The Bishop: During the first three centuries, the entire religious life of the diocese centered around the person of the bishop. The priests and deacons were his auxiliaries but they worked under the immediate direction of the bishop. In large cities, however, like Rome, it was soon found necessary to hand over permanently to the priests and deacons certain definite functions. Moreover, as a result of the spread of Christianity outside the great centres of population, the bishop gradually left to other ecclesiastics the administration of a fixed portion of the diocesan territory. In the East, at first bishoprics were created in all districts where there was a considerable number of Christians. (New Advent Article)
Armenian Service Church of the Holy Sepulcre
Greek Service Church of the Holy Sepulcre
Nice pics of the Orthodox bishop.
From Owen the Ochlophobist…
http://ochlophobist.blogspot.com/2007/10/holy-rus-past-presence-1600-years-of-st.html
With one sung word in the Church Slavonic choral tradition one will find conveyed sorrow, near desperation, resolve, compunction, joy, peace, and ever more. There is no sound on this earth which greater recapitulates the human narrative. To hear this is to hear salvation, this is what the Kingdom of God sounds like, to hear it is to better know Him. Here, in this singing, the blind can see with their ears. Do not confuse this with aestheticism. What I am writing about is not a matter of taste, it is about the human soul and its proper givenness to God, those particular patterns of sound which facilitate the bringing about of such. Just as with Orthodox iconography we can recognize the saving written images of salvation, bound and gracefully held within the Tradition, outside of which is madness, so we might say that there are icons of sound, also bound and held within the Tradition. I rejoiced when I heard them.