The Only Person Who Can Make More Clergy

The office of bishop can be reduced to one sentence, and the whole quarrel of the Reformation over church authority follows from it.

The power to ordain

Ordination of priests and deacons is reserved to bishops, and in churches that hold apostolic succession the validity of every other order in the diocese runs back through him. A bishop governs a diocese and teaches within it with an authority that is his own rather than delegated, and in Catholic and Orthodox practice a bishop must be consecrated by more than one other bishop, which prevents any single man from founding a line by himself. That safeguard is a structural admission of how much the office concentrates.

Where the office is rejected

Methodist and Lutheran churches keep bishops with narrower powers; Presbyterian and congregational churches reject the office outright, and this is not administrative detail but the original point of the Reformation quarrel about who holds authority in the church. Women serve as bishops in most Anglican provinces, in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and in the United Methodist Church, and do not in the Catholic or Orthodox churches, which follows directly from the restriction of priestly ordination to men in those churches.