Sandra Teresa Soledad Montes Vela, a lay executive council member from the Episcopal Diocese of Texas, announced on Facebook that she has resigned from the Episcopal Church’s interim governing body, saying it would be unprincipled for her to remain a member.
“In prayer and heartbreak, with conviction and peace, I have resigned from the Executive Council of The Episcopal Church. I refuse to belong to any space that asks me to betray truth or silence my integrity,” Montes said in her Facebook post on October 23, two days after the council’s last meeting concluded. She later forwarded to Episcopal News Service the resignation letter she sent to the church’s presiding officers by email.
“This most recent meeting was, for me, when the hummingbird stopped returning to the flower,” she told the presiding officers. The meeting was held October 20-21 at Kanuga, an Episcopal conference center and camp in the Diocese of Western North Carolina. Montes did not attend in person but participated via Zoom.
Montes also had filed a complaint this year against Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe under the church’s Title IV disciplinary canons for clergy, citing a verbal altercation that occurred in June 2025 during a break at that month’s executive council meeting. Churchwide authorities have since concluded that case with a “pastoral response.”
Montes had clashed several times with churchwide leaders, particularly over her concerns they were privileging White perspectives, dismissive of LGBTQ+ experiences, and insufficiently attentive to Spanish translations of church materials. Montes, who is pansexual, had served on the executive council since 2022, when she was elected by the general convention. Her term was to run through 2027.
“October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. I must also name spiritual and institutional violence,” she said in her Facebook post about resigning from the executive council. “I’ve been reminded that love without safety is not love, and faith without truth is not faith. I can no longer keep going back to be hurt, hoping the cycle has ended.”
She did not elaborate there on the reasons for her resignation, but in her resignation letter she singled out a verbal exchange on October 20 when she was one of several executive council members who confronted Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe on the church’s process for handling a previous vacancy on the council.
As the council was voting that morning on nominees to replace Stannard Baker, a member from Vermont who died in June, Joe McDaniel asked why he, as a member of council’s nominating advisory committee, had not been consulted about the criteria for choosing someone to fill Baker’s seat.
McDaniel, a member from the Diocese of the Central Gulf Coast who is Black, was participating via Zoom.
“It doesn’t make sense to appoint a committee with people of color and not empower them to proceed with exercising that power,” McDaniel said. “That is a manifestation of White supremacy, and I just wanted to point that out.”
Rowe noted that McDaniel’s committee, though it could have been consulted, has an advisory role in such nominations, which are made by a different body, the executive council’s executive committee. Rowe then asked the executive council to proceed with voting, but Montes spoke up to voice her own concerns.
“Our member just called out White supremacy and nothing was mentioned about that,” she said. “It is awful that this could happen, and nothing was said about that statement.”
Rowe then paused to say his intention was “not to ignore it but to clarify the process.” He acknowledged that there are “many dynamics at play, and I apologize for those,” and he then asked a chaplain to say a prayer before moving on.
Montes, in her resignation letter, noted Rowe’s “visible defensiveness” in responding to questions from people of color on the council. “I urge someone on the presiding bishop’s team to review the video of Monday morning’s incident. This should not become another moment smoothed over by calls for ‘grace.’”
Members of the executive council, the church’s governing body between the triennial meetings of the general convention, have engaged in a number of pointed debates in recent years on a range of issues, from the process for filling canonical staff positions to a divisive leadership election in the house of deputies. Montes has been among the more vocal members to raise alarm at what she has identified as the church’s White-centric structures, including during former Presiding Bishop Michael Curry’s tenure.
Tensions between Rowe and Montes began rising even before he took office as presiding bishop on November 1, 2024. During an executive council orientation session led by Rowe last October, Montes objected to the quality of the church’s Spanish translations.
“I have seen since my very first meeting that Spanish is not treated as respectfully as English is,” Montes said at the time. “We have had, over and over, mistranslated—items that are not translated fully or that are not translated well.”
Rowe responded by affirming that the executive council will be provided with translations, adding, “probably we’ll never meet your standards, Sandra.” Montes objected to what she called Rowe’s “very condescending” and “really patronizing” response. After a brief back and forth, Rowe apologized for his choice of words.
Little has been said publicly about the June 2025 incident between Rowe and Montes that prompted her Title IV complaint. It occurred at the executive council’s in-person meeting at the Maritime Conference Center in suburban Baltimore, Maryland. Montes filed her complaint the following month, according to confirmation provided by Rowe’s office.
On June 25, the last day of the council meeting, Montes posted to Facebook, “I was told today: ‘If you want to remain on this board, you need to learn how to act in a board.’”
Montes, in an interview for this story, said during a break she had approached Rowe with a concern and he began yelling at her before she could state her question. “He’s never raised his voice to me like that before,” she said, noting that the exchange happened in front of staff and other council members. “I felt belittled.”
Indianapolis Bishop Jennifer Baskerville-Borrows, as vice president of the house of bishops, consulted with the Title IV reference panel and “referred the matter for a facilitated conversation to explore a restorative covenant,” Rowe said in a written statement.
“In August, Dr. Montes and I met at a neutral site in New York City for a daylong conversation with a bi-lingual facilitator,” Rowe said. “We each had the support people we requested attend with us. The facilitated conversation did not produce a restorative covenant, and the matter was referred back to the reference panel. The reference panel then concluded the matter with pastoral response.”
Montes said she had asked Rowe for a clear apology but did not receive one.
In her resignation letter, Montes had hoped to be a voice for justice and inclusion on the council but “have rarely felt that I had true comrades in the struggle.”
“It hurts so much to write these words, but I am giving up,” she said, “not on the Gospel, not on justice, but on trying to survive inside a space that continues to wound me and that is now led by someone who publicly berated me, violently and aggressively taunted me, and has told me that people fear me and agree with him.” —Episcopal News Service
