Let's discuss the office of bishop, and particularly how CAs do it (which may or may not be the same thing as what the Bible teaches).
Easterns (and Lancaster, or at least Lancaster did in 1950 rather consistently) have a "conference model" with 1 bishop over multiple churches - typically over a district. Eastern tends to operate as if Lancaster in 1950 was the kingdom of heaven, and tries to do things exactly like Lancaster did back then.RZehr wrote: ↑Wed Jan 10, 2024 11:52 am Ah. The missing piece of the puzzle. Out here in the West we have generally a strong culture of every congregation having their own resident bishop. Not so with Eastern. Now I understand why. If something is incentivized, you shouldn’t expect it not to increase. Seems in Eastern bishops collect congregations like they are collectibles.
Lancaster until fairly recently had one bishop per district, but now has multiple bishops over some districts; for example, the NYC district has a proliferation of bishops, and Southeast Mennonite Conference has multiple bishops as well. (At this point, Lancaster can have significantly different governance from district to district.)
The Amish model has a bishop in each congregation who is effectively part of that congregation. Amish-Mennonites tend to follow this pattern, such as Beachys.
Holdemans dispensed with bishops some time ago. They simply stopped ordaining them, and then everyone had to wait until the last bishop finally died.