[Episcopal News Service] The Episcopal Church has hired a faith-based organizer from the Diocese of Olympia to be the church’s first gender justice staff officer, ending a nearly two-year process that originated in a 2022 resolution approved by the 80th General Convention.

Aaron Scott, who has nearly two decades of experience as an organizer from the transgender community, will begin work as the gender justice staff officer on April 29, according to a church news release. In this new role, Scott “will seek to inspire, gather and equip Episcopalians for justice, advocacy, and inclusion work focused on women and LGBTQ+ people,” the release says. He will develop formation opportunities, share related resources with the wider church and help expand a network of leaders focused on greater inclusion of people of all gender identities and expressions.

Aaron Scott. Photo: Misha Dumov

Scott was selected from a list of finalists interviewed by an 11-member gender justice committee that helped develop the new position with the Rev. Melanie Mullen, the church’s director of reconciliation, justice, and creation care. “Aaron impressed the committee with his theological and community-organizing knowledge,” Mullen said in the news release. “There is great urgency to protect members of the LGBTQ+ community, and we look forward to the impact Aaron’s work will have on the church and beyond.”

The 80th General Convention, at its July 2022 meeting in Baltimore, Maryland, authorized the creation of the position in Resolution A063, which was proposed by the Task Force to Study Sexism in the Episcopal Church and Develop Anti-Sexism Training. During deliberations on the resolution, its focus widened from anti-sexism training to include both women’s ministries and LGBTQ+ inclusion.

The process of developing and filling that new position, however, was not immediate, and church leaders have faced questions over the past two years over the pace of progress toward fulfilling the resolution’s mandate.

In February 2023, the church announced in a news release it was recruiting volunteers to the gender justice committee “to help cast vision and interview candidates” for the position. Two months later, church budget planners heard concerns that the gender justice position had not yet been filled, during testimony at an April 2023 listening session on the 2025-27 churchwide budget. “It’s ever more important … that this position exists,” Sarah Lawton testified at the time.

Lawton, a lay leader from the Diocese of California who serves on the steering committee of TransEpiscopal, would later be among the 11 people named to the gender justice committee’s roster, which was announced in an October 2023 news release that included a call for applications for the new staff officer position.

Scott began his gender justice work in 2006 with Queers for Economic Justice. In 2013, he co-founded Chaplains on the Harbor with the Rev. Sarah Monroe as a group of Episcopal chaplains ministering to homeless individuals in the coastal communities of Grays Harbor County, Washington.

More recently, Scott has worked at Union Theological Seminary’s Kairos Center as project coordinator for the Countering White Christian Nationalism Initiative, and he serves on the national steering committee for the Poor People’s Campaign. Scott has a master’s degree in in biblical studies from Union Theological Seminary and a bachelor’s degree from Fordham University’s Latin American and Latino Studies Institute.