Introduction to Orthodoxy

In every structure, people have roles that need filling. In a business, for example, someone needs to be the boss; someone needs to take care of the computers; someone needs to make sure that the elevators are working; someone needs to make sure that everything is done with safety in mind; all without including the employees who keep the company in the black.

The Church has a lot of similarities to this view. There are people required in local parishes for things to remain functioning – someone to open the doors; the person to organise for the bills to be paid; the person to order (or make) the candles; the person to do yardwork around the church land; all without including the people to make the services themselves happen.

From my observations, there are some who have a very distorted view of the priest. Sometimes this is exceptionally high (almost taking away the  humanity of the priest); other times, this is exceptionally low (almost taking away the set-apart nature of the priesthood).

Even if I was able to, I’m not going to go through everything that it takes to be a priest. I’m not one, so it’s difficult to speak from any kind of experience; and from what I’ve gathered, even those who are priests can’t explain it to those who aren’t clergy.

Perhaps the most popular misconception – and it can be “justified” by many means – is the idea that the priests are the ones who do all the ‘churchly’ work. If the parish isn’t growing, or the youth aren’t coming, or the community isn’t as strong as it used to be, it can be blamed on the priest.

The reality is that this is, well, wrong: the priest is only effective insofar as people allow him to be.

The flip side of this is that, if someone feels a call to do ministry, they immediately think that they must be a priest. Not necessarily the case, at all.

If I may borrow from some scholastic-sounding terminology: the essence of the priest is to tend to the body of believers.
That’s a big job, as any priest can tell you. To do this, a priest must live a life of purity (both before and after ordination), must have theological education (nowadays this usually means academic degrees, but doesn’t have to), must be male (because Christ chose males as apostles) and must be willing to love their flocks, even to death. That excludes a lot of people – by birth, by age and by moral actions.

But it’s not the whole job, also as any priest can tell you. Bishops are needed to guide the priests; deacons are needed to assist the priests and bishops to do their jobs well. But outside ordained clergy and various servers in church services, there is still more work to be done. We believe that Christ is the Way, the Truth and the Life; we believe that Christ gave us His Church to guide His children to salvation.

That’s where laypeople come in.
If priests are to minister to their congregation (which is their primary responsibility), then it is the primary responsibility of laypeople to do two things (and these are related): firstly, to work towards salvation; and secondly, to bring others towards salvation.

In a very practical way, there is very little that a priest can do that a layperson can’t – aside from, obviously, the sacraments. Laypeople provide a witness – people with nothing material to gain, who still believe wholeheartedly, gives those outside the Church with the ability to see the work of Christ in peoples’ lives.

Those excluded from the clergy are not, in any sense, any less than those who are clergy. There is a lot of work to be done by all of us. All of us have a vocation to love God and one another; all of us have a vocation to worship Truth and lead others to Truth, Who was incarnate for us.