SHAKER HEIGHTS, Ohio (RNS) — On a drizzly Sunday in June, the scent of smoke wafted into the sanctuary of Christ Episcopal Church in Shaker Heights, Ohio, as a handful of parishioners prepared a post-service cookout on charcoal grills. The aroma added an immersive effect to the sermon of the Rev. Charles Graves IV, who was preaching about the Holy Spirit’s arrival on Pentecost via flames, wind and in multiple languages.

“We continue to have to learn new languages of our communities as they change,” said Graves, waving his hands expressively as he spoke. “We continue to have to learn new languages of generations as they change, and God continues to grow and shape and mold us and change us day by day.”

His invitation to change wasn’t just for the approximately 60 parishioners in the pews, but for the broader Episcopal Church. Between 2013 and 2023, the historic denomination saw a 23% drop in membership, from just over 2 million to under 1.6 million.

Despite the numerical decline of many progressive mainline churches, Graves, 35, is part of a younger, more diverse generation of Episcopal priests optimistic about the denomination’s future — as long as it continues to evolve.

“We’re at that moment where we know that what we’ve been doing for however long doesn’t work anymore, and that we have to try something new,” Graves told RNS in an interview in his church office. “Often, that inspires a willingness to change that you have the opportunity to lean into.”

Graves — a Black, gay, married priest who became rector of Christ Episcopal Church in September 2024 — has already been cautiously stoking that change on local and national levels, pushing the church to be more inclusive and accessible. Described as both “gentle” and “prophetic” by colleagues, this month, Graves was invited to preach during the Pride Sunday Holy Eucharist in D.C.’s Washington National Cathedral on June 1. He encouraged the hundreds in attendance and thousands watching online to “keep fighting … for the freedom of trans folks and nonbinary folks and so many in our communities under the yoke of oppression.”

But Graves’ passion is serving at the grassroots level, he said. For him, church looks like collecting diapers for immigrant families, speaking out with interfaith clergy against a local book burning incident and launching a community garden. Above all, it’s about fostering active, reciprocal relationships among church members and within the suburban Cleveland neighborhood.

Graves attributes his relational approach to ministry to his childhood in a thriving Black Episcopal congregation in Baltimore, Maryland. When his family joined St. James Episcopal Church in 1993, the parish was led by a dynamic priest named Michael Curry, who would later lead the denomination between 2015 and 2024.

“I didn’t know that the Episcopal Church wasn’t mostly Black, or that not every priest preached like Michael Curry,” said Graves, whose family has been in the Episcopal Church for seven generations.

Graves said the church was ahead of its time, welcoming same-sex couples without a second thought.

Despite his positive experience in the church, Graves was convinced his future was in politics, even after enrolling at Yale Divinity School in 2012. By the time he graduated, though, his priestly calling was clear. In 2019, he took a campus ministry position serving students at three universities in the Houston area.

When the University of Houston shuttered its LGBTQ center in 2023, Graves teamed up with other LGBTQ-affirming ministry leaders to revive programs that had been eliminated. His efforts to promote LGBTQ+ inclusion also emerged on a national scale within the Episcopal Church. He co-founded the LGBTQ+ Caucus, a group that proposes church policy changes related to LGBTQ+ inclusion. In 2022, the group helped pass 25 proposals, including mandating LGBTQ+ inclusion training for Episcopal Church employees and volunteers and establishing a denominational position focused on women’s and LGBTQ+ initiatives. Graves has also been a member of the Episcopal Church’s Executive Council, an elected body that helps oversee denominational efforts, since 2019.

For years, Graves was content fulfilling his ministerial calling outside a traditional parish setting, he explained. Then, last June, he visited Christ Episcopal Church in Shaker Heights.  

The church sits on a busy thoroughfare in a Cleveland suburb known for its early racial integration efforts. Martin Luther King Jr. visited the church in the 1960s, and today it’s known for being “on the progressive edge of theology,” as one parishioner put it. Vestry member Paige Plumlee-Watson joined the parish with her wife in fall 2019 and told RNS its LGBTQ-inclusive reputation was a major draw.

Since she joined, though, the church has been in a period of transition triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic and the longtime rector’s retirement. The neighborhood around the church, too, has been changing — a new housing development went up next to the church, and across the street, a trendy market hall was built as part of a mixed-use development of restaurants, shops and upscale apartments.

The congregation’s response to those changes convinced Graves to take the job.

“They didn’t say, how do we get more people to come to church? How do we stop the church from shrinking? All that kind of desperation talk,” Graves said. “What they asked was, how do we engage more deeply with our community? And that’s a very different question.”

Key to engaging with community, Graves said, is technology. After becoming rector last fall, one of his first tasks was to improve the quality of the church service livestream, noting anyone under 40 would “interrogate” the church’s website and social media. He and the church have also focused on in-person community efforts like transforming part of the church narthex into a makeshift diaper bank for a local immigrant organization and collecting books to replace 100 library books, recently destroyed in a nearby book burning, about LGBTQ+, African American and Jewish communities. Graves has also launched a yearlong strategic planning initiative in which congregants are determining what their church’s future might look like. 

Still, like many small parishes, Christ Episcopal Church has been dealing with financial constraints and staffing changes. Graves says in some ways, his church is a microcosm of the denomination, which is facing smaller budgets, restructuring staff and emphasizing local ministry. These changes don’t need to be discouraging, according to Graves. In fact, he sees Christ Episcopal Church as part of an energetic movement within the denomination led by young clergy eager for the church to adapt.

“We entered into a church that was already in free fall, and we don’t have the establishment idea of church,” Graves said. This younger, diverse cohort of priests didn’t inherit the expectation that people will automatically attend church or that the church will be given respect in a community by default. Instead, he said, these leaders are asking, “How do we actually engage with the needs of our community? How do we speak into these massive issues that our world is going through?”

One parish that Christ Episcopal Church is learning from is Jubilee Episcopal Church in Austin. Led by the Rev. Lizzie McManus-Dail, author of “God Didn’t Make Us to Hate Us,” the intergenerational, multicultural, “LGBTQIA celebratory” Episcopal congregation meets in a strip mall. Key to the “incense-swinging, stomp-your-feet singing” church plant’s success is its embrace of joy in worship and its ability to make ancient liturgies accessible without watering them down, McManus-Dail said. And her large media presence as “Rev. Lizzie” doesn’t hurt, either.

The Rev. Zack Nyein, senior associate rector at St. Bart’s, a historic church in Midtown Manhattan, is also giving input as Christ Episcopal Church considers next steps. He leads a Thursday evening worship community called Imagine Worship aimed at reaching “seekers and unchurched folks,” Nyein said. The service features a relaxed atmosphere and a blend of new and traditional music, and it often concludes with a shared meal. Its open doors and ambient lighting encourage passersby to stop in.

“Creating some of those soft spaces in person and online for folks to just come and see has been really crucial,” Nyein said. “I think in this moment, we can’t just put up the sign and say, ‘Come at 10 o’clock on Sunday’ and expect people to flock to us like they might have in times past.”

It’s models like these that make Graves hopeful about what’s to come — both for his parish and the denomination. He knows there’s no one-size-fits-all prototype for a thriving congregation, but as long as churches are willing to take risks informed by their relationships with the local community, he thinks there’s reason to believe the Episcopal Church will survive long past his own retirement.

“We’re not despondent about the future of the church,” Graves said. “We’re all leading the church toward a very different future.”