I was raised in the Episcopal church and was then ordained and now pastor in the Anglican Church in North America.[1] As such, I’ve always followed Jesus in the context of the episcopacy—that form of church governance where local churches are part of a diocese that a bishop oversees, and those dioceses are connected in a larger province under an archbishop.
One benefit of this church structure has been a heightened awareness of the larger church. When the bishop visited my church when I was growing up, we were all reminded that we were part of the Church, the people of God extending beyond local assemblies, where all Christians are united under one head, Christ (Eph. 1:22–23). A blessing of Anglicanism, at least for me, has been a thick catholicity. The episcopacy puts skin on the church universal.
As with any denomination, however, strengths can also be weaknesses. An unintentional consequence of thick catholicity can be thin congregationalism. The episcopacy can eclipse the ekklesia, in as much as the latter most commonly refers, in the New Testament, to a local gathering of Christians. It is a pity when this happens in Anglicanism because our English reformers, in the Thirty-Nine Articles, define
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