Wesleyans and Episcopacy

The ordination of Francis Asbury by Thomas Coke at the Christmas Conference of 1784, Thomas Coke Ruckle, painter; A. Gilchrist Campbell, engraver. (Source: WikiCommons)

The Wesleyan movement has had an awkward relationship with episcopacy from the beginning. When John and Charles Wesley first began to organize the “people called Methodists” into classes and societies and send out lay preachers across Britain, they fell foul with the bishops of the Church of England, and rightly so. What they were doing was nicely called “irregular.” They were crossing boundaries, sometimes literally in terms of parishes, and clashing with the spiritual oversight of the church. But the Wesley brothers never intended to upstage the church, but to revive it, or better yet restore it. At the heart of Wesley’s overarching vision for Methodism is a restoration of the passion and power of the early church, what he called “primitive Christianity.”

Beginning in the 1750s, the Wesley brothers begin to work less and less closely with one another as John’s vision for Methodism begins to take on a more independent hue. He never left the Church of England. He died within her embrace. But at the same time, he created a worldwide network that for the most part would leave Anglicanism and create its own ecclesiastical structure. The causes for this are too many to discuss in this article. But it can arguably be said that both intransigence among the church’s leadership and bullheadedness on Wesley’s part contributed in unhelpful ways. There could have been a way to incorporate the Wesleyan movement into the structures of the church and Wesley could have been less authoritarian, but that is not what happened.

In England, this separate Methodism took decades to evolve, even after the Wesley brothers had died. But in America, the Revolutionary War and the subsequent need for clergy in the newly independent United States quickened the situation. Arguably, John Wesley took advantage of it and fully embraced the revisionist ecclesiology that Charles detected decades earlier. He declared himself a “New Testament bishop” and ordained Thomas Coke as a “superintendent” and Richard Whatcoat and Thomas Vasey as “elders.”

When this took place, Charles Wesley exploded. He’s so well known for his hymns and little known as a person by most Wesleyans today, but Charles was first and foremost a loving husband and father, and an ecclesiastical conservative. I have argued elsewhere that the reason he began to travel less in the 1750s was not because he was married but because he perceived the initial stirrings of revisionist ecclesiology emerging from his brother and some of the lay preachers and wanted nothing to do with it. Yet he remained at the heart of the movement as the conservative voice, the traditionalist who tried to remind his brother of the church, and of the theology behind what it means to be the church.

Charles Wesley’s reaction to John’s 1784 ordinations was swift and critical. In his letters at the time, he asks why his brother couldn’t have at least waited until he was dead. He wanted to know how someone who had not been consecrated as a bishop could ever act like one. And he was convinced that Thomas Coke had duped his brother into acting in such a maverick fashion. His gift for poetry came in handy when he wrote: 

So easily are Bishops made
By man’s, or woman’s whim?
W–– his hands on C–– hath laid,
But who laid hands on Him? 

What John Wesley had done over the course of thirty years beginning at least by the 1750s was to embrace what John Munsey Turner has called a “liberal Anglican ecclesiology.” In this he denied apostolic succession and argued that presbyters and bishops were not only of the same order, but also of the same degree. This last part is essential because it is precisely where Wesley took the ideas of the leading liberal Anglican thinkers on the topic, Peter King and Edward Stillingfleet, and went far beyond even their radical claims. He argued that presbyters can ordain just as they can celebrate the sacrament.

Interestingly enough, the argument that presbyters and bishops are of the same order has led many modern Methodists to attack the historic tradition of bishops, but the Roman Catholic Church also holds that they are of the same order. The claim does not necessitate denigrating the episcopacy. What it does, in traditional theology, is to show how the presbyters of the church are linked to their bishop, even if the bishop by the laying of hands has been given gifts to lead the church, to ordain, and so on. 

I think it’s essential to admit that Wesley could sometimes be a confusing figure. He never left the Church of England yet as one of her presbyters he declared himself a bishop. Even in 1789 he vehemently wrote, “I live and die a member of the Church of England,” adding to the claim that “none who regard my judgment or advice will ever separate from it.”

By embracing a revisionist ecclesiastical perspective, however, Wesley has arguably bequeathed a legacy of revisionism to his heirs,  capitalizing on an extraordinary moment and making irregularity normative. In so doing, he has detached Methodist polity and subsequent ecclesiastical thinking from the “primitive Christianity” that he claimed to love so dearly. The result has been the triumph of pragmatism in what should first and foremost be regarded theologically as the Body of Christ. The church is not an institution or organization like any other.   

The confusion that Wesley left can be seen throughout the Wesleyan world when it comes to ecclesiology. Too often, institutional decisions are made for pragmatic reasons and then given a theological veneer to justify them. Bishops have often become bureaucrats with little contact with the people they are called to shepherd. Deriving from this confusion is the idea that ordination itself, to whatever order or degree, is simply licensing,  thus denying the scriptural directive to lay hands on anyone set apart for certain ministries in the church, a pattern seen clearly and repeatedly in scripture. To imagine that ordination is a license is to see it as temporary, while the historic church has never seen ordination this way. The licensure view has created great confusion about the authority and responsibility placed on ordained persons, which are bestowed by the Holy Spirit and therefore not temporary, interim, or fleeting. Traditionally, licensure allows an ordained person to exercise their ministry, but does not affect their ordination. They are not the same thing. 

The historic church does have a vision for an ordained ministry and for bishops, one that is theologically rich and subsequently missional at the same time. This vision emerges in the early church. At its core is the concept that as the church spread and the apostles died, apostolic leadership required expansion and continuation. Overseers—the literal definition of the term bishop—were needed and they derived their authority from Christ and his apostles through the laying on of hands. 

