Bishop, Priest, Deacon (Holy Orders)

The shape of ordained ministry grows straight out of the New Testament. The apostles did not leave the churches they founded to organize themselves: Paul charges Titus to "ordain elders in every city" (Titus 1:5), tells the elders of Ephesus that the Holy Ghost has made them overseers of the flock (Acts 20:28), and writes to Timothy about the qualifications of a bishop (1 Timothy 3:1). His letter to Philippi greets the saints there "with the bishops and deacons" (Philippians 1:1). In Acts 6 the apostles pray and lay hands on seven men set apart for service — the moment the tradition remembers as the origin of the diaconate. In the earliest documents the titles episkopos (overseer) and presbyteros (elder) can still overlap; the offices themselves, the Church has always held, were there from the start.

By around the year 107, the pattern is unmistakable. St. Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, writing letters to the churches as he was taken to martyrdom in Rome, speaks of bishop, presbyters, and deacons as the given structure of every local church, and pleads that nothing be done apart from the bishop — for where the bishop is, there the people should be, as where Christ is, there is the catholic Church. That is not a late invention layered over a free-form early Christianity; it is the testimony of a man formed within living memory of the apostles.

The bishop is the successor of the apostles (apostolic-succession) and the chief shepherd of a local church. He is its high priest and teacher, the guardian of its faith, and the only minister who can ordain. Every Eucharist in his diocese is celebrated in communion with him — quite concretely: the Liturgy is served on an antimension, a cloth signed by the bishop's own hand. Cut off from the bishop, a parish would be cut off from the catholic Church; through him, the smallest mission is joined to the apostles and to every other altar in the world.

The priest, or presbyter, exists because the bishop cannot be everywhere. He is the bishop's hand extended into the parish: with the bishop's blessing he celebrates the Holy Mysteries (all except ordination), preaches, hears confessions, and shepherds the flock entrusted to him. The *deacon* — the word means "servant" — is not a junior priest but a distinct calling: he leads the litanies, serves at the altar, proclaims the Gospel, and from the beginning has carried the Church's ministry to the poor, the sick, and the forgotten. Together the three orders make the local church what it is; the Liturgy in its fullness assumes all three.

A man enters these orders through ordination — cheirotonia, the laying on of hands — always within the Liturgy, always by a bishop, and always before the people, who greet the newly ordained with the cry Axios! ("He is worthy!"). The Church is careful about what this does and does not mean. There is finally one priest, Jesus Christ; the clergy have no priesthood of their own to add to His. The grace of the Holy Spirit makes a man bishop, priest, or deacon so that Christ's own ministry — teaching, feeding, forgiving, serving — remains present and visible in every generation.

Nor do the ordained stand above a passive Church. All the baptized are a royal priesthood, and the clergy exist for the Body, not the Body for the clergy. Orthodox practice keeps the ministry close to ordinary life: married men may be ordained deacon and priest (marriage comes before ordination, not after), while bishops are drawn, as a rule, from the monastic clergy. The parish priest with a family, the deacon at his weekday job, the bishop who answers for them all — this is the threefold ministry the Church has known since the age of the apostles.