This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Traditions have settled on strikingly different answers to the same basic problem, how legitimate authority passes from one holder of an office to the next. The Catholic and Orthodox churches, and the Anglican Communion as well, ground their bishops' authority in apostolic succession, an unbroken chain of ordination reaching back, they hold, to the apostles themselves, so that legitimacy runs through the act of consecration rather than through popular choice. Presbyterian and congregational churches instead vest that authority in elected bodies, elders or the gathered congregation choosing their own leadership directly. Some traditions outside Christianity, and some office lineages within it, instead pass a position hereditarily within a family understood to carry the necessary standing.
Because so much rests on which of these an observer accepts as valid, a contested succession has repeatedly split a body in two, each side holding the other's claimed office illegitimate; several historical papal schisms and any number of smaller denominational splits followed exactly that shape. The mechanism a tradition uses to fill an office is rarely incidental to it; it is usually close to the center of what makes the office authoritative at all.