Serbian Orthodox Church in North America
Serbian Orthodox Church in North America belongs to the Eastern Orthodox family of churches.
Governance: hierarchical.
Serbian Orthodox Church in North America reports 121 congregations in the United States (RCMS 2020 (ARDA national table), 2020).
The Serbian Orthodox Church in America — steel-town parishes keeping the slava, healed in 1992 from a Cold War schism that once split its communities down the middle.
Heritage
Serbian immigrants built parishes in steel and mining towns from Pennsylvania to California from the 1890s onward; the Serbian Orthodox Church organized them as an American