Orthodox Church in America

Heritage

Russian monks from Valaam reached Kodiak, Alaska in 1794; St. Herman of Alaska stayed, defended the Aleut people against the fur company, and was glorified in 1970 as America's first canonized Orthodox saint. The mission grew into a diocese whose seat moved from Sitka to San Francisco to New York, led from 1898 to 1907 by the future Patriarch St. Tikhon. Cut off by the Bolshevik revolution, it governed itself as the "Metropolia" until 1970, when the Moscow Patriarchate granted it autocephaly — full self-governance — as the Orthodox Church in America. Its Alaskan parishes still worship in Yup'ik, Tlingit and Aleut communities the original mission planted.

Theological family

Chalcedonian Eastern Orthodox without remainder. The OCA's distinctive is not doctrine but vocation: the conviction that Orthodoxy in America should become one local American church rather than a permanent colony of mother churches — the claim its 1970 autocephaly embodies, which some sister jurisdictions accept and others still dispute.

Who decides what

Autocephalous: its own Holy Synod of bishops elects its primate, the Metropolitan of All America and Canada, with no overseas patriarch above him. An All-American Council of clergy and lay delegates meets regularly; dioceses and elected parish councils carry local governance.

What a first-time visitor would find

The Divine Liturgy in English almost everywhere, in Slavic-tradition chant, with congregational singing strong in many parishes. Visitors find the full Orthodox inheritance — icons, incense, fasting seasons, Pascha at midnight — with the language barrier removed; convert members are common enough that a first-timer will usually meet someone who remembers being one.

What it has always cared about

Mission in the local language, from Aleut translations in the nineteenth century to English today; St. Vladimir's Seminary as a theological engine — Alexander Schmemann and John Meyendorff taught there and shaped Orthodox thought worldwide; Alaska held in honor as American Orthodoxy's holy ground.

Its gift to the wider church

English-language Orthodoxy itself, in large measure — and Schmemann's For the Life of the World, written from St. Vladimir's, which taught generations of Protestants and Catholics as well as Orthodox to see the Eucharist as the meaning of the world. RCMS 2020 counts 560 parishes, the most of any Orthodox jurisdiction.

Commonly confused with

With "the Russian church" — the OCA is historically Russian but autocephalous and predominantly English-speaking; ROCOR and the Moscow Patriarchal parishes are separate jurisdictions. Its Romanian, Albanian and Bulgarian ethnic dioceses also blur the usual jurisdiction-by-ethnicity map.

Range of views inside it

Diocesan cultures differ audibly — Alaskan Native parishes, Midwestern Rusyn-heritage parishes from the Alexis Toth movement, and convert-majority mission plants are all characteristically OCA; chant styles, fasting counsel and remaining Slavic flavor vary parish to parish.

Moments this body was part of

• 1794 — Orthodoxy arrives in Alaska

  Eight Russian Orthodox monks landed on Kodiak Island in 1794, beginning the first Orthodox mission in North America. Monks like St. Herman defended the Alaska Native peoples against exploitation by the fur companies, and Orthodoxy took lasting root among them — the seed of what became the Orthodox Church in America.

• 1880–1924 — Orthodoxy crosses with the immigrants

  Greek, Russian, Antiochian, Serbian, Romanian and Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants planted Orthodox parishes across industrial America between 1880 and 1924, each community organizing under its mother church — which is why American Orthodoxy is arranged in overlapping ethnic jurisdictions to this day. The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese was chartered in 1921.