This is about the office of an overseer or overwatcher, translated ‘bishop’ in our King James Version. The term bishop or overseer is interchangeable in the New Testament with that of elder.
How many preachers are there in a church? At least one to every church or family of God's people. In Revelation 1:16-20 there is reference to the stars – one per church – in the hand of Christ, and the explanation is given that these stars are the angels of the churches. The seven letters to the seven churches in Revelation 2 and 3 are all addressed to the angels of those churches. Who are the angels of the churches? Some people have thought that each church has a guardian angel, but that's a little bit absurd, because the angel of each church seems to be counted as one of the church people. He's addressed along with the church; he's responsible with them; he is on earth with them, and he is to tell them where they need to be corrected. Some of those churches were badly out of line, and he is to warn them. Well, an angel doesn't speak to warn all the church members. Some people have said that the angels of the churches are just messengers – delegates were sent from the churches to John on Patmos, and these are the messengers sent back to the churches. That is equally absurd because John was in exile on Patmos. He wasn't at liberty to receive delegates, and there's no mention of such people. There's no alternative to the majority interpretation down the centuries, that the angels of the churches are the pastors, the preachers, the teachers of the churches.
The overseer or the preacher of the gospel is not a priest. One of the mistakes of the Church of England is that when the Church of England reformed from being lost in Catholicism and under the Pope and became a gospel church, according to the Scriptures, it never fully reformed. It was never allowed to fully reform because of the politics of the day. As the leading reformers tried to go forward, so the Crown held them back. The Reformation was about to complete almost a final leap to become a holy biblical Church of England when King Edward VI died, and Mary came to the throne, reformation stopped dead, and the clock began to be put back to Catholicism. Eventually, of course, Elizabeth I came to the throne, a nominally Protestant queen who wanted to uphold the Reformation, but only up to a point, because she was convinced, that if you reformed the Church of England too much, and if you did away with the hierarchical structure and the authority of the bishops, then the authority of the Crown itself would be weakened. The royal watchword was, ‘No bishops, no queen’. That is why it still has an archbishop and bishops. Now for many years the bishops' control was very weak, so in the history of the Church of England after the Reformation you have got many great preachers and fervent evangelicals, because there was no discipline in the Church of England. When John Newton, the ex-slave trader, was the rector of St. Mary Woolnoth in the city, he could do as he pleased. But in the 20th century, the bishops – most of them unbelievers – got control, and there are now more unbelievers than believers officiating in the Church of England. Because it didn't fully reform, it kept words like ‘priest’; when you become a full minister, you become a priest. Well, that is not complete reformation, because the priesthood was done away with in Christ. There is no power flowing through the clergyman's cuffs, transmitting blessing. Everything comes to us directly from Christ by faith. There is not supposed to be any hierarchy in the church. These elders are not lords over God's heritage. Christ says so, the Apostle Paul says so. The only sense in which they rule is by teaching the word of God. Their authority is not personal; it's what they draw from the word: that is what challenges our souls and rules us. So the overwatcher doesn't have personal authority. He's a teacher of the infallible word of God, and everything is drawn from that.