Although most

Baptist Baptists are a Christian denomination, denomination within Protestant Christianity distinguished by baptizing only professing Christian believers (believer's baptism) and doing so by complete Immersion baptism, immersion. Baptist churches ge ...

groups are congregationalist in polity, some have different ecclesiastical organization and adopt an

episcopal polity An episcopal polity is a hierarchical form of church governance in which the chief local authorities are called bishops. The word "bishop" here is derived via the British Latin and Vulgar Latin term ''*ebiscopus''/''*biscopus'', . It is the ...

governance. In those churches the local congregation has less autonomy and the bishop oversees them, assigning pastors and distributing funds.

Evangelical Baptist Union of Georgia

The Evangelical Baptist Union of Georgia have an episcopal polity, with an archbishop as the

primate Primates is an order (biology), order of mammals, which is further divided into the Strepsirrhini, strepsirrhines, which include lemurs, galagos, and Lorisidae, lorisids; and the Haplorhini, haplorhines, which include Tarsiiformes, tarsiers a ...

. Archbishop Malkhaz Songulashvili, minister of Peace Cathedral in Tbilisi is a charismatic figure and social activist.

Union of Baptist Churches in Latvia

The Baptists of Latvia are result from a revival among German and Latvian Lutherans and organized their first church in 1861. The union is headed by a bishop.

Episcopal Baptist Church in Congo

The Église Épiscopale Baptiste is a

denomination in

Democratic Republic of the Congo The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), also known as the DR Congo, Congo-Kinshasa, or simply the Congo (the last ambiguously also referring to the neighbouring Republic of the Congo), is a country in Central Africa. By land area, it is t ...

. It began with evangelical missionaries who accepted the Baptist doctrines and organized this denomination retaining the

. The Church became autonomous in 1956. In 2007 there were ten bishops, and 105,000 baptized members in 110 territorial parishes. Most of them were in the nine provinces of DRC and some in

Angola Angola, officially the Republic of Angola, is a country on the west-Central Africa, central coast of Southern Africa. It is the second-largest Portuguese-speaking world, Portuguese-speaking (Lusophone) country in both total area and List of c ...

and

Zambia Zambia, officially the Republic of Zambia, is a landlocked country at the crossroads of Central Africa, Central, Southern Africa, Southern and East Africa. It is typically referred to being in South-Central Africa or Southern Africa. It is bor ...

. The pastor are under supervision from the bishops, who assign them a church. The EPB is a member of the

World Council of Churches The World Council of Churches (WCC) is a worldwide Christian inter-church organization founded in 1948 to work for the cause of ecumenism. Its full members today include the Assyrian Church of the East, most jurisdictions of the Eastern Orthodo ...

and the Église du Christ au Congo.

Among African-American Baptists

A few African-American Baptist congregations have ordained or started calling their senior minister

bishop A bishop is an ordained member of the clergy who is entrusted with a position of Episcopal polity, authority and oversight in a religious institution. In Christianity, bishops are normally responsible for the governance and administration of di ...

, but without changing congregational polity. In the National Baptist Convention (USA), its statement of faith teaches the bishop and pastor are synonymous; in the Full Gospel Baptist Church Fellowship, the bishop and pastor are separate offices.

India

The uniting Church of North India received Baptists when in its constitution and had the Baptist Samson Das ordained Bishop of Cuttack in 2006.

References

External links

Bishop ordained in Virginia
Baptist denominations Baptist denominations established in the 19th century Protestantism in Georgia (country) Protestantism in the Democratic Republic of the Congo {{Baptists-stub