Ordination (Cheirotonia)

From the beginning, ministry in the Church was given the same way: by prayer and the laying on of hands. The apostles laid hands on the seven first deacons (Acts 6:6); Paul reminds Timothy of "the gift that is in thee … with the laying on of the hands of the presbytery" (1 Timothy 4:14). The gesture is not decoration. Hands can only be laid on you by someone who is present, which means the gift can travel only person to person, generation to generation — an unbroken physical chain from the apostles to the newest deacon, which the Church calls apostolic succession.

There are three major orders — deacon, priest, and bishop; the shape of each ministry is described in bishop-priest-deacon-holy-orders. Beneath them stand the minor orders of reader and subdeacon, given by a simpler blessing outside the altar (cheirothesia, a distinction the tradition observes: only the major orders are ordained at the Holy Table during the Liturgy).

Ordination is never a private ceremony; it takes place inside the Divine Liturgy, before the whole Church, and each order is conferred at the point of the service its ministry serves — the deacon after the consecration of the Gifts, the priest earlier, so that he may share at once in the offering, the bishop earlier still. The candidate is led three times around the Holy Table while the choir sings the same hymns sung at a wedding crowning — the martyrs' hymns, because both mysteries crown a life that is being given away.

Then he kneels at the corner of the Holy Table, his forehead resting on it, and the bishop lays his hands on his head and prays the ancient formula: "The grace divine, which always healeth that which is infirm, and completeth that which is wanting, elevateth, through the laying-on of hands, N., the most devout Sub-Deacon, to be a Deacon: Wherefore, let us pray for him, that the grace of the all-holy Spirit may come upon him." The words say everything the Church believes about ordination: the bishop does not supply the grace, God does; the man remains infirm and lacking, and grace completes him. As the new clergyman is vested piece by piece in the garments of his order, the bishop presents each with the cry "Axios!" — "He is worthy!" — and clergy and people repeat it. The people's Axios is not a formality: ordination is given in and for the Church, never over her head.

A bishop's consecration follows the same grammar at greater depth: he is consecrated by several bishops together (canonically at least two or three), because no bishop is the source of the episcopate — he is received into a college that descends whole from the apostles.

The Orthodox Church ordains married men: a man may marry before ordination (not after), and most parish priests and deacons are married. Bishops are drawn from the monastic and celibate clergy. Ordination is also, in Orthodox understanding, not open to repetition or reversal in the manner of a job: the grace is given once, and a deposed clergyman is not "re-ordained" if restored.

Just as important is what ordination does not mean. It is not a promotion in holiness — the Church's calendar is filled with lay saints — and it does not make the clergy a spiritual aristocracy over a passive laity. All the baptized share what Scripture calls the royal priesthood, offering the world back to God in prayer and thanksgiving; see the-royal-priesthood-of-the-laity. The ordained priesthood exists within that people, not above it, to serve the mysteries by which the whole body lives. As St. John Chrysostom taught, its dignity is precisely that something heavenly has been entrusted to earthen hands.