Is the Episcopal Church Hierarchical?

By Mark McCall
September 2008

The question posed in the title of this paper may seem at first glance to be a variant of the perennial rhetorical tautology “Is the Pope Catholic?” As will be shown below, the answer to this second question is definitely “yes,” but the answer to the first is much less obvious and ultimately will be “yes, but,” at least at the national level. TEC is hierarchical, but the hierarchy is not what you think. It is often said that TEC’s polity is unique, democratic and misunderstood. Whether it is democratic is debatable, but it is certainly unique and unquestionably misunderstood, not least by many in TEC itself.

Paper here-pdf