Finding a Parish

A newcomer looking at a single city's Orthodox churches can be forgiven for confusion. One is "Greek Orthodox," another "Antiochian," another belongs to the Orthodox Church in America, another to the Russian Church Abroad. These names describe jurisdictions — administrative families, usually rooted in the mother-church of a particular nation — not different religions or rival churches. All of the canonical jurisdictions are in full communion with one another: they share one faith, one chalice, and the same Mysteries, and a member of any one of them may confess and receive Communion in any other. To belong to a canonical Orthodox parish is to belong to the whole Orthodox Church.

This arrangement of many jurisdictions in one city is largely an accident of history. As Orthodox Christians emigrated, each community naturally gathered around the church of its homeland, and in lands like America those overlapping structures have not yet grown together into a single local Church — which is what the diaspora question is about. Today assemblies of the canonical bishops coordinate them, and lists of the recognized jurisdictions are easy to find. For an inquirer the point is reassuring: you are not choosing between competing churches, but between doors into the same house.

The real differences you will notice are ones of culture and style. A parish may serve entirely in English, entirely in Greek or Church Slavonic, or in a mixture. Its music may be Byzantine chant — a single melodic line carried by a chanter — or the four-part harmony of the Slavic tradition. It may follow the new (revised Julian) calendar or the old Julian calendar; both are fully Orthodox, a point treated in the calendar question. Some parishes are mostly made up of families who have been Orthodox for generations; others are full of converts. Some are large cathedrals, others tiny missions meeting in a rented hall.

None of this touches the faith itself. A mission of a dozen people and a great domed cathedral are equally the Church, offering the same Eucharist. So the differences are worth noticing not because one kind is "more Orthodox" than another, but because you are looking for the place where you can actually pray, understand, and put down roots. A service in a language you do not follow at all may nourish you less, week after week, than a humbler parish where you can enter in.

Visit — and visit more than once. A first Divine Liturgy is often overwhelming: long, sung, unfamiliar, with no clear cue for when to sit or stand. It rarely makes sense the first time, and it is not meant to be judged by first impressions. Stay for the coffee hour afterward, meet a few people, and above all meet the priest. Tell him plainly that you are exploring; ask your questions. He is the one who will eventually receive you as an inquirer and then a catechumen, and a good relationship with him matters more than any other single factor.

Two pieces of realism from the tradition. First, proximity counts for more than newcomers expect: you will be there most Sundays, and a parish becomes a family, so the ordinary church twenty minutes away is often better for you than the ideal one two hours off. Second, do not shop endlessly for a flawless community. Every parish is full of sinners, as every hospital is full of the sick; that is what a church is for. The one thing worth verifying is that a parish is canonical — in communion with the recognized Orthodox churches. A few groups look Orthodox but have separated themselves from that communion; if you are unsure, simply ask the priest whose bishop he serves under. The goal is not the perfect parish but a home where you can be known, confess, and commune.