INTERESTING QUESTION ON NON-GEOGRAPHICAL BISHOPS

I think this excerpt addresses rather well two of our ongoing debates on TA about ECUSA... Who defines what the church is, and what it believes ? And can a Bishop legitimately sack a dissenting priest, or close a church, if they are dissenting on the grounds of a change away from scriptural/traditional Christian and Anglican teaching ?

Revd Canon Karen Gorham (Canterbury): There appears to be increasing pressure from parishes, networks, wanting to choose their own doctrinally compatible bishop. Has the Act of Synod and the introduction of PEVs set a precedent for a new understanding of episcopacy where the diocesan bishop’s rôle is no longer seen as an instrument of unity?

The Bishop of Rochester: We need to begin by saying that what unites the Church is not the figure of the bishop, important as that may be; it is the faith of the Apostles. The bishop is there, as we have already heard from our panellists, to safeguard and transmit that faith and to make sure that it becomes intelligible in whatever context the Church finds itself. That is what keeps the Church together; bishops are only a means. Where bishops become as it were the end, that is where things go wrong with Churches: you get episcopal tyranny. I would say that what we need first of all is bishops and everyone else acknowledging the authority of the apostolic teaching, and then we will not have the sort of fragmentation that the questioner clearly fears.

Amen to that!

So much for flying bishops, then....