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Methodists to ask themselves if bishops will fit in

by
02 November 2006

BRITISH METHODISTS could have bishops in the historic succession within seven years. Delegates at next month’s Methodist Conference will debate a plan to create the denomination’s first bishops. A final decision is expected to be made in 2007.

If the proposals in the report What Sort of Bishops? Models of Episcopacy and British Methodism are backed next month, churchgoers will be asked whether they believe that the plans fit their tradition.

“We want to know whether our people would recognise bishops as Methodist rather than as something alien being transplanted in,” the Revd Kenneth Howcroft, Assistant Secretary of the Conference, said last week. Some Methodists didn’t want bishops, and were quite frightened by what they perceived as Anglican bishops, he said. But Methodist bishops would not be copies of their Anglican counterparts.

“The closer we got to the Church of England, the more we realised that we would have to develop our own thinking about bishops, so that we had something to bring to the table. Otherwise, we would find ourselves accepting the C of E model by default,” said Mr Howcroft.

“We have our own ways of living in communion, and we want to offer that back to other Churches. How a communion coheres is an Anglican issue, and we are working on that in our own terms. We might have something to add to the debate.”

The report considers what pastoral and leadership tasks are undertaken by bishops, and how these correspond to the levels of authority in the present Methodist Church. The report says that British Methodism “cherishes” its place in the holy Catholic Church. It celebrates the inheritance of the apostolic faith, and it exercises a “communal, collegial and personal” episkope. But it asks whether “an order of bishops” could help it in its pastoral and missionary task and in its ecumenical relations.

Creating bishops would not be an admission that the Church lacked anything essential, the report makes clear. It would accept “the sign of episcopal sucession” only if it did not involve repudiating what it “believed itself to have received from God”. Nor would bishops be isolated or superior, but would have to “exercise oversight within the ministry of the whole people of God and at its service”.

Methodist bishops would work alongside others. Their primary focus would be the Methodist Conference. “In Methodist understanding, personal episkope is very clearly derived from communal episkope,” the report says. Individuals had no authority independent of their colleagues and the communal body.

Methodist bishops, men and women, would be presbyters and bishops for life, taking their place within the threefold order of ministry. They might revert to “ordinary circuit ministry” or another position, after serving in episcopal office. They would lead by their example of searching for “a contemporary form of holy living”, and in mission and ministry. They would expect to be involved in ordination “subject to the decisions of Conference”, whose President would always “automatically” be ordained bishop.

Methodists are asked to consider five different models of who would become a bishop. The most modest proposal is to have just one bishop, the Conference President. A second model adds selected past Presidents; a third proposes the President and district chairs; a fourth adds the general secretary to the others; and the final model dispenses with past Presidents but adds three superintendents or other presbyters in each district to the rest.

The Methodist Council, and the faith and order committee, has posed two questions: did the report “adequately articulate a Methodist understanding of episcopacy”? And “who should the specific representatives of that ‘corporate episkope’ be?”

If next month’s Conference approves, the options will be discussed throughout the Methodist Church in Britain, and also with its ecumenical partners. Responses would be sent to the general secretary by the end of October 2006, and the matter would return to the Methodist Conference in 2007 for what the report describes as a decision “whether to embrace the historic episcopate”.

Mr Howcroft said that the “historical gift” of episcopacy could then be received between 2010 and 2012, to coincide with the implementation of the covenant with the Church of England.

“If we said that we were to receive this historical gift, where should we receive it from?” he asked. It could be from the Church of England as a partner of the Covenant. Or from another Church, “so that we are bringing something distinctive to the covenant”.

www.methodist.org.uk

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