Ordination and Worship Leadership in the Early Church

(Faith : Worship)
Early Church Worship, Worship and culture, J. Frederick Holper,

Ordination and Worship Leadership in the Early Church

Ordination is rooted in the need for order within the Christian community. It tends both to reflect and to shape the church's life and witness amid changing historical circumstances. An important development in the post-New Testament period was the emergence of a three-office structure for ordained ministry (bishop, presbyter, deacon) and the subsequent transformation of that structure into a more authoritarian one as the church came to assume a public role in a wider cultural context.

Emergence of a Threefold Office Structure in the Early Church 

The earliest Christian communities had no common, universal structure for leadership. Though most, if not all, had been formed in response to the preaching of itinerant apostles and prophets, the cultural contexts in which those churches were plants helped produce a variety of patterns for local leadership, some informed by Jewish models, others by models derived from Greco-Roman society.

Emergence of a Threefold Office Structure

Earlier patterns of ministry had relied upon both the teaching authority of itinerant apostles, charismatic prophets and evangelists, and the organizational and the leadership authority of diverse forms of collegial local church leaders. The pattern that emerged toward the end of the first century.
Three congregational offices of leadership:
(1) single pastor-bishop, elected by each community, who presided over all aspects of the congregation's  life and worship;
(2) groups of collegial community-elected leaders known as presbyters, who oversaw the life of the community under the leadership of the bishop;
(3) service-oriented ministers called deacons, who assisted the bishop in both ministry and worship.
This form of church order is known as "mon-episcopacy".
First, fidelity to apostolic teaching is explicitly noted a as bishops.
Second, ordination takes place on the Lord's Day in the midst of the assembly, which must give its explicit approval to the choice of the candidate.
Third, those ordained as bishops receive the kiss of peace as a sign that they have been made worthy, and then immediately preside at a celebration of the Eucharist.

Later patristic era church orders in both the East and the West preserve these basic elements of the rite. Some of them also add other elements of the rite. Some of them also add others elements such as the bestowal of symbols of office and a formal declaration of ordination.

J. Frederick Holper,