The Most Rev. Sean W. Rowe

The Most Rev. Sean W. Rowe was elected presiding bishop and primate of The Episcopal Church in June 2024 and took office on Nov. 1 for a nine-year term. In this role, he serves as the church’s chief pastor and CEO. Known for his expertise in organizational learning and adaptive change, Rowe is committed to strengthening support for local ministry and mission.

He was ordained bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Northwestern Pennsylvania in 2007 after serving as rector of St. John’s in Franklin, Pennsylvania, for seven years. From 2014 to 2018, he served as bishop provisional of the Episcopal Diocese of Bethlehem, and from 2019 to 2024, he led a partnership between the Episcopal Dioceses of Northwestern Pennsylvania and Western New York.

Born in Sharon, Pennsylvania, into a family of steel and mill workers, Rowe was raised in the United Methodist Church and graduated from Grove City College in 1997 with a bachelor’s degree in history. During Rowe’s college years, the Rev. Barbara Akin, chair of the history department at Grove City, gave him a Book of Common Prayer and invited him to the Episcopal Church of the Epiphany in Grove City, where he was confirmed and discerned a call to the priesthood.

He enrolled at Virginia Theological Seminary after graduating from college, and after earning his Master of Divinity there in 2000, returned to Northwestern Pennsylvania to serve as rector of St. John’s, Franklin. During his seven years as rector, the congregation more than doubled in size.

Rowe was 32 in May 2007 when he was elected bishop of Northwestern Pennsylvania on the first ballot. For almost 12 years, he was the youngest bishop in The Episcopal Church. In 2014, he earned a doctorate in organizational learning and leadership at Gannon University.

Before his election as presiding bishop, Rowe served as a leader of many civic and churchwide organizations and governance bodies, and as parliamentarian for the House of Bishops. In 2018, he became the first bishop to serve on the House of Deputies Committee on the State of the Church, a position he held until 2022. That year, he was awarded the House of Deputies medal for his service.

Rowe is married to Carly Rowe, executive director of Erie Episcopal, a creative collaboration between two Episcopal congregations in Erie, Pennsylvania. They live in Erie with their daughter, Lauren.

Mary DeJong

Mary DeJong is a spiritual ecologist, eco-theologian, urban naturalist, and pilgrimage guide whose work explores the sacred relationship between story, soul, and place. Through spiritual companionship, pilgrimage, rewilding, and myth, she invites people to recover an ancient way of belonging: learning to listen for the stories held within the living world and allowing those stories to shape who we are becoming.

For nearly 25 years, Mary has led women’s pilgrimages to the storied Isle of Iona in Scotland, a place that has profoundly shaped her spiritual imagination and understanding of pilgrimage. There, she guides participants into Celtic practices of hospitality, ritual, contemplative attention, and relationship with the more-than-human world. She understands pilgrimage and retreat as contemporary rites of passage—threshold experiences where place can become teacher, stranger can become sacred guide, and the landscape can begin to speak.

Mary’s work is deeply informed by years of in-depth study and training with Celtic theologian and teacher John Philip Newell, as well as her work alongside poet and teacher David Whyte. Their influence, together with the work of contemporary story-carriers including Martin Shaw, Sharon Blackie, and Sophie Strand, has contributed to Mary’s distinctive eco-mythos approach, which weaves tale and terrain, story and soul, inner landscape and outer world.

Mary holds an M.A. in Theology & Culture with a focus in Eco-Theology from The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology, with additional study in religion and ecology, ecopsychology, mythology, and Celtic spirituality. She serves as a guest instructor at The Seattle School, teaching on myth, eco-spirituality, and pilgrimage, and works with Seattle University’s Center for Ecumenical and Interreligious Engagement (CEIE), teaching and offering spiritual practices within its programs. As a trained urban naturalist and Forest Steward through Seattle’s Green Seattle Partnership, she brings ecological knowledge and spiritual imagination into conversation with one another.

Through her teaching, retreats, and pilgrimages, Mary creates spaces for people to slow down, pay attention, and enter into reciprocal relationship with the places they inhabit. At the heart of her work is the conviction that the Earth is not simply the backdrop to our stories; the living world is a storyteller, and learning to listen may be one of the most important spiritual practices of our time.