For many Orthodox men, being made a reader is not a step toward higher clerical rank at all but a permanent form of lay liturgical service, since a reader remains free to marry after ordination to the rank, unlike a deacon or priest, and large numbers of readers serve their whole lives in that capacity without ever seeking further ordination. A parish's reader chants the fixed and variable psalms, hymns, and scripture readings appointed for each service, work that requires real fluency with the liturgical books and their complex, constantly shifting cycle of texts, and a skilled reader is often as essential to a parish's worship as its priest.
Because the readership is the entry point into formal liturgical ministry, seminaries and monasteries commonly tonsure students as readers early in their training as a mark of their beginning commitment, well before ordination to the diaconate is considered. The office traces to the early church's practice of appointing trained lectors to read scripture aloud to a largely illiterate congregation, a practical function that liturgical tradition preserved even after literacy became widespread and the reading itself became primarily ceremonial. A capable reader also often leads or trains a parish choir, since much of the reader's material is chanted rather than simply spoken, and a parish with a strong readership tends, in practice, to have noticeably fuller and more confident congregational singing as a direct result.