Orthodoxy in America: An Overview
In brief
Orthodox Christianity came to America not as one church but as many. What began as a single Russian mission in Alaska in 1794 grew, through wave after wave of immigration from Greece, the Middle East, the Slavic lands, and elsewhere, into a patchwork of overlapping "jurisdictions" — Greek, Antiochian, Russian, Serbian, Romanian, and more — often several in the same city, each answering to a mother church overseas. This overlap is a canonical anomaly that Orthodox everywhere acknowledge. The American bishops now meet together in an Assembly to coordinate their common life and, in time, to resolve it.
One mission, then many
American Orthodoxy has a single point of origin: the Russian mission to Alaska in 1794, when monks from Valaam preached the Gospel to the native peoples of the far northwest. From Alaska the Russian church spread down the Pacific coast, and by the early 1900s its far-sighted bishop in America, the future St. Tikhon of Moscow, was imagining a single, multi-ethnic, English-speaking Orthodox church for the whole continent, gathering the newer immigrant communities under one roof.
History pulled the other way. Great waves of immigration — Greeks, Arabs from the Ottoman lands, Carpatho-Russians, Serbs, Romanians, Ukrainians, Albanians — brought Orthodox Christians who naturally organized parishes around their own language and homeland and looked back to their own mother churches for bishops. Then the Russian Revolution of 1917 severed the one church that might have been the trunk, cutting off the American diocese from Moscow and fracturing the Russian presence itself. By the mid-twentieth century, Greeks answered to Constantinople, Antiochians to Antioch, Serbs to Serbia, and so on — many jurisdictions, one faith, side by side.
The overlapping-jurisdictions anomaly
The result is a situation the ancient canons did not foresee. By an old rule of order, one city should have one bishop; in the United States a single city may hold Greek, Antiochian, Russian (OCA and ROCOR), Serbian, Romanian, Bulgarian, and other Orthodox bishops at once, each fully Orthodox and in communion with the rest, yet each governing his own flock in parallel. Everyone agrees this is not the way things ought to be.
Why it persists reaches back to an unsettled question the whole Orthodox world shares: the diaspora question — who has authority over Orthodox Christians in lands that lie outside the ancient patriarchates. Constantinople reads the canons to give the first see a special charge over such territory; other churches hold that each may care for its own emigrant children until the churches together decide otherwise. Until that larger question is resolved, the American overlap remains. The Church names its danger honestly, too: the drift from healthy love of one's heritage into ethnophyletism, the confusion of the faith with a nationality, which a council condemned as heresy in 1872.
Toward a common life
The overlap is being worked on. Since 2010 nearly all the canonical Orthodox bishops of the country have gathered in the Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops of the United States, whose stated task is to foster unity and to prepare a properly canonical organization of Orthodoxy in America. In practice the jurisdictions already share seminaries, charities, and a common faith, and increasingly a common English-language worship.
One of the most striking features of American Orthodoxy is that it has become a church of converts as much as of immigrants — the convert movement has reshaped many parishes and drawn people with no ethnic tie to Orthodoxy at all. For a newcomer the practical point is simple: the different names on the signboards (Greek, Antiochian, OCA, Serbian) are administrations of one and the same Church, sharing one altar, and a visitor is welcome in any of them.