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If breathless parish anecdotes and fresh-off-the-press media profiles are to be believed, the Orthodox Church is one of few religious communities experiencing growth today in the United States. Largely convert-driven, this renaissance is at once a pleasant surprise and potential stumbling block for a self-styled “Ancient Faith.” For while inquirers eagerly flock to the Church with commendable zeal, her “cradle” membership flounders, even falls away, with every passing generation on these distant shores.

Are these trends indicative of Orthodoxy in America’s looming “crisis” of identity? Or are they rather signs of a propitious convergence of two historic modes of living out the Orthodox faith in the New World? Turning to her rich and varied history in America, we find these modes operative at every level of the Church: from her hierarchs to her youth, from her grand cathedrals to her humble chapels. Indeed, the great spiritual leaders and saints of the New World are remembered primarily for their efforts to creatively bridge as well as defiantly challenge anyone who would present Christ and culture—evangelism and ethnicity—as diametrically opposed realities. 

Evangelism and Ethnicity

A handful of monks, some from the storied Valaam Monastery of Russian Finland, first landed on the wild and remote shores of Alaska in the final decade of the 18th Century. They arrived as missionaries on the heels of Russian imperial expansion into the newly claimed territory, which brought with it a rapacious fur-trade dependent upon the exploitation of indigenous labor. Within two years of missionary activity, 12,000 indigenous Alaskans were received into the Orthodox Church. [1] The last surviving member of the original missionary party of 1794, a simple monk named Herman, eventually established his hermitage on Spruce Island. For nearly forty years, his hand-dug cell was the spiritual center of Orthodoxy in America. Both Russians and natives flocked to St. Herman (+1837) as a wise teacher, defender of the vulnerable, and veritable wonderworker.

Some decades later a talented young priest arrived in Alaska. Fr. John Veniaminov (+1879) labored for years to produce pioneering translations of liturgical and catechetical texts into the Aleut language. Later as the region’s diocesan bishop, and then Metropolitan of Moscow, John—now Innocent—advocated vigorously for indigenous rights, promoted the education of American-born and Anglophone clergy, and made the crucial decision to move the Russian Mission’s headquarters to the boomtown of San Francisco following Alaska’s sale to the United States in 1867. [2] Alongside Sts. Herman and Innocent, numerous, often nameless others are rightfully counted among the “Apostles to America.” 

Even into the 20th Century, visionaries like Archbishop Tikhon (+1925; head of the Russian Orthodox Church in America from 1898-1907) considered Orthodoxy’s presence in America an apostolic endeavor. His 1902 report to the Holy Synod of Moscow underscored the urgent need to familiarize the American people with the Orthodox faith through the establishment of institutions of learning, service, and social uplift:

By setting up in North America an independent see what was intended was, among other things, the acquaintance of the heterodox world with the Orthodox Church. How far has this objective been met? What is being done for this? Very little, as of yet. [3]

The missionary impulse that characterized this earliest influx of Orthodoxy in America was evidently not so far removed from the immigrant experience. Servicing the needs of newly baptized converts required many of the same skills and institutions that were necessary to organize, aid, and assimilate hundreds of thousands of Greeks, Slavs, Arabs, Albanians, and Romanians who flooded into the United States with the opening of Ellis Island in 1892. 

For context, approximately 600,000 ethnic Greeks alone entered the United States between 1891 and 1922; the number of permanent Greek Orthodox parishes subsequently grew from one (Holy Trinity, New Orleans) to nearly 140, spread throughout the country. [4] Roughly the same held true for other groups of Orthodox immigrants, most of whom in addition to moral and spiritual formation, depended upon their parish communities for the maintenance of cultural customs, traditional languages, and other connections to their countries of origin.

A change in immigration law in 1924 drastically reduced the annual allotment of persons who were permitted to emigrate from traditionally Orthodox countries to the United States. While many of the first Orthodox immigrants in America arrived with plans to return home, this change signaled that they were likely here to stay. Reflecting the new status quo, the first ethnic Orthodox jurisdictions were formally established in the Americas over the years and decades that followed.

A canonical irregularity, ethnic jurisdictions served the growth of the Orthodox Church in the New World as much as they hindered it. Towering figures of the Greek Archdiocese such as Archbishops Athenagoras (1930-1948) and Iakovos (1959-1995) were pivotal to promoting Orthodoxy’s recognition as America’s “Fourth Major Faith” and the living continuation of ancient Hellenism. They were equaled by the efforts of other leaders, however, like Metropolitan Philip (1966-2014) of the Antiochian Archdiocese, to unify the jurisdictions and cultivate a distinctly American Orthodoxy. If the former brought valuable prestige and publicity to the Church, the latter mostly brought people, including thousands of “Evangelical Orthodox” converts in 1980’s and 90’s.

