The Bishop

Principle

A bishop is an elder set apart to focus and to represent the oversight that belongs to the whole order of elders, for the unity of the church and the ordering of its mission. The office rests on the church’s consent and remains answerable to it.

Background

Our Discipline says that the episcopacy is “a special ministry, not a separate order” (¶ 402). That sentence has a long Methodist pedigree, and I want to defend it before I say why our practice makes it hard to believe.

The pedigree begins with Wesley, who wrote plainly what he thought and then acted on it. “Lord King’s Account of the Primitive Church convinced me many years ago,” he told the American Methodists in 1784, “that Bishops and Presbyters are the same order, and consequently have the same right to ordain.” On that basis he appointed Coke and Asbury not as bishops but as Superintendents, and used the same word two years later. When Asbury accepted the title bishop, Wesley’s response was not measured:

“I study to be little: you study to be great. I creep: you strut along… How can you, how dare you suffer yourself to be called Bishop? I shudder, I start at the very thought! Men may call me a knave or a fool, a rascal, a scoundrel, and I am content; but they shall never by my consent call me Bishop! For my sake, for God’s sake, for Christ’s sake put a full end to this!”

It matters what Wesley was objecting to. He was not objecting to oversight; he exercised more of it than any Methodist bishop since. He was objecting to greatness, to title, and to a man’s appetite for being something. “I study to be little: you study to be great” is a criticism of the social form of an office, not of the work.

Wesley names a book as the thing that changed his mind, and almost no United Methodist has read it. Peter King’s Enquiry into the Constitution, Discipline, Unity and Worship of the Primitive Church appeared in 1691 and set out to establish what the church of the first three centuries actually looked like. Its argument about bishops turns on a distinction our debates have lost: the difference between degree and order. King’s thesis is that presbyters “were different from the Bishops in gradu, or in degree; but yet… were equal to them in Ordine, or in Order.”

His definition of a presbyter states the whole case in a sentence:

“A Person in Holy Orders, having thereby an inherent Right to perform the whole Office of a Bishop; but being possessed of no Place or Parish, not actually discharging it, without the Permission and Consent of the Bishop of a Place or Parish.”

Two things are being held apart there. The presbyter possesses, by his ordination, an inherent right to do everything a bishop does. What he does not possess is a place. And in the church King is describing, authority to act attaches to holding the cure of a particular congregation, so a man with the right but not the place exercises it only where the one who holds the place permits.

King illustrates this with the arrangement his readers lived under, and it needs one word explained. In the English church, the pastoral charge of a parish is called the cure of souls, and one clergyman holds it. Others may serve in that parish, and they are in exactly the same holy orders as the man who holds it, but they minister there by his leave rather than in their own right. King’s example is the curate, the assisting clergyman who serves a parish he does not hold:

“As a Curate hath the same Mission and Power with the Minister, whose Place he supplies; yet being not the Minister of that Place, he cannot perform there any Acts of his Ministerial Function, without Leave from the Minister thereof: So a Presbyter had the same Order and Power with a Bishop, whom he assisted in his Cure; yet being not the Bishop or Minister of that Cure, he could not there perform any Parts of his Pastoral Office, without the Permission of the Bishop thereof.”

That is the entire argument in miniature. The curate is not a lesser sort of priest. He is the same sort of priest without the charge, and the moment he is given a parish of his own, nothing about him changes except that the permission is now his to give. King then offers a shorthand, that bishops, priests, and deacons would be clearer in English as “Rectors, Vicars, and Deacons,” meaning by rectors the bishops as “the actual Incumbents of a Place” and by vicars the presbyters as their assistants. His terms are looser than English parish law, where a vicar is himself an incumbent of a sort, and the looseness does not matter to his point, which is the distinction between the one who holds the charge and the one who serves under it.

He is also disarming about his own certainty, in a way this document would do well to imitate: “I am not so wedded and bigotted to this Opinion, but if any shall produce better, and more convincing Arguments to the contrary, I will not contentiously defend, but readily relinquish it, since I search after Truth, not to promote a particular Party or Interest.”

