Welcome back to Seamus Popery. I'm Joe Heschmire. One of the reasons that there are so many denominations in

Christianity is because of disagreements about the biblical teaching on the structure of the church. This is sometimes called

church polity. So the question, there's a lot of different possible answers to it. But broadly speaking,

we could say the question like this. In the local church, do you have a three-tiered structure of governance where you have

bishops and then you have elders and then you have deacons?

Or do you just have a two-tiered structure of governance in which elders and bishops are the same thing?

Now you'll find variations on that. I don't mean to

suggest this is an exhaustive overview of all of the different ways you could read the biblical evidence.

I do mean to suggest that these are two of the biggest camps. And if we can get this right,

it'll be really helpful. So is a bishop in the Bible something different than an elder? Now, terminologically, I know

some people watching this are saying, we don't call our middle tier elders, we call them presbyters,

where we call them priests. All of that is coming from the same. So the Greek word for elder

presbis is where we get the word presbyter

that becomes prester in slangy, vulgar Latin, and from prester it becomes priest. There's

bigger theological issues that we could talk about there, whether we think of this as a priestly

authority or not, but I'm going to actually leave that pretty consciously aside, just to focus

the question on, do we have above that middle tier, whatever you call it, priest, presbyter,

elder, is there an office above that of bishop, or are elders and bishops the same thing?

So should the church be run, again, at the local-ish level, so one church per city,

you'll have a lot of evidence of that in the early church. So at the city level, should there

be one bishop running that, as you'll see among Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans, or

should there be a co-ruling presbytery?

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