Orthodox immigration to the United States slowed after 1924, but it never fully ceased. Waves of Greeks came in the 1960’s and 70’s in the wake of domestic political instability and the Turkish invasion of Cyprus. By the late 1980’s, refugees fleeing Communism’s collapse and the ensuing civil strife it engendered came under the direst of circumstances. Subsequent waves of Orthodox immigrants arrived (and continue to arrive!) on the heels of conflicts in Yugoslavia, the Caucuses, Ukraine, and the Levant.

Presenting Orthodoxy in America’s missionary impulse prior to its immigrant experience should not be taken to mean that the former disappeared with the emergence of the latter. The saintly life of Metropolitan Dmitri (+2011) of the Orthodox Church in America’s Diocese of the South provides an inspiring example of Orthodox missionary outreach to the Spanish-speaking peoples of North and South America. As of today, the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America continues to support a flourishing “Apostolic Mission to the African Diaspora in the Americas, West Indies, and the Caribbean.” Moreover, the United States in recent decades has itself become a launching ground for Orthodox missionary activity. Pan-Orthodox organizations like the Orthodox Christian Mission Center bring together “cradle” and “convert” believers from across the country to serve the growing needs of a global Orthodox Church.

Looking Backward, Heading Forward

From this all-too-brief overview of Orthodoxy in America’s two characteristic modes of existence, what lessons from the past might we apply in the present to help ensure a better future for the Church in this country?

The most obvious and essential is simply that neither mode thrives in isolation from the other. Indeed, the “crisis” of today is a sign that they must be brought back into conversation, communion, and, ultimately, convergence. Consider, for instance, how we might answer the following questions as Orthodox Christians. 

  • What does it mean that an “immigrant faith” is attracting converts in a country whose political climate and leadership is generally wary of, if not openly hostile to immigrants? 
  • How did a Church not so long ago perceived by many to be rigidly insular become such a capacious spiritual home for the many malcontents of secular modernity? 
  • Why is it that those who are born and raised Orthodox in this country so often live and die outside the faith? 

These questions force us to look back to a time when the missionary and immigrant modes of Orthodoxy in America were not so far removed. They lead us to ask: What would a Church that combines both look like?

The first parishes in the contiguous United States were Pan-Orthodox by necessity. While we know relatively little about them, what information survives shows that for these earliest immigrant communities, ethnicity—while a crucial informing factor—was not the defining factor of their Orthodox identity. English was a lingua franca that facilitated communication among Greeks, Arabs, Russians, Serbs, and others. To the best of their abilities, clergy incorporated English alongside traditional languages in fulfilling their liturgical, pastoral, and pedagogical duties. These early parishes, often without a church building of their own, also relied heavily on the generosity of the “heterodox” Christian communities of the United States, especially the Episcopalians.

While the precise details of his life story are exceptional, St. Raphael of Brooklyn (+1915)—the first Orthodox bishop consecrated in the New World—spoke for countless of his fellow Orthodox immigrants when he described himself as “an Arab by birth, a Greek by primary education, an American by residence, a Russian at heart, and a Slav in soul.” These distinctions were certainly real but always considered bridgeable; they broadened rather than constrained one’s perspective.

We also cannot overlook the simple fact that many of the parishes receiving converts today were founded by immigrants—some of whom were converts themselves, like the thousands of Eastern Catholics shepherded into the Church by St. Alexis Toth (+1909). The heart of the Orthodox Church in America, even today, is the local “ethnic” parish. “In the immigrant parish,” Dr. James Skedros writes, “through the guidance of an educated clergy and the faithful adherence to deep-seated, highly ingrained Orthodox practices and ethos that those first immigrants brought with them, the evangelical and salvific message of Christianity was preserved and perpetuated.” Nuancing the conventional “black-and-white” missionary-immigrant schema, Skedros highlights that

It was these very ethnic parishes that sent their young men to study at seminary in order to serve as clergy for the Church. It was these very ethnic parishes that provided education to its parishioners, thus teaching them that one of the key commands of the Christian faith is to share the saving message of Jesus Christ with others. It was these very ethnic parishes that preserved the gospel message through the weekly celebration of the Eucharist, where the fullness of the Church is actualized. [5]

Ethnicity and evangelism converge most organically in the local parish, where the Eucharist is offered “for the life of the world” and the Church in her fullness manifests. Perhaps the nationalistic narrow-mindedness that characterizes certain strains of contemporary Orthodoxy in America is, in fact, a reaction to the open-mindedness of earlier generations, who knew firsthand what it takes to build a thriving parish in this country and whose everyday “witness” as Orthodox Christians was itself a form of “mission.” Any familiarity with the charismatic parish clergymen and larger-than-life lay leaders who ushered the Church in America through the latter half of the prior century dispels the false notion that “ethnic” must also mean exclusive; that immigrants cannot be both faithful Orthodox Christians and engaged American citizens.

