Who Are the Orthodox?

What you'll notice

There's a Greek Orthodox church on the main road with a blue dome and a festival every fall. Across town there's an Antiochian Orthodox church with Arabic on the sign and, quite possibly, a priest who grew up Baptist. Twenty minutes away is a Russian one with onion domes, and a Serbian one, and a Romanian one that meets in a former Lutheran building. You visit two of them, and the services are the same service: same shape, same prayers, same bread, same wall of saints, in different languages, with different pastries afterward.

So which one is the Orthodox Church? All of them. That's the first thing to understand, and the second is why there are so many.

What it's called

Orthodox comes from the Greek orthodoxos, "having the right opinion." The second half, doxa, means both "opinion" and "praise," so the one word carries right belief and right worship together.¹ In English the full name is the Eastern Orthodox Church; most people just say the Orthodox Church. The Creed, sung every Sunday, calls it "one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church,"² and the Orthodox mean every word, including "one."

Two neighbors share part of the name or part of the look. The Oriental Orthodox (the Coptic, Armenian, Ethiopian, Eritrean, Syriac, and Indian Malankara churches) are an ancient family of their own. Eastern Catholics (churches that pray the Byzantine Liturgy in communion with Rome) are Catholics. Both are described below.

What's actually happening

One Church, many addresses

The Orthodox Church is one communion of Christians who share one faith, one baptism, and one Eucharist, and who recognize each other's bishops. Saint Paul's "one Lord, one faith, one baptism" (Ephesians 4:5) is the standard.

But there's no Orthodox pope. The Church is a family of self-governing churches, each with its own bishops, and normally each in full communion with the others. A self-governing church is autocephalous ("its own head"). The Church of Greece, the Church of Russia, the Church of Serbia, the Church of Romania, the Patriarchate of Antioch, and a dozen others are each autocephalous, and together they're the one Orthodox Church. The Ecumenical Patriarch (the Archbishop of Constantinople) has a primacy of honor among them, first among equals, not a jurisdiction over them.³ How much that primacy includes is argued, Constantinople and Moscow most of all. They're siblings, not branches: they argue like siblings and share a table like siblings.

What a jurisdiction is

A jurisdiction is the branch of one of those mother churches that cares for its people in a particular place. In the United States there are a dozen, overlapping, because the Orthodox arrived from a dozen countries, each bringing its own bishops. The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America answers to Constantinople; the Antiochian Archdiocese to the Patriarchate of Antioch, the city where "the disciples were first called Christians" (Acts 11:26); the Serbian, Romanian, Bulgarian, and Georgian dioceses to their mother churches; the Russian parishes to Moscow by two different routes; and the Orthodox Church in America, which grew out of the original Russian mission, governs itself.⁴ They're all in communion. An Orthodox Christian can receive Communion in any of them, and their bishops sit together in the Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops of the United States, formed after a 2009 pan-Orthodox meeting at Chambésy to coordinate the Church's life here.⁵

The overlap is an accident of history, not a doctrine. Nobody planned a country where the Greek and Antiochian bishops both have cathedrals in the same city; the ships just kept coming.

The neighbors people confuse

The Eastern Orthodox, the subject of this guide, accept all seven ecumenical councils. The Oriental Orthodox are close cousins. They parted from the rest after the Council of Chalcedon in 451, over how to describe Christ's two natures. In 1990 a joint commission of the two families, meeting at Chambésy near Geneva, agreed that both "have always loyally maintained the same authentic Orthodox Christological faith," named the first three ecumenical councils their "common heritage," and recommended lifting the old condemnations on both sides.⁶ The two families still aren't in communion. Their liturgies are their own, but if you visit a Coptic or Armenian church you'll feel you're in a cousin's house.

