How the Church Is Organized

What you'll notice

Look at the bottom of any parish website and you'll find a little genealogy: "A parish of the Diocese of the Midwest, Orthodox Church in America," or "Metropolis of Chicago, Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America," or "Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America." In the Great Litany the deacon prays for "our Holy Synod (or Patriarch)" and for "our Bishop," and names him.¹ When that bishop visits, the whole parish turns out, the choir rehearses for a month, and somebody polishes things that haven't been polished since his last visit.

On the altar lies a folded cloth, the antimension (the consecrated cloth Hapgood calls a "Vice-Altar"), unfolded for the Eucharist and folded again afterward. Hapgood's book lists it among the things indispensable for the Liturgy: "A Corporal (Antimins), consecrated by a Bishop."² No bishop's cloth, no Liturgy. The organization chart is sitting right on the altar.

What it's called

A church that governs itself, choosing its own head and its own bishops, is autocephalous ("its own head"). A church that runs its own affairs but whose head is approved by a mother church, and who commemorates that church's primate, is autonomous; a 2016 pan-Orthodox document calls autonomy "the relative or partial independence of a particular ecclesial region."³

Nine of the self-governing churches are headed by a patriarch; the rest by an archbishop or a metropolitan. A bishop's territory is a diocese, which the Greek Archdiocese calls a metropolis. A council of bishops is a synod. The canons are the Church's rules, made by councils and Fathers. And a jurisdiction, in American parish talk, is the branch of a mother church that cares for its people in one region. It's a practical word, not a canonical one, and the canons would rather it weren't needed.

What's actually happening

Autocephalous churches

The Orthodox Church is a family of self-governing churches meant to be in full communion with one another; since October 2018 the Church of Russia has broken communion with the Patriarchate of Constantinople.⁴ A standard list counts fourteen: the four ancient patriarchates of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem; the patriarchates of Russia, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Georgia; and the churches of Cyprus, Greece, Poland, Albania, and the Czech Lands and Slovakia, which are led by an archbishop or a metropolitan.⁵ The Orthodox Church in America lists itself among the autocephalous churches by a grant from Moscow in 1970, and in 2019 Constantinople granted autocephaly to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine. Both are disputed between churches,⁶ and this guide takes no side on either.

The Ecumenical Patriarch (the Archbishop of Constantinople) is first in honor among them, a primacy of honor, not a jurisdiction over the others.⁷ How much that primacy includes is argued, Constantinople and Moscow most of all.

Bishops and synods

Inside each church, the bishops meet in synod and elect a head, who can't act alone. One of the oldest rules in the Church, Apostolic Canon 34, puts the balance in two halves. "The bishops of every nation must acknowledge him who is first among them and account him as their head"; but neither may the first bishop "do anything without the consent of all."⁸ That's the Orthodox constitution in a sentence, and it runs both ways.

Each bishop governs a diocese. Nicaea, in 325, ruled that "a bishop should be appointed by all the bishops in the province,"⁹ so even the choosing of a bishop is the work of many bishops, not one.

Parishes

The bishop sends a priest to each parish. Under the OCA's Statute the priest is "head of the Parish" by appointment of the diocesan bishop, and a parish council, elected by the annual parish assembly, is "the executive body that assists the Parish Priest in administration of the Parish."¹⁰ The Greek Archdiocese's Regulations say the parish is "headed by a canonically ordained and duly appointed Priest," that its council members are elected by parishioners in good standing, and that the metropolitan "ratifies elections of the Parish Councils."¹¹ The pattern in both is the same: the priest is accountable to the bishop for the altar, the council helps with the roof and the budget, and the bishop has the last word. Nobody on the council votes on the Creed.

