This is a question often asked, especially by Roman Catholics. No doubt they expect to find in the Orthodox Church an equivalent to the papacy. For Orthodox, however, the very existence of a visible head of the Roman Catholic Church indicates that, whatever its merits, the Roman Catholic Church is structurally a secular insti-tution.
Visible heads are the symbols of secular corporations, companies or governments.
But the truth is that the Orthodox Church has no visible head. They worked to protect the Church from heathen invasions or heretics, gave generous donations to monasteries and church-building programs, sponsored missions, and issued laws in defense of the Church. In church history other great and universal figures have stood up to defend the Church at critical times. A company would dissolve into chaos without a chairman, the Roman Church would vanish without a pope. The answer is given by the Saviour in the Gospels.