The Orthodox Church in America (OCA)

The OCA's story begins with the monks of Kodiak (the Alaskan mission). As the Russian church in America grew, its diocese moved from Alaska to San Francisco and, in 1905, to New York under the future St. Tikhon of Moscow, who governed a flock of many nationalities and dreamed of a united American Orthodoxy. When the Russian Revolution cut the American diocese off from a Moscow now under Bolshevik pressure, the diocese was left to fend for itself.

In 1924, at an all-American council, the Russian diocese in America declared itself temporarily self-governing — the body long known simply as the "Metropolia" — pending the day it could safely regularize its ties with the mother church. For decades it lived in that provisional state, one Russian-rooted jurisdiction among the many that immigration had produced in America.

On April 10, 1970, the Patriarch of Moscow, Alexy I, and his synod signed a tomos granting the Metropolia autocephaly under a new name: the Orthodox Church in America. Moscow thereby released its American daughter to full independence and counted it the fifteenth autocephalous Orthodox church. Whether that grant was valid is exactly where the Orthodox world divides, and the two positions must be stated fairly.

Those who recognize the OCA's autocephaly — the Church of Russia, which granted it, together with the churches of Bulgaria, Georgia, Poland, and the Czech Lands and Slovakia — hold that Moscow, as the mother church that brought Orthodoxy to America and long shepherded it, had every right to make its American church self-governing. Those who do not recognize it — the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the churches of Alexandria, Jerusalem, Greece, and Cyprus, with several others neither recognizing nor formally opposing — hold that a new autocephalous church cannot be created by one church acting alone, still less in the contested "diaspora," but requires the consensus of all the churches, and (on Constantinople's reading) belongs to the prerogative of the first see. This is the very same question — who may grant autocephaly — that stands between Constantinople and Moscow more broadly (see autocephaly and the diaspora question). The Church has not defined it, and this encyclopedia renders no verdict.

Whatever its disputed administrative rank, the OCA's Orthodoxy has never been in question: no church breaks communion with it, and its bishops sit alongside all the others in the Assembly of Bishops. It spans dioceses across the United States, Canada, and Mexico, worships largely in English and on the new calendar, and keeps its Alaskan mother-diocese to this day.

The OCA has weighed well above its size in American Orthodox life — through its seminaries at Crestwood and South Canaan and the twentieth-century theologians associated with it, and through its early and deliberate embrace of English-language worship, which helped make it a natural home for converts. For a newcomer the useful summary is this: the OCA is a fully Orthodox church whose independence some of the other churches accept and some do not, while all of them commune together at the same chalice (the wider American picture).