I will say here that I am not talking about a monarchical episcopacy as it developed in some parts of the church, particularly in the medieval era. But the primitive vision that emerges can be seen in the writings of some of the earliest church fathers, particularly Ignatius. So even if the development of bishops is not always clear, within decades of the apostolic era the episcopacy emerges for ordering the Body of Christ. By the end of the second century, as Robert Louis Wilken notes, “the principle of one bishop for a city gradually took hold” and “had become almost universal” (The First Thousand Years, 31)

In this development, key features of the episcopacy emerge. And if we take the history of the church as our guide, there are bishops in every age who embody and exemplify these features.

The first feature is faithful teaching, or even apostolic witness. The bishop of the church was to teach the faithful and to be faithful to the witness of Christ and the apostles, to maintain “the faith once delivered to the saints.” One can think of no greater exemplar of this episcopal calling than St. Augustine of Hippo, whose teaching ministry is legendary. Most of his writings are actually sermons delivered to the gathered Christian community as he taught them about the faith. And while Augustine was one of the best teachers the church has ever known, he was not alone in that task as a bishop. The list of teaching bishops from the earliest centuries of the church goes on and on, including: Clement, Athanasius, Gregory of Nyssa, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory Nazianzen, Ambrose, and Gregory the Great. The call of the episcopacy is a calling to convey the truth of the gospel faithfully.

Another feature is that of unity. Historically, the bishop has been seen to represent or even embody the unity of the church. The earliest bishops emerged as leaders of the church in a local city and its surrounding area; their people knew them. As noted above, they were distinctly connected to the clergy of what would later be called a diocese. The ordination of presbyters and later deacons for their separate work would be seen as an extension of the bishop’s own ministry. And as such it was seen as an extension of apostolic ministry, even after the death of the apostles.

The earliest form of apostolic succession can be seen in the writings of Clement of Rome, said by Athanasius to have been consecrated a bishop by St. Peter himself. Written in the first century, Clement’s letter to the church in Corinth argues that their clergy have authority because the apostles ordained them. But while he was trying to settle a local issue in Corinth, Clement was pointing to the universal unity of the apostolic witness, of which he and the clergy he spoke of participated. As Christ prayed “that they all may be one,” the episcopacy emerged as a means to maintain that unity both at the local level and also farther afield as bishops were ordained by other bishops and would eventually come together in synod or council to address the great matters of the church, such as at Nicaea in 325 or Constantinople in 381.

This brings us to another feature of the early episcopacy and that is the bishop as shepherd. The bishop was the leader of the church in his area, but that leadership was not primarily managerial or administrative. The leadership of the bishops was to mirror that of Christ himself, the shepherd of the flock. This could be done in numerous ways. In some cases it was seen in a ministry to and with the poor. The Cappadocian fathers (all bishops) were keen to care for the poor, the sick, and the needy. One of them, Basil, founded a massive hospital complex that focused on professional health care.

Shepherding was also seen in safeguarding the church from heresy. Athanasius of Alexandria, one of the most important figures in the Christological controversies of the fourth century, fought tooth and nail against attempts to demote Christ, to make him into a semi-divine figure with no saving power. His book, On the Incarnation, remains one of the most seminal works on the nature of Jesus Christ. For Athanasius, this was more than teaching the faith; it was defending it against error in order to care for the souls of those under his charge. 

Finally, the episcopacy and mission are distinctly intertwined. This can be seen in the missionary advances of the church through the bishops. Gregory the Great sent Augustine of Canterbury in 596 to bring the faith to the English people after seeing some of them enslaved in Rome. Likewise, out of Augustine’s ministry, Boniface would leave England in 716 and take the faith to the German people, becoming the “Apostle to the Germans.” Boniface would ultimately give his life there after founding churches and monasteries throughout the center of Europe as the Bishop of Mainz. 

This description of some of the earliest qualities of the episcopacy could go on and on, and there are other themes that could be advanced. But what this says to the Wesleyan people today is that there is an ancient pattern for leadership in the church. It doesn’t take much insight to see in numerous Wesleyan bodies today how the ancient vision would only benefit their ministry. Within United Methodism the bishops have great administrative power but function within a bureaucracy that separates them from clergy and laity alike. Their work involves very little ministry. In the Church of the Nazarene, the six General Superintendents are tasked with covering the entire world church. They’re constantly flown all over the world, and this despite having district superintendents whose ministry is much more conducive to the traditional localized episcopacy. In the emerging Global Methodist Church, many conversations about episcopacy are pragmatic and reactionary, thus theologically and historically void, such as attempts to undermine a localized episcopacy or to make it a temporary office.  

But the vision of the historic episcopacy is not lost. It can be locally adapted and has been for centuries. Embracing it means more than simply copying our forebears. It means embracing a theologically focused ecclesiology. Apostolic witness and the firm belief that the church is nothing less than the Body of Christ drove this ancient vision as it should ours. This embrace doesn’t mean that we must malign the revisionist vision of Wesley, but to acknowledge that his vision in this regard was focused on a particular time and place with pressing needs unique to that moment. To embrace the full “primitive Christianity” at the heart of his entire ministry would be to embrace a truly historic and theological vision, connecting the people called Methodists to the larger church in a way that has been missing for far too long.

Ryan N. Danker is the director of the John Wesley Institute, Washington, DC and Assistant Lead Editor of Firebrand.