Alexander Schmemann

1. The Beginning of the Church (28 pages)

Page 12

We thank you, our Father, for the life and knowledge which you have revealed through Jesus, your Child. To You be glory forever. As this piece of bread was scattered over the hills and there was brought together and made one, so let your Church be brought together from the ends of the earth into your Kingdom . . . Remember, Lord, Your Church, to save it from all evil and to make it perfect by Your love. Make it holy, and gather it together from the four winds into Your Kingdom, which You have made ready for it.

In the light of the Eucharistic meeting, every day and every deed performed were steps on the way to the final victory of the coming Lord; because of the Sacrament, Christians do not look on the Church as a simple human organization, with a leader and subordinates, authority and obedience, but as a living organism imbued with the Holy Spirit.3

At the head of the community stood the bishop.
His authority was unique. Appointed by the apostles or their successors, the other bishops, he was the head and source of the Church’s life. His special gift consisted in transforming the gathering of Christians through the Sacrament into the Body of Christ and in uniting them in an indivisible union of new life. The power to dispense the sacraments was indissolubly linked with the power to teach; he taught at the meeting, not by his own initiative but according to the Spirit; he was the guardian of the apostolic tradition, the witness to the universal unity of the Church. “One must look on the bishop as on the Lord himself,” writes St. Ignatius of Antioch in the beginning of the second century. Therefore “nobody must do anything that has to do with the Church without the bishop’s approval . . . Where the bishop is present, there let the congregation gather, just as where Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church.”4

The bishop was helped in administering the Church by the presbyters, or elders. While St. Ignatius compared the bishops to Christ, he compared the presbyters to the apostles. Installed by the bishop through the laying on of hands, they helped him in every way and passed on his teachings and directions to the community. The primitive Church was a city community, a meeting of Christians in one place around a bishop, but when the number of Christians grew and a single meeting of this sort became impossible, the community split into a network of parishes dependent on it. Then the presbyters replaced the bishop and became his fully-empowered deputies, but through the sacrament of the episcopal laying on of hands all congregations retained their organic link with the bishop as the beneficent organ of Church unity.

After the bishop and the presbyters came the deacons, the “servers.” They were the “ears, hands, and eyes” of the bishop, his living link with his people. In the early Church, unity in worship was inseparable from actual material aid, brotherhood, concern for the poor and for widows, for the burial of their brothers, and for orphans. The bread transformed into the Body of Christ was a part of that daily bread, the food that Christians brought to their meeting for the common table and to aid the poor.
The deacons had the responsibility of distributing the gifts, helping the poor, organizing the agape (“love feast,” as partaking of the Eucharist was called) — in sum, of carrying out the unity of Christians resulting from their participation in the Sacrament.

St. Ignatius’ statement that “without the bishop, presbyters and deacons there is no Church” does not mean that only the hierarchy was active in it. Every member had his function and each supplemented the other in indissoluble union. “Now there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit. And there are differences of administrations, but the same Lord.
And there are diversities of operations, but it is the same God which worketh all in all. But the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal” (I Cor. 12:4-7). The various organizational forms of the early Church must be understood in the light of an ideal which found expression in service to one’s brothers.

 

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Schmemann, A History of the Orthodox Church: Table of Contents

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Reference address : https://www.ellopos.net/elpenor/schmemann-orthodoxy-1-beginning.asp?pg=12