Christian Episcopal Church Davies, with John Elbridge Hines as one of the principal consecrators. Bishop Hines had himself been consecrated the fifth bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Texas in 1945, and was later elected the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States of America. In 1992, following years of controversy in the Episcopal Church in the USA and the Anglican Church of Canada over what conservative members considered a steady drift towards both political and religious liberalism, the Episcopal Missionary Church (EMC) was founded. Although this was fifteen years after the Congress of St. Louis at which Anglicans from
Episcopal polity bishops came to be seen in their more traditional role as ones who delegate to the presbyterate inherited powers, act as pastors to presbyters, and holding a particular teaching office with respect to the wider church. Anglican opinion has differed as to the way in which episcopal government is "de jure divino" (by the Divine Right of Kings). On the one hand, the seventeenth century divine, John Cosin, held that episcopal authority is "jure divino", but that it stemmed from "apostolic practice and the customs of the Church...[not] absolute precept that either Christ or His Apostles gave about it" (a