Jurisdictions in America

In Greece there's one Orthodox church, the Church of Greece. In America there are a dozen jurisdictions, overlapping, because the Orthodox arrived from a dozen countries and each kept its ties home. The Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops lists them: the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese and, separately, the Ecumenical Patriarchate; the Antiochian Archdiocese; the Orthodox Church in America; the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia and the Parishes of the Russian Orthodox Church in the USA; the Serbian, Romanian, Bulgarian, and Georgian dioceses; the American Carpatho-Russian, Ukrainian, and Albanian dioceses.¹² Most are in full communion with one another. The 2018 break runs between the jurisdictions tied to Moscow and those tied to Constantinople, and this guide describes it without taking a side.

The OCA's own history calls the American situation "multiple, overlapping jurisdictions based on ethnic background," and names the canonical principle it departs from: one Church in one territory.¹³ The bishops themselves call it an anomaly, and healing it is still on their agenda.

The Assembly of Bishops

In 2009 a pan-Orthodox conference at Chambésy, Switzerland, set rules for assemblies of all the canonical bishops in regions like ours, and the first assembly for this region met in New York in May 2010. Its stated aim was to "advance actions that facilitate canonical order in our region," answering the primates' call for "the swift healing of every canonical anomaly."¹⁴ It exists to coordinate the Church's life here.¹⁵ Its most visible gift to a visitor is the directory of every canonical parish in the country.

The canons

The canons are the Church's rulebook: the Apostolic Canons, the canons of the ecumenical and local councils, and the canonical letters of Fathers like Basil and Athanasius. The Council in Trullo in 692 gathered them into one recognized body, receiving "the eighty-five canons" handed down in the apostles' name along with those of Nicaea, Ancyra, Gangra, Antioch, Laodicea, Constantinople, Ephesus, Chalcedon, Sardica, Carthage, and the Fathers.¹⁶ The standard Greek collection with commentary is The Rudder (Pedalion). The canons are applied with two words in mind: akriveia (exactness, the rule kept to the letter) and oikonomia (a bishop's merciful bending of it for one person, for a reason). The bend never becomes the rule; How Converts Are Received shows the pair at work.

Why it matters

Christ prayed "that they all may be one" (John 17:21). The Orthodox answer to how is not a headquarters. It's a shared cup: churches that confess one faith and receive at each other's altars, bishops who recognize each other, and a priest who can't serve without his bishop's cloth. Saint Ignatius put it in the second century: "Wherever the bishop shall appear, there let the multitude [of the people] also be; even as, wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church."¹⁷

It's also why the Orthodox can disagree loudly and stay one Church. Families do that.

Where it came from

The apostles appointed elders in every church (Acts 14:23), and Saint Ignatius, around 107, writes to churches each led by a bishop with presbyters and deacons. The great cities became centers for their regions. Nicaea in 325 confirmed the "ancient customs" that gave the bishop of Alexandria jurisdiction over Egypt, Libya, and Pentapolis, and the like for Rome and Antioch, and said that "custom and ancient tradition" gave honor to the bishop of Jerusalem.¹⁸ Constantinople I in 381 placed the new capital second, "after the Bishop of Rome; because Constantinople is New Rome."¹⁹ By 692 the Council in Trullo could give the order in one line: Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem.²⁰ When Rome and the East parted, Constantinople became first among the Orthodox.

Later churches became autocephalous as the faith took root in new nations: Serbia's first archbishop in 1219, Russia's self-governing metropolitan in 1448 and its patriarch in 1589.²¹ America's story is in A Short History.

What you do

If you're Orthodox: learn your bishop's name and pray for him by it; he's named at every Liturgy whether you're listening or not. Go to the parish assembly. Serve on the council if you're asked, and remember it keeps the roof on, not the altar. When you travel, any canonical parish is your parish.

If you're visiting: don't let the jurisdiction on the sign decide for you. The faith and the Liturgy are the same in all of them; pick the parish you'll go back to. The Assembly of Bishops' directory lists them all, and How to Find a Parish has more.

Go deeper

• Apostolic Canons 34 and 39, and Nicaea canons 4–7, in The Seven Ecumenical Councils (NPNF2 14).
• Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church, the chapter on the Church's structure.
• The Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops, assemblyofbishops.org.
• Who Are the Orthodox? and A Short History.

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