Macedonian Orthodox Church in the US
Macedonian Orthodox Church in the US belongs to the Eastern Orthodox family of churches.
Governance: hierarchical.
Macedonian Orthodox Church in the US reports 20 congregations in the United States (RCMS 2020 (ARDA national table), 2020).
The American parishes of the Macedonian Orthodox Church — Ohrid Archbishopric, whose 1967 self-declared independence was finally recognized by world Orthodoxy in 2022.
Heritage
Macedonian immigrants — the factory towns of the industrial Midwest prominent among their settlements — organized parishes tied to the church at home. That church declared autocephaly from the Serbian Patriarchate in 1967 and spent fifty-five years unrecognized by world Orthodoxy; in 2022 the Ecumenical Patriarchate and then the Serbian church received it back into communion — a reconciliation its diaspora parishes had prayed toward for two generations. The American parishes carry Macedonian language, festival and identity; RCMS 2020 counts 20 of them.
Theological family
Chalcedonian Eastern Orthodox, heir with Bulgaria and Serbia to the Ohrid literary tradition of Sts. Clement and Naum, the disciples of Cyril and Methodius who made Ohrid a lighthouse of Slavic Christianity.
Who decides what
A diocese of the Macedonian Orthodox Church — Ohrid Archbishopric, under its Holy Synod in Skopje, with parish boards locally.
What a first-time visitor would find
The Divine Liturgy in Church Slavonic and Macedonian with English; parish festivals thick with Macedonian music, dance and food.
What it has always cared about
Recognition itself — pursued patiently for fifty-five years; the Ohrid inheritance; the parish as the diaspora community's living room.
Its gift to the wider church
Its 2022 reception back into communion joins ROCOR's 2007 reconciliation as recent proof that Orthodox schisms, however long and however tangled with national politics, can actually end.
Commonly confused with
With Bulgarian and Serbian parishes — the historical and national questions are intertwined and sensitive; identity is best treated as each parish states it.
Range of views inside it
A small jurisdiction varying mainly in generation and language balance.
A note from the mapmakers: Nothing here may be asserted of a specific parish, and national-identity questions in this family are contested ground our data cannot adjudicate. Sentences drawn from this record hedge as "Macedonian Orthodox parishes typically…" and yield to the parish's own materials.
Sources: Encyclopedia of American Religions (J. Gordon Melton, Gale) · Handbook of Denominations in the United States (Abingdon Press)
Where Macedonian Orthodox Church in the US churches are on the map
3 Macedonian Orthodox Church in the US congregations appear on The Church Map, across 3 states.
More of the Eastern Orthodox story · Find these churches on the map