you’re seeing,” the Rt. Rev. Diane Jardine Bruce, a member of Executive Council from the Diocese of Los Angeles, told Episcopal News Service by phone. She also chairs the Joint Budget Committee, which authorized the new consolidated format. “For me, it’s a step forward.” The nearly 700 budget line items approved in 2024 by General Convention remain available in the 2025-27 churchwide budget document, posted on the Finance Office’s website. Each year, Executive Council, the church’s governing body between meetings of General Convention, must adopt an annual budget with revised figures that adjust for the church’s real-time ministries, programs and needs. Church leaders say anyone interested in the 2026 adjustments to department spending and other itemized expenses can now get answers to their questions by contacting the Finance Office directly. Even so, the decision not to post all the information online has generated mixed reviews. Lawrence Hitt II, a council member from the Diocese of Colorado and chair of Executive Council’s Governance and Operations Committee, appreciates the new one-page annual budget document. “I think the Joint Budget Committee decision to report the consolidated budget to the church is, in fact, very helpful and is easier to understand than the massive full budget which consists of enormous detail,” Hitt told ENS by email. “This will accurately reflect broad trends in the application of our financial resources.” On the other hand, Jill Showers Chow, a lay member from the Diocese of the Central Gulf Coast, thinks more than one page should be released to the wider church and readily available. “While I appreciate the value of a concise overview, the one‑page presentation raises serious transparency and stewardship concerns because it omits the supporting side notes that vestries, diocesan leaders and lay members need to understand how totals were derived and what the budget means for mission and ministry across the church,” Chow said in response to an ENS email. MORE: Triennial and annual budget documents are posted to the Finance Office’s website. The audience for church budget documents, though hard to quantify, includes Episcopalians like Will Harron. When Executive Council discussed and voted on the 2026 budget at its Dec. 11 online meeting, Harron was following it on the council’s YouTube livestream and live-blogging the details for the benefit of General Convention’s Young Adult Caucus, of which he is an active member. And then he waited. Budget documents typically are posted online after such votes. Harron asked churchwide leaders when the 2026 budget would be available, and they told him they were working on a new format for release in January that would be more user-friendly. He was not pleased by the result. “Frankly, I’m sort of disappointed that the level of detail on how the church spends its ministry money and how the church responds to the priorities of General Convention isn’t present this year, as it has been in previous years,” Harron, a deputy from the Diocese of Western Massachusetts and the part-time provincial coordinator for the church’s Province I, told ENS in a phone interview. Harron said he eventually was able to get the information he was looking for by contacting an Executive Council member. Previously, he and anyone interested in those details would have had immediate access through the budget document. “There’s a real lack of clarity and transparency” in the single page, he said. It is common for the church to change the format of its budget documents to reflect its shifting priorities after new presiding bishops take office. Budgets, for example, followed a structure known as the “Five Marks of Mission” during Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori’s nine-year term, which ended in 2015. When Presiding Bishop Michael Curry succeeded her, his staff reworked the churchwide budget to emphasize three of Curry’s top priorities: racial reconciliation, evangelism and creation care. Since Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe began his term in November 2024, he has restructured much of the churchwide staff into three new divisions: Strategic Support, Mission Program and Public Policy, Partnership and Witness. The new consolidated 2026 budget format clearly shows how much money is budgeted for those divisions, as well as grantmaking, governance, administration and “presiding bishop ministry.” Church leaders have welcomed Chief Financial Officer Christopher Lacovara’s efforts to upgrade accounting software, systems and processes since he was hired in March 2025. Those upgrades made the new consolidated budget possible for 2026, and several Executive Council members singled out that one-page document for praise, because it provides a sharper picture of more than $49 million in annual churchwide revenues and expenses. “I absolutely reject the assumption that having more numbers out there is the same thing as transparency,” Lacovara said in an interview with ENS, adding that the one-page consolidated 2026 budget is “infinitely more transparent” than previous budgets, which he said were sometimes unreliable in their numbers or disconnected from actual church spending. “The message to the church is, we are going to give you less detail but more accurate and meaningful budget information,” he said. […]