The Episcopal Diocese of San Diego

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About

The diocesan headquarters of the Episcopal Diocese of San Diego — created in 1973 from the Diocese of Los Angeles and now overseeing 44 congregations and roughly 20,000 members across San Diego County, Imperial County, southern Riverside County, and Yuma County, Arizona — operates from the former Holy Trinity Episcopal Church property at 2083 Sunset Cliffs Boulevard. As a Province 8 diocese of The Episcopal Church (TEC) within the Anglican Communion, the Sunset Cliffs offices coordinate clergy deployment, congregational finance audits, evangelism initiatives, and liturgical-music programming, with the resident Bach Collegium ensemble at All Souls' Episcopal Church/Bach Collegium San Diego serving as one of the diocese's flagship sacred-music programs. Average Sunday attendance across the diocese reached 3,746 in 2024, and current ministry priorities under the fifth diocesan bishop (consecrated June 15, 2019) include church planting, campus ministries, migrant-shelter programs for women and children, and affordable-housing development. Active ecumenical relationships connect the diocese to other mainline Protestant bodies on shared social-justice and refugee-resettlement work, with First United Methodist Church of San Diego functioning as a regular Methodist counterpart in joint advocacy and downtown shelter coordination. The diocesan office building also hosts School for Ministry training, eucharistic visitor and pastoral care visitor programs, diaconal formation, and the Showers of Blessings hygiene-services ministry for unhoused San Diegans. The most consequential diocesan project of recent decades has been the legal and pastoral work of retaining Episcopal Church property after multiple parish departures over theological liberalism, a fight upheld in 2008 by the California Court of Appeal, which affirmed the bishop's authority to dismiss vestry members and clergy attempting to remove parishes from TEC.