Then King argues the case three ways. First, that presbyters did everything bishops did: “A Bishop preached, baptized and confirmed, so did a Presbyter. A Bishop excommunicated, absolved and ordained, so did a Presbyter… the only Difference that was between them was in Degree; but this proves there was none at all in Order.” Second, that Scripture and the earliest writers use the two words for the same men, in Ephesus and Philippi, and Clement of Rome calls the same Corinthian leaders both. Third, and most simply, that the ancients counted two orders and not three: bishops and deacons, or presbyters and deacons, “and if there were but these Two, Presbyters cannot be distinct from Bishops, for then there would be Three.”

King’s second argument can be checked in a few minutes with a concordance, and it holds. Paul calls the Ephesian elders together and tells them the Holy Spirit has made them overseers (Acts 20:17, 28); Titus is to appoint elders, and the qualifications given are those of the overseer (Titus 1:5–7); Peter charges the elders to shepherd the flock, “exercising the oversight,” as their fellow elder (1 Peter 5:1–2). The one place the New Testament gives the title without qualification is to Christ, “the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls” (1 Peter 2:25), which is why our own prayer at the ordination of elders addresses God through Christ, “Apostle and High Priest, Shepherd and Bishop of our souls.” Every human oversight in the church is derivative of that one.

One image from King is worth more than the arguments, and it may be the best short description of episcopacy this document can offer. He describes the presbytery of an early church seated in a semicircle, with the bishop’s chair at the head, “on a Seat somewhat elevated above those of his Colleagues,” and concludes that the bishop was thereby distinguished from them “by his Priority in the same Order, but not by his being of another Order.”

The bishop’s chair is higher, and it is in the same semicircle. That is what our ¶ 402 is trying to say, and it is what Wesley believed, and it came to him from this book.

The pedigree continues with our first bishops, who explained themselves at the request of the General Conference of 1796. Coke and Asbury take up the episcopal form and do something startling. They give away apostolic succession entirely. The doctrine of “the apostolic, uninterrupted succession of bishops,” they write, is what “all the learned world at present know to be utterly indefensible,” and Protestant writers have stopped trying to defend it. Then: “Now, the idea of an apostolic succession being exploded, it follows, that the Methodist Church has every thing which is Scriptural and essential to justify its episcopacy.”

What do they put in its place? Every church’s right to choose the episcopal form; the unanimous approbation of the General Conference, “which is the chief synod of our church”; the continuing compliance of the members; the respectability of the source; and, on the next page, the fruit: “Mr. Wesley therefore preferred the episcopal form of church government; and God has (glory be to his name!) wonderfully blessed it among us.”

Not one of those is a claim of divine institution. Methodist episcopacy is grounded in the consent of the church and vindicated by its fruit. A bishop who is not of a separate order, whose office rests on the church’s agreement and is answered for by its results, is exactly what ¶ 402 says. Our first bishops were more radical on this point than the paragraph is.

Two cautions before going further. First, the Coke and Asbury notes were annotations, not law, and Emory reminds us that “the bishops themselves disclaimed having any authority to make laws or regulations.” Second, and more pressing: their bluntness about succession sits awkwardly beside our contemporary habit of saying that ordination secures apostolic continuity. Both can be held, but only with care. The Lima text distinguishes the apostolic tradition of the whole church, which is the gospel handed on and lived, from the succession of the apostolic ministry, which is the historic chain of hands. A church may confess the first without asserting the second, and that is very close to what Methodists have always meant. What we cannot do is use the word apostolic warmly and vaguely and hope no one asks. That is precisely the habit this document exists to interrupt.

And there is a second stream, which most United Methodists do not know about and which changes the picture.

Our episcopacy is not simply Wesley’s, because our church is not simply Wesley’s. In 1968 the Methodist Church united with the Evangelical United Brethren, and the German-American stream brought its own doctrine of oversight. Its polity was described by its own historians as composite, combining episcopal, presbyterial, and congregational features, and its bishops were elected for a term of four years rather than for life, a contrast drawn deliberately against the early Methodist Episcopal Church. That is not a variation on our episcopacy. It is a different account of what oversight is and how it is held accountable.

