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 postNew 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 planted helped produce a variety of patterns for local leadership, some informed by Jewish models, others by models derived from Greco-Roman society. Immersed as these early churches were in the apocaly…