The service unfolds in three movements. Before the public liturgy begins, the priest performs the proskomedia at a side table, preparing the bread and wine and commemorating the living and the dead with particles arranged around the central Lamb. The Liturgy of the Catechumens follows, the gathered half of the service, with its litanies, antiphons, the entrance with the gospel book, the appointed epistle and gospel, and in ancient practice the dismissal of those not yet baptised, a dismissal still spoken though the catechumens now stay.
The Liturgy of the Faithful is the eucharist proper: the great entrance, in which the prepared gifts are carried in procession through the church while the Cherubic Hymn is sung, the kiss of peace and the creed, and then the anaphora, the great prayer of offering that runs through thanksgiving, the words of institution and the epiclesis, the explicit calling down of the Holy Spirit on the gifts which Orthodox theology treats as belonging to the heart of the consecration. Communion is given in both kinds from the chalice with a spoon. Around this skeleton the rite has grown centuries of hymnography that change with the day and the tone, so that the same liturgy is never quite the same twice, and the whole is sung throughout, for the Byzantine tradition does not speak its worship.