Episcopal church governance

Many Christians affirm episcopal church government, rule by bishops, from the Greek episkopos, overseer, who ordain clergy, oversee dioceses, and are held by these traditions to stand in a ministry reaching back to the apostles. On this view the threefold ministry of bishops, priests, and deacons is the church's God-given order, and the bishop is the focus of unity and the guardian of teaching and sacrament within a region.

The polity is not uniform even among those who hold it. Roman Catholic structure places a single bishop, the Pope as bishop of Rome, in a position of universal jurisdiction over the whole church, a supreme authority the Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox communions do not recognize. Orthodoxy instead organizes itself as a communion of self-governing, autocephalous churches, Greek, Russian, Serbian, and others, each headed by its own senior bishop or patriarch, with the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople honored as first among equals in ceremonial precedence but without Rome's kind of direct governing authority over the other churches. The two structures, one centralized under a single universal bishop, the other a federation of equal, independent episcopates in shared communion, represent genuinely different institutional answers to how bishops relate to one another across the whole church, not merely local variations on a single model.

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.