To start with, as I wrote last month, we have bishops, watching over the congregations over a wide area (in our case, all of continental Europe, and more besides, although this is an exception!), and priests, commissioned to lead, teach and care for the local flock under their care. (And if you say, well, all Christians care for each other, then what is special is that a priest acts as the focus of God's care for us by presiding at the Eucharist and by assuring us of God's absolution of our sins.)
All bishops are priests, but not all priests are bishops. And together with bishops and priests, a third order of ministry is the diaconate. Deacons deserve an article to themselves. If you think of them as apprentice priests, doing a year's on-the-job training after graduating from Theological College (that's what we call our seminaries where our clergy get trained), you'd be wrong, but that is often what they are!
Bishops, priests and deacons make up the clergy, as distinct from the laity - the rest of us. Of course we are all "ministers" (the Latin word means "servant" - the opposite of "master"), but in Anglican church-speak, a minister is someone who presides at a service - usually someone clerical. But we do have lay ministers as well. They may be Readers, like David Low, with authority to take services and to preach, or even full-time Lay Workers, who do many of the tasks the clergy do. (The Church Army's workers are an example.)
"Priest" and "deacon" are not really job titles. To understand the names of the jobswe need to know a bit about the organization and structure of the Church of England.
To begin with, the Church of England, of which St Ursula's is a part, consists of two provinces - Canterbury and York. Each province has an archbishop. The Archbishop of Canterbury (currently George Carey) has oversight of the whole of the Church of England, and in fact of the whole Anglican communion, so he is also called the Primate.
The two provinces are divided into dioceses. Forty-two dioceses cover England (and England means England - not Wales, Scotland or any part of Ireland), and two more cover the Isle of Man and continental Europe. Each diocese is headed by a bishop - ours is John Hind. The diocesan bishop may be assisted by one or more other bishops, called suffragans. Our suffragan is Henry Scriven, who will be visiting us next month.
The forty-three English and Manx dioceses are divided into parishes. The priest in charge of a parish was originally called either a rector or a vicar - depending on whether he got to administer the tithes (the agricultural produce given to maintain the church). A large parish (or a lazy rector in times past!) might employ an assistant curate - shortened to "curate" (though a curate is anyone who "takes care of souls").
Here in Europe our parishes are different - they are really ministries to particular groups of people, and not to a geographical area. Just as a school or a guild might have a chaplain, so do we.
Parishes were grouped into deaneries, and deaneries into archdeaconries. A dean was originally a monk in charge of ten novices, but today a dean is usually either the priest who controls and organizes the cathedral church (the chief church of the diocese), or a local coordinator. Here in Europe, we only have archdeaconries at present. Some are relatively small, like Switzerland, and some, like the Archdeaconry of the Danube and the Aegean, are enormous.
The leader of an archdeaconry is an archdeacon - ours is Peter Hawker. The archdeacon is the priest responsible for the pastoral care of the clergy in the archdeaconry, and for helping coordinate the local ministry in a particular area.
Job titles are confusing, and if I went on to mention canons (they're priests who may, or may not, be on the staff of a cathedral), vicars-general and others, they would be more confusing still. The important thing to remember is that these are all people who serve to serve Christ and to do God's will, within the structure of the church - a church which seeks at the same time to be holy - committed to God's service, catholic - open to all, and apostolic - committed to showing forth the Good News about Jesus Christ, both in its life and in its preaching. This is what matters more than any job title!
HD