One part of the old believers went on the way of receiving pastors, priests, passing from the dominant Church. These old believers believed that although the reform had indeed significantly distorted the faith and piety of the dominant Church, yet there was still some divine grace left in it. If a priest is received properly, with a proper rank, with renunciation of his heresy and anointing of the world, then he retains his rank, and thus the ranks of the clergy are replenished among the old believers. This is the direction of the old believers, which was cared for by the clergy of the crossing of the dominant hierarchy, is called clericalism, the Popovtsy. Sometimes they were also called runaways, because the priests who came to them “escaped” from the dominant Church.

The other part of the old believers was much more radical. They believed that the degree of distortion in doctrine and in Church life which resulted from the reforms so great that the dominant Church has lost divine grace and its priests is not the true bearer of the sacred Ministry, although formally and perform priestly duties. But since the Lord promised that the Church of Christ and the Eucharistic Sacrifice would exist until the last time, for the old believers of this direction, for the old believers-bespopovtsev from this followed the conclusion that with the fall of piety in the Third Rome came the time of the reign of Antichrist. One of the signs of this last time, the invisible Antichrist Kingdom, is the disappearance of the true priesthood, since they considered it canonically impossible to borrow the non-Orthodox priesthood, the heretical priesthood.

In their views, they relied on precedents from the history of the Church. In the ancient Church, some part of the Christians, finding themselves in a heretical environment and not having Orthodox clergy, refrained from liturgical communication with non-Orthodox clergy. In South-Western Russia, where as a result of the betrayal of the episcopate and clergy, Orthodox laity very often found themselves in such a position that there was no one to perform the Church sacraments. Such sacred acts as the sacrament of baptism because of the lack of priests were forced to perform simple laymen. In addition, there has long been a practice characteristic of sparsely populated areas, in particular Pomerania, regions in the North of Russia, on the North sea coast, where not every parish had a priest. The priest came to these remote and sparsely populated villages, to these parishes only a few times a year to perform the sacraments: to marry, to baptize children, and the rest of the time the service was performed in the absence of the priest, with the omission of those sacraments, those sacraments that only the priest or deacon is authorized to perform. In the same way, using this experience of Northern Pomerania, Church services were performed by the old believers-bespopovtsev: according to the full Church Charter, but with the omission of the Liturgy, with the omission of a number of other sacred acts that are not authorized to perform a layman, and which can only be performed by a priest or deacon.

Being deprived of the Liturgy and the sacrament of communion as a result of the absence of the clergy, the old believers-bespopovtsy saw their only hope in the doctrine of spiritual communion, which was also not the fruit of their original, self-serving reflections, but was based on individual sayings from the Church literature of the past time. Since they had no other legal way to receive communion, they said that the only communion available to them was spiritual, that is, a fervent prayer to the Lord and the hope that this very spiritual desire to receive communion, to taste the Body and Blood of Christ, would be “imputed by the Lord in need” for true communion, since the old believers

At the same time, in contrast to various kinds of heresies that denied the very necessity of the clergy, the very special mission of the holders of the Holy office, the old believers-bespopovtsy never perceived the absence of the priesthood as something normal, proper. In their view, this is a grave loss, since the normal life of the Church is a life with a full three-fold hierarchy. But at this time, since there is a deviation from the true faith, there is nowhere to take these truly Orthodox hierarchs and Orthodox priests. Only for this reason, in need, bespopovtsy do not have the priesthood and episcopate. The disappearance of the true Orthodox clergy was for them one of the signs that the world has come to the last time, the Kingdom of evil, the Kingdom of Antichrist.