The merger fused the two and never reconciled them. And the detail that makes this concrete is one almost every United Methodist has seen without knowing its origin. The bishop’s crest is EUB. It was made after the 1946 Uniting General Conference that formed the Evangelical United Brethren Church, by the sculptor Ralph M. Holdeman, at the request of Bishop George Edward Epp, Secretary of the Board of Bishops. Holdeman explained its parts: the chi rho in the shape of a cross, “one of the most ancient symbols found in the catacombs”; the alpha and omega suspended from the crossarm; and the staff, which “not only points to the bishop as the chief shepherd of God’s flock but also emphasizes the loving care that should motivate all administrative decisions.”

The artist has stated the doctrine. The emblem our bishops wear was designed to say that administration is subordinate to, and motivated by, shepherdly care. It came from the tradition that elected its bishops to four-year terms. We kept their symbol and the Methodists’ life tenure.

Our own liturgy agrees with the crest. In the service celebrating the assignment of a bishop to an area, the signs of the office are presented in a deliberate order: first the pastoral staff, “be upheld and sustained by Christ the Good Shepherd”; then the Bible, the water, the bread and cup, the towel and basin, the stole; and only then the Book of Discipline, and last of all the gavel. The crook comes before the gavel. The bishop’s own promises in that service are entirely pastoral: to proclaim the Word and rightly administer the sacraments, to be “a teacher of the faith, a pastor of souls, and a means to the unity of the body of Christ,” and “a means of reconciliation and healing.” The rite is careful in the other direction too. It says the bishop “has been ordained to the ministry of Word and Sacrament,” which is to say ordained once, as an elder, and speaks of “my consecration to the episcopacy.” Our liturgy holds ¶ 402 exactly.

Now the difficulty, and it is not about any bishop’s character. We disclaim a separate order while materially constructing one. Bishops are elected for life. They are compensated from a separate general church fund (¶ 819) rather than by the conferences they serve, which insulates the office economically from the body that receives it. They are subject to their own complaint procedures (¶ 413). They form a council of their own. Whatever ¶ 402 says, an office with life tenure, its own revenue stream, and its own accountability track is functioning as something other than a temporary assignment given to an elder by the church’s consent.

The mirror image is worth naming, because it is the same failure running the other way. With licensed local pastors, the church withholds the theology while depending on the ministry. With bishops, the church disclaims the theology while constructing the reality. Both are gaps between what we say and what we do; they simply run in opposite directions; and both are to be judged by the same standard, which is whether the church can say what God is doing through the office and then arrange its life as though that were true.

There is a constructive edge here that the criticism should not be allowed to obscure. If oversight belongs to the whole order of elders and the bishop is its focusing, then ¶ 402 is not merely defensible; it is right, and our task is to make the practice match. On that account the problem is not that bishops are insufficiently distinguished from elders. It is that we have built the episcopate into something apart while allowing the eldership’s own superintendency to wither into administration. Recover the second and the first becomes far less strange.

King’s semicircle is the test. A bishop seated at the head of a company of colleagues, first among people who share his order and exercise his oversight with him, is a bishop the Methodist tradition can account for. A bishop supported by a separate fund, elected for life, judged by a separate process, and presiding over an order that no longer superintends anything, is seated somewhere else. The question is not whether the chair should be elevated. It is whether it is still in the room.

Practice

The church should ask directly what in the office of bishop requires life tenure, and should be able to answer theologically rather than by appeal to precedent or to the difficulty of changing it. Half our own inheritance did without it.

The Episcopal Fund should be examined for what it teaches. A church that pays its bishops from a fund the conferences do not control has said something about accountability whether or not it meant to, and it has said it in the one language everyone understands.

Bishops should be given, and should be able to take, the pastoral time their own rite describes. When a bishop’s calendar makes it impossible to be “a pastor of souls,” the church has arranged the office against its own liturgy, and the fault lies with the arrangement rather than with the person trying to survive it.

And the crest should be taught. A church that explained to its people where that staff came from, and what its maker said it meant, would have begun the conversation about episcopal accountability from inside its own tradition rather than from outside criticism.