Bringing Beloved Community into Focus
Fall 2021
Today’s Episcopal Church continues to evolve intentionally in exciting ways, and we at CPG are proud to support this work. Presiding Bishop Michael Curry identified racial reconciliation—Becoming Beloved Community—as a top priority in what he has described as The Jesus Movement, and at CPG we’re doing our part.
Responding to resolutions passed at the 79th General Convention, and in partnership with the Executive Council, CPG launched an initiative to collect demographic information about clergy, on a voluntary basis.
In our role as Recorder of Ordinations, CPG began inviting all clergy to share personal race, ethnicity, gender identity, and sexual orientation information, which we will use to track trends in deployment and compensation. To date, nearly 5,000 bishops, priests, and deacons have logged onto CPG’s self-service web portal, MyCPG Accounts, to share additional information about themselves. All collected demographic data is kept private and secure and is separated from any data used to administer benefits.
Matthew Price, PhD, Senior Vice President for Research and Data at CPG, led the efforts to document compensation trends in a new, interactive Clergy Compensation Report. It not only categorizes data by region, age, employment status, parish size, and operating revenue, but, for the first time, also breaks it down by gender identity, sexual orientation, race, and ethnicity, and it includes international clergy.
“When I look at a chart or spreadsheet, I don’t just see numbers. I see a story. The story of the Church,” Dr. Price explains.
The Rev. Clayton D. Crawley, Executive Vice President and Chief Church Relations Officer at CPG, says, “CPG is proud to continue its partnership with The Episcopal Church, General Convention, and the Executive Council, in order to have a better understanding of who we are as the Body of Christ in the world.”
As Bishop Curry explains, “If our vision is to reflect the vision of Jesus, we need to know how close we are to it. This gives us a snapshot of who we are. This really can help us along the journey to truly becoming God's Beloved Community.”
If you are a clergy member and haven’t yet entered your demographic data, please Be Part of the Picture!
Comments? Questions? Concerns? CPG is listening. Please reach out to us at corpcomm@cpg.org