It is headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee. The diocese includes 52 parishes and mission outposts. Most of its present communicants reside in the metropolitan Nashville area (chiefly Davidson, Rutherford, Sumner, and Williamson counties). Paul's Church in Franklin is the diocese's oldest congregation. John C. Bauerschmidt was consecrated as the eleventh Bishop of Tennessee on January 27, 2007. He is the third bishop to serve since the final territorial separation in 1985; his predecessors were George L. Reynolds (1985–91) and Bertram Nelson Herlong (1993–2005). The seat of the bishop is Christ Church Cathedral in Nashville, which was designated the diocesan cathedral in 1997. Weekday diocesan offices are located at the former property of St. Andrew's Church in the Green Hills neighborhood (see below for background information). From 1985 to 2013, the Diocese maintained offices in closer proximity to downtown Nashville but has not, nor at present intends to, occupied any portion of its cathedral, which was a pre-existing parish prior to its designation, with them. From 1871 until the division of the diocese (1982–1983), the seat of the bishop was St. Mary's Episcopal Cathedral in Memphis; it continues today as the cathedral of the Episcopal Diocese of West Tennessee. Bishops of Tennessee In a history of the diocese published in celebration of its 175th anniversary, Herlong, the 10th bishop of the diocese, writes:  Much of the early growth of the Diocese of Tennessee occurred in plantation regions, mainly centered in the hilly, fertile tobacco-growing region south of Nashville and in the cotton-producing lands of the Mississippi River region in southwestern Tennessee, the church being imported by Anglican loyalists from Virginia and North Carolina. It was not until after the American Civil War that the Episcopal church penetrated much of East Tennessee, and well into the 20th century before many other towns elsewhere in the state got their own churches. The University of the South, located on the Cumberland Plateau in Sewanee, Tennessee, however, helped the fledgling diocese in matters of clergy development. As with much of American Protestantism during the period after World War II, the Episcopal Church flourished in newly-developing suburban areas, a large number of the new churches being missions founded by long-established in-town parishes. By the 1960s and during the episcopate of John Vander Horst, enough growth had taken place that the diocese had established offices in Nashville and Knoxville in addition to the cathedral in Memphis in order to economically provide episcopal care to parishes and missions throughout the state; Vander Horst maintained his office in Nashville while keeping his seat in Memphis.