An Interview with Lisa Towle

The newly elected president of the National Episcopal Church Women talks about her plans

By Lisa Towle

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Lisa Towle was elected president of the National Episcopal Church Women (ECW) on the first ballot by a two-thirds majority on June 27. She has served as president of the Episcopal Church Women of North Carolina (ECW-NC) for the past 12 years. She will continue as president of ECW-NC through the end of the year.

This is the first time the Presiding Bishop and the president of the national ECW will be from the same diocese.

We had a chance to chat with Lisa the morning after her election.

What are your plans for the National Episcopal Church Women?

I’ve been on the Board for the past three years as its secretary. In 2012, when I was elected to the Board, I also at that ECW triennial meeting introduced a resolution regarding the restructuring of the national ECW. That resolution passed by a very large margin. This Board from 2012 to 2015 has been working to start to meet the mandates of the resolution. Now, we’re going to start to live into the restructuring effort.

It’s not just our governance and our by-laws we’re looking at; it’s about opening up the ECW. Every woman in this Church is a member of ECW. She can choose to participate or not, but my concern is that we’ve become maybe a little too static and a little too staid. We need to let people know that we’re here and what we do and why it’s of value. And hopefully more women of the church will come back to that and will see that.

There’s kind of an evangelizing going on and hopefully a new focus on mission and ministry. It took three years just to start to do the resolution, and I have a three-year term, so in 2018 we’ll see where we are.

What is the thing you would most like to see happen in the national ECW during the next three years?

I’d like for all parts of our church, not just our ladies but also our clergy and our bishops, to see that we are vital. And we have to earn that recognition.
There’s a lot to do, and there’s a lot of education to do, because we have so many new people coming into the Episcopal Church, who weren’t born in the church, who aren’t familiar with [the ECW].

Generally, there’s respect for the ECW and appreciation of it, but maybe we’re seen as a little too tight of a circle.

What have you been most proud of during your 12 years as President of ECW-NC?

Right now what comes to the top of my mind—because I’m most involved with it—is our [effort to] fight human trafficking.

I’m also thrilled and very happy that [Bishop of North Carolina and Presiding Bishop-elect] Michael Curry helped make sure the Episcopal Church Women were part of our companion diocesan relationship with Botswana. It was the first time women were formally included in something like that. The relationship with the Anglican women in Botswana has grown and is very tight, and I’m proud of that.

When I first came in, we didn’t have a communications program, so I’m also proud of getting that up and running and having those tools in place.

Can you tell me more about the work you all are doing in Salt Lake City?

The national ECW Board has a social justice team. They do a lot throughout the course of a three-year span. When we come to a General Convention/Triennial meeting sight, we focus on two things.

To recognize the host community we focus on one entity within that community. For instance, in 2012 when we were in Indianapolis, we focused on a place called Crain House, a halfway house for women who have been released from prison where they can live with their children until they are able to move on. Here we opted to go with the Homeless Youth Resource Center, which is under the umbrella of the Volunteers of America program. They’re trying to expand their space, which is tiny. That’s what the 5K run we hosted [yesterday morning] supported.

The second piece of our social justice initiative is human trafficking. Yesterday we had Rachel Lloyd, a survivor of human trafficking. She’s from England and came to the States, where she was involved in the commercial sex trade. Once she got out of the life, she started GEMS (Girls Educational and Mentoring Services). They’re headquartered in New York, but they work nationwide. We are supporting them by raising awareness and collecting money.

Homeless Youth Resource Center, Rachel Lloyd of GEMS and Episcopal Relief and Development addressed us yesterday about their latest initiatives. Social justice is a very big piece of what we’re doing.

Both North Carolina’s ECW and the national ECW are currently focusing on human trafficking. Are those initiatives related?

North Carolina started [focusing on human trafficking] before it became a focus on the national level.

The goal here is not just to do something at the national level and then we all walk away from Salt Lake City. It’s to share this information such as that from the speakers we had yesterday. And then hopefully people will be inspired to go back to their dioceses and their congregations and bring this information forward.

A relationship between a national organization and the grassroots work is the ideal, but that can be a little tricky in the Episcopal Church, how you maintain that balance. Sometimes it’s very top-down because we have a hierarchical structure in our Church. That works in some respects, but we also really need to focus on bottom-up [initiatives] so we can meet somewhere in the middle and help each other.

A lot of what we do at these triennial meetings is have women from around the country share what they’re doing so everyone gets a sense of the breadth of the work happening. It’s very easy to get myopic. You get very focused on where you live and what you do, then you come to something like this and you can get very fired up because there’s great stuff going on. You think “I can do that; I can go home and make that happen.’”