Soloist wrote: ↑Wed Jan 10, 2024 3:18 pm
My take is that Bishop and Minister are effectively interchangeable.
I would agree (in terms of scripture)... in actual practice in CA circles, they are completely different offices.
Yep. As we all know, bishops are the only ones authorized to baptize, marry, officiate communion, etc. It's "always" been that way.
My old church (Mid-West), for inexplicable reasons, didn't recognise its bishop (despite him being listed in the Mennonite Church Directory, right up until he died a year or two ago), and the minister there simply performed baptisms and marriages.
A lay member, not ordained, baptised his own children, which as far as I know isn't the norm. Whilst I don't necessarily have a problem with that, I do think it's a good for ordained men to conduct the various ordinances, when possible.
Soloist wrote: ↑Wed Jan 10, 2024 4:15 pm
The Scripture doesn’t dictate who performs marriages, who performs baptisms, who performs communion or even who ordains leaders.
Correct. When my father in law was ordained bishop in his congregation, the oldest man, a layperson, read his "charge" or instructions, and led in prayer for him. That's all it consisted of. There may or may not have been a visiting minister present, but if so, it would only have been to speak, not officiate in the ordination. I don't see an issue with this at all. This was of course after the congregation had chosen him by vote. Essentially that is who ordained him; the public "performing" of the ordination was simply a formality. It would be nice to see ordinations become an unpretentious function of a local church's business rather than a large assembly from far and wide with pomp and circumstance like it tends to be in conservative Mennonite churches.
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Remember the prisoners, as though you were in prison with them, and the mistreated, as though you yourselves were suffering bodily. -Heb. 13:3
The whole idea that bishops need to ordain comes from the old Catholic* ideal of apostolic succession, and specifically the sacrament of "laying on of hands", where you must have hands laid on you by another ordained bishop in order to be ordained. Whilst I respect their traditions, I don't see this as a requirement in scripture.
CMs (particularly of Swiss Brethren origins) for some reason held on to a lot of this episcopal stuff, or else they re-adopted it in the last 200-300 years.
* And EO, Church of the East, Oriental Orthodox, etc. etc.
Josh, I think. Make a num era of statements that might be somewhat accurate but miss some important nuances.
First, Eastern is NOT a conference structure per se . Officially they are a conferring fellowship.
Now, I am happy to discuss how faithful thy really are to that structure, but officially they are.
Eastern bishops are not singularly “in charge of their districts” independently of either the conferring fellowship OR the bishop body as a whole.
If they were, there would not be a Pilgrim. They would still be The Lebanon district.
I am fine with folks not being Catholic, but it is amazing when Protestants want to be SO tied to scripture….well, except when it does not work. Apostolic succession is hardly just something they made up.
A purely intellectually interesting discussion is that there are American Episcopalians that are considered to have had valid succession because some got their ordinations via the Orthodox Church. Pretty goofy in reality but like I said, interesting. That is why the Catholic schism is not like most others. The RCC and the Orthodox Church hold that each other’s succession, sacraments, etc. to be valid.
The conferring fellowship thing is interesting. I didn’t realise there was a gradient between a conference structure that still has congregational ownership of buildings and a true fellowship where bishops are strictly part of congregations.
Soloist wrote: ↑Wed Jan 10, 2024 12:47 pm
Not having Bishops isn’t the right answer.
Having 1 bishop for several churches also doesn’t seem right.
I don’t object to them helping a new church, but local leadership should eventually take over.
In our case, we simply consider all ministers to hold the office of "bishop" as described in a King James Bible, or "elder" in one of those newer translations.
Of note is there is definitely no biblical office of "minister". "Priest" or "presbyter", perhaps, but "minister" is not something described as it does presbyter/elder, bishop, or deacon. And presbyter/elder and bishop seem to be nearly identical, at least in the few places the Bible refers to them.
Overall, a question is if the Bible teaches an episcopal, heirarchical church order, one consisting of the laity at the bottom, deacons above that, ministers/priests above them, and then bishops above them. (I noticed a "senior bishop" referred to above, so we could add a layer of "archbishop".) And then, why not go all the way to the top and have a supreme bishop all over all the other bishops, and call it a pope?
I don't see this hierarchical model endorsed in scripture at all, and interestingly, neither did the Dutch Anabaptists, at least at first, who had a flatter church model. For whatever reason, by the time Swiss Mennonites got to America, they pretty much had a full-blown episcopal model in force.
I don't see that model in scripture either. I think of the terms elder, overseer, pastor, and bishop as interchangeable. However, somebody does have to be in charge, and in churches where only the term elder is used, and there is more than one elder, there is inevitably a head elder or senior elder. The exact terms (minister, bishop, elder, or whatever) concern me far less than how it works out in practice. I have seen people reject the Mennonite hierarchical system in favor of an ostensibly more flat model with only elders and deacons, only for leaders to exhibit tendencies to rule like the honest-to-goodness pope himself. And I have seen bishops and ministers in the contemporary conservative Mennonite model function as good servant leaders. That said, hierarchical terms and structures do lend themselves to the lording of people over others.
In our congregational context - we use the term lead pastor interchangeably with bishop, although our model of leadership is slightly different. We have both pastors and deacons, but our lead pastor is selected from the pool of pastor/minister/elders and serves a 5 year term. We'll often select that as a renewable term (by congregational ballot/approval but recommended by our leadership team) unless we know that it is someones final term due to our mandatory retirement age of 65. At that point, we'll outline a 10 year plan, with the new lead pastor selected to serve 5 years before their term begins to avoid any significant upheaval as the position transitions to a younger generation.
thebluffs wrote: ↑Sun Jan 14, 2024 7:17 pm
In our congregational context - we use the term lead pastor interchangeably with bishop, although our model of leadership is slightly different. We have both pastors and deacons, but our lead pastor is selected from the pool of pastor/minister/elders and serves a 5 year term. We'll often select that as a renewable term (by congregational ballot/approval but recommended by our leadership team) unless we know that it is someones final term due to our mandatory retirement age of 65. At that point, we'll outline a 10 year plan, with the new lead pastor selected to serve 5 years before their term begins to avoid any significant upheaval as the position transitions to a younger generation.
How long has this model been used?
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Remember the prisoners, as though you were in prison with them, and the mistreated, as though you yourselves were suffering bodily. -Heb. 13:3
