Explanation

The Episcopal Church has statistics on the employment and compensation of clergy broken down according to gender, published in a report by the Church Pension Group each year. This valuable information assists the wider church in understanding the gaps that persist in clergy deployment and compensation on the basis of gender. Another resolution (D005) submitted to this Convention has called for the gathering of statistics on the basis of race and ethnicity. This resolutions supports that call to gather additional demographic information and adds a call for statistics on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. The specification of gender identity, separate from already existing information about gender, can allow for clergy who self-identify as transgender and/or as gender nonbinary, to make their numerical presence more clearly known and allow the wider church to understand what opportunities trans and nonbinary clergy have had to serve in the Episcopal Church thus far. Likewise, gathering statistical information on the basis of sexual orientation would allow the wider church to gain a greater clarity about the deployment and compensation patterns of clergy who self-identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual. All of this information will help us as a Church to come to fuller terms with and to respond to the gaps that exist in deployment and compensation at the intersection of various forms of difference and axes of oppression. As the report from the House of Deputies Committee on the State of the Church declared (regarding the need to overhaul the Parochial Report), “we value what we measure” (p. 557).