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The Office Today: General and District Superintendents

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The Office Today: General and District Superintendents

Two ranks of the office survive across Methodism, whatever a given body calls the senior one. A general superintendent, called bishop in the United Methodist Church and the African Methodist Episcopal, African Methodist Episcopal Zion and Christian Methodist Episcopal Churches, and general superintendent in the Free Methodist Church and the Wesleyan Church, has oversight of a large territory, ordains clergy, presides at the annual conferences that assign ministers to congregations, and represents the denomination as a whole. The office is elected or appointed for a term or until retirement rather than held for life, and none of these bodies claims that its general superintendents stand in an unbroken chain of apostolic succession reaching back to the New Testament, the claim historic episcopal churches make for their bishops.

Below that sits the district superintendent, an ordained elder appointed to oversee a cluster of local congregations within a conference, a role with no equivalent title change across the tradition; every major Methodist body uses district superintendent for it. The district superintendent supervises local pastors, recommends clergy appointments to the bishop or general superintendent, and handles discipline and administration at the district level, work closer to what Wesley's original circuit-riding superintendents did than the more centralized general office above it.

The two-tier structure, one officer overseeing an entire denomination or region and another overseeing a district beneath it, is what actually carries Wesley's original functional idea of superintendency forward, regardless of which rank ended up keeping his preferred word for the title.

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