The Oldest Pattern

Episcopal government is the order of the Roman Catholic, Eastern and Oriental Orthodox, and Anglican churches, and is retained in a modified form by Methodism, whose bishops exercise oversight without the same claim of unbroken tactile succession from the apostles that the older episcopal traditions make. It is contrasted historically with the polities that emerged from the Reformation on the European continent and in Scotland: John Calvin's Geneva developed a system of government by councils of elders (a consistory), and John Knox carried a related presbyterian model, government by courts of ministers and elders rather than by individual bishops, into the Church of Scotland, a structure that spread from there into Presbyterian and Reformed churches worldwide.

Within episcopal churches themselves, the office of bishop has also become a site of significant modern change and division: several Anglican provinces began ordaining women to the episcopate in the closing decades of the twentieth century and after, a development other Anglican provinces and the Catholic and Orthodox churches did not follow, and disagreement over the question has been one factor in the recent structural strains and realignments within the worldwide Anglican Communion. For its adherents generally, the episcopate remains not merely a useful administrative structure but part of the church's divinely intended form, bound up with the continuity and catholicity of the faith.