The Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese
In brief
The Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America is the North American jurisdiction of the ancient Patriarchate of Antioch, whose see is now at Damascus. Its roots are Arab — Syrian and Lebanese immigrants who carried their faith to the New World — but it has become one of the most visibly convert-welcoming bodies in American Orthodoxy, most famously in 1987 when some two thousand former evangelicals were received into it. It is a full member of the Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops.
An ancient see in a new land
Antioch is one of the oldest names in Christianity. It was there, the Book of Acts records, that "the disciples were called Christians first" (Acts 11:26), and the Patriarchate of Antioch traces its founding to the apostles Peter and Paul. Today that patriarchate, its faithful largely Arabic-speaking and its cathedral in Damascus, shepherds Orthodox Christians across the Middle East and a worldwide diaspora born of a century of emigration and hardship.
Arab Orthodox immigrants began arriving in North America in the late nineteenth century. To care for them the Russian Church in America — then the mother church of all Orthodox on the continent — consecrated Raphael Hawaweeny in 1904 as bishop of Brooklyn, the first Orthodox bishop consecrated on American soil. St. Raphael, later glorified as a saint, traveled ceaselessly among scattered Arab parishes, "the Good Shepherd of the Lost Sheep in America." From those beginnings grew today's Archdiocese, headquartered in Englewood, New Jersey, its parishes now spread across the United States and Canada.
The embrace of converts
For much of the twentieth century the Archdiocese was, like most American Orthodox bodies, an immigrant church holding an ethnic heritage together in a new country. Under Metropolitan Philip Saliba, who led it for nearly half a century (1966–2014), it turned decisively outward — pressing for English in the services, for American-born clergy, and for a mission beyond the immigrant community. Over his tenure the Archdiocese grew several-fold, from roughly sixty parishes to some two hundred and fifty.
The most striking chapter came in 1987. A body of American evangelicals — some two thousand strong, organized as the Evangelical Orthodox Church after years of searching for the roots of the early Church — was received en masse into the Antiochian Archdiocese and reorganized as a missionary department. Their leaders, many of them former campus-ministry figures, became Orthodox priests and, in time, some became bishops. The reception was not without friction, and Orthodoxy in America has many doors; but it made the Antiochian Archdiocese a byword for the convert movement, and it seeded parishes full of Americans with no ancestral tie to the Christian East.
Its place in American Orthodoxy
The Archdiocese remains under the Patriarchate of Antioch, and its primate is chosen by the Holy Synod in Damascus; Metropolitan Saba (Esper) was enthroned in 2023. Alongside the Greek Archdiocese, the Orthodox Church in America, and the other jurisdictions, it forms part of the overlapping map of Orthodox churches on one continent — the situation the diaspora question concerns, in which the ancient rule of one bishop for one city has not yet been realized in the New World.
What has given the Antiochian Archdiocese its particular character is the meeting of two things the tradition holds together: an unbroken descent from the apostolic see of Antioch, and a readiness to preach in the language and to the people of the land it has come to. That combination — deep roots, open doors — is much of why its story matters beyond its own membership.