For Your Citizenship is in Heaven

No one more than the “Apostle to the Gentiles” himself experienced firsthand the tension between evangelism and ethnicity; for him it was not simply a pastoral reality but a personal struggle. St. Paul would never cease to be a “cradle” Jew “of the tribe of Benjamin” (Rom 11:1), nor did he expect Greco-Roman “converts” to become “Israel after the flesh” (1 Cor 10:18). He discerned instead that Christian unity is realized in the principle of “one-mindedness” (homonoia) founded upon the love of Christ (Rom 8:35-39) and guided by the law of the Cross (Phil 2:5ff). The Church in history followed St. Paul’s insight whenever and wherever she blessed and baptized the best of human culture according to the “mind of Christ” (1 Cor 2:16)—a mind perpetually renewed and transformed rather than conformed to the ways of the world (Rom 12:2).

What would St. Paul say to the Orthodox Church in America today? Among other things, he would likely repeat what he wrote to the Ephesians. Gentiles were once “strangers” (xenoi) to the “commonwealth of Israel” (politeias tou Israēl), “but now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near” (Eph 2:12-13). “Therefore,” he continued, “you are no longer strangers (xenoi) and foreigners (paroikoi), but fellow citizens (sympolitai) with the saints and members of the household (oikeioi) of God” (Eph 2:19). There is no place for “xenophobia” within the Church, however construed; all belong to the same oikos of God. Indeed, the bonds of this fellowship are so strong that they transcend every earthly care, as Paul assured the beleaguered and divided Philippians: “For your citizenship (politeuma) is in heaven, from which we also eagerly wait for the Savior…[who] is able even to subdue all things to Himself” (Phil 3:20-21).

The Orthodox Church will not survive subsequent generations in America as an exclusivist ethnic enclave with the outward trappings of Christian worship. Yet neither will she truly embody the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church as an ideological society that condones the divisive, profane, chauvinistic, and nostalgic elements of modern reactionary politics and Christian fundamentalism. Citizens of heaven and 21st Century America, we are collectively at risk of being too complacent toward the promise of the former to be sufficiently critical of our present participation in the latter; too ideologically conformed to the world to be perpetually transformed by the clarity of our calling.

Whether the missionary and immigrant modes of Orthodoxy in America will converge or diverge into “crisis” depends largely on the extent to which one of these modes is privileged over the other. St. Maximus the Confessor taught that difference need not lead to division; rather, it exists for the very purposes of communion. The Church does not erase but transcends and thereby fulfills in heavenly communion every earthly difference. With “one mind” as well as with “one voice and one heart,” she confesses her Orthodox faith. Evangelism and ethnicity, the one Lord Jesus Christ and the many cultures who call upon His name, constitute a tension as ancient as the Orthodox Church: only the present context is novel. To the past, then, we must now turn to discern the future.

This article is published as part of the America at 250: Orthodoxy in a New Homeland media initiative co-organized by the Orthodox Observer and the Department of Inter-Orthodox, Ecumenical, and Interfaith Relations of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America to honor the contributions and experience of Orthodox Christianity in America and celebrate 250th anniversary of America’s founding.

[1] Thomas Hopko, “Mission to Alaska” in The Orthodox Faith: Volume III—Church History. Accessed via the Orthodox Church in America’s website, https://www.oca.org/orthodoxy/the-orthodox-faith/church-history/eighteenth-century/mission-to-alaska

[2] Ibid, “Russia: Missionary Activity,” https://www.oca.org/orthodoxy/the-orthodox-faith/church-history/nineteenth-century/russia-missionary-activity

[3] Quoted from the translation reproduced in Matthew Namee’s indispensable Lost Histories: The Good, The Bad, and The Strange in Early American Orthodoxy (Ancient Faith, 2024), p. 162.

[4] For the population estimate, see Thomas Fitzgerald’s The Orthodox Church (Bloomsbury, 1998), p. 25. For the parish total, see Demetrios J. Constantelos’ Understanding the Greek Orthodox Church: Its Faith, History, and Practice(Seabury Press, 1982), p. 130.

[5] James C. Skedros, “Orthodox Missionary and Immigration Paradigms in the United States,” Greek Orthodox Theological Review 62, no. 1-2 (2017): 83-99.

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