The Bishop and the Church

For reasons which are impossible to enumerate here, there is, in many minds, a great confusion concerning the Episcopal office in the Church.

In the early years of Christianity, in the times of the Councils and of the Fathers, the bishop was the center of the entire church life: his flock knew him as its Father, its Teacher, its Priest. Nothing in the Church was done without his knowledge, and he himself knew his people by name and understood his office not as an opportunity to exercise power, but, first of all, as a service - just as the Lord showed Himself to be the Servant.... It is for this service that apostolic authority is also given to the bishop, and there can be no Church without him being the Pastor and the Head.

Today in America we often lose this conception of episcopacy. Instead of seeing in the Bishop the Teacher of the apostolic faith, we visualize him as simply the occasion of a more elaborate - and often incomprehensible - liturgical ceremonial. Forgetting that it is in his name only that our parish priest can serve the Divine Liturgy, we are sometimes afraid of his "interventions" in our parish affairs, which we wrongly consider as "our own," and not God's. We do not understand where our money goes when it is being sent to the diocesan or the Metropolia's treasury, for we do not see any use for these institutions anyway. And finally, the shameful multiplicity of "jurisdictions" makes us feel that bishops are rather a divisive element in Church life, and we tend simply to forget that the most important character of episcopacy is to keep the Church in unity in every place.

Again, it is not the place here to look for responsibilities: everyone—bishops, priests, laymen—have their share in them. But let us rather be concerned with the means to correct a situation both unusual and critical. The forthcoming Sobor gives us a crucial opportunity to make a decisive step all together.

The late Metropolitan Leonty had succeeded in preserving throughout the most difficult period of our Church's history a holy image of the episcopate. His successor's most difficult task will be to maintain that image. But he will also have to lead the Church in a different historical period: a period of further transition towards the establishment and progress of American Orthodoxy, a period of growth, of unification, of challenge by both an increasingly secularized world and changing patterns of life.

We can be sure that whoever will be elected will receive the help and the guidance of the Holy Spirit. But let us also remember what Saint Leo the Great, a great Church Father, once said: "There is no greater sin than to bestow the grace of the Holy Spirit upon an unqualified person." And much of our troubles do come precisely from the fact that Saint Leo's precept has not been taken seriously enough in the past. The power of grace is not magic; to be effective, it requires the cooperation of man, and the Sobor will be the moment when we, all together, will have to designate the one who will be capable of giving that cooperation which God needs today.

From: Vision of Unity by John Meyendorff, St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, Crestwood, NY 1987