Eastern Catholics—Byzantine Catholics, Melkites, Ukrainian Greek Catholics, and others—worship with the Liturgy this guide describes but are in full communion with the pope of Rome. Most descend from Orthodox communities that entered union with Rome while keeping their Eastern rite: the bishops of the Kyivan Church at the Union of Brest in 1596, sixty-three Carpatho-Rusyn priests at Uzhhorod in 1646.⁷ Like the Orthodox, they ordain married men as priests.⁸ The Orthodox love them as family and don't share Communion with them. They're also the best proof that the pope isn't the only difference between Orthodox and Catholics, as the myth entry explains.

Why it matters

Christ prayed "that they all may be one" (John 17:21). For the Orthodox, that unity has a shape you can see: one faith confessed and one cup shared, held together by bishops who recognize each other. That's why a Greek and a Serb can walk into each other's churches and receive Communion, and why a church with the same Liturgy but a different communion is a different church.

It's also why the faith has never been a nationality. The ethnic roots are real and loved; the baklava and the Slavonic and the grandmother who's held the same spot by the icon stand for fifty years are gifts, not obstacles. But the Church's first Pentecost was preached in every language in the room (Acts 2:9–11), and she has been translating ever since. Most American parishes now serve mostly in English, keeping some Greek, Slavonic, Arabic, or Romanian for the hymns people grew up with. Nobody will ask what you are. They'll ask whether you're staying for coffee. Myth: "Orthodoxy is an ethnic church" has the rest.

Where it came from

The long story, from Pentecost on, is in A Short History. In America it came in four waves: one by mission, one by immigration, and two by conversion.

The mission. In 1794 a small band of monks from the Valaam monastery landed at Kodiak, in Russian Alaska, sent to the native peoples rather than merely to the fur traders. The oldest Orthodox saints on this continent, Herman of Alaska, Juvenaly, Peter the Aleut, and Innocent, belong to that mission, and its diocese later moved its headquarters to San Francisco and then New York.⁹

The immigrants. Greeks, Arabs, Serbs, Russians, Carpatho-Rusyns, Romanians, Ukrainians, Albanians, and Bulgarians came through the ports and built churches where they landed. The first Greek Orthodox community in the Americas was founded by merchants in New Orleans, and the first permanent one in New York in 1892; the Greek Archdiocese was incorporated in 1921 and recognized by the State of New York in 1922.¹⁰ In 1904 Saint Tikhon consecrated an Arab priest, Raphael Hawaweeny, as Bishop of Brooklyn, the first Orthodox bishop consecrated in North America.¹¹

The returners. In 1891 a Carpatho-Rusyn priest named Alexis Toth, an Eastern Catholic whom the local Latin bishop wouldn't recognize, brought his Minneapolis parish of 361 people into the Orthodox Church, and tens of thousands of Eastern Catholics followed over the next decades.¹²

The converts. In 1987 about two thousand former evangelicals, who had spent a decade reading their way toward the early Church, were received into the Antiochian Archdiocese, beginning that February in Los Angeles.¹³ Today converts from every background and none are part of nearly every jurisdiction.

What you do

If you're Orthodox: most of the Orthodox churches are in full communion with one another. The exception that matters most: in 2018 the Church of Russia broke Eucharistic communion with the Patriarchate of Constantinople.¹⁴ When you travel, find the nearest parish of a canonical jurisdiction in communion with your own and go; it's your church too.

If you're visiting: find a parish. The Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops keeps a parish directory at assemblyofbishops.org. Pick the closest one, or the one a friend goes to; jurisdiction matters much less than whether you'll go back next week. How to Find a Parish has more.

Field Note: how to tell you're in the right book. If the parish belongs to one of the jurisdictions listed by the Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops, you're in the right book. If the sign says Coptic, Armenian Apostolic, Ethiopian, or Syriac Orthodox, you're with the cousins. If it says Byzantine Catholic, Melkite, or Ukrainian Catholic, the Liturgy will look familiar and the communion is Rome's.

Go deeper

• John 17:20–23 and Ephesians 4:1–6.
• Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church, the chapters on the Church's structure and on the twentieth century.
• How the Church Is Organized and Orthodox and Catholic.
• Any Sunday Liturgy in a jurisdiction other than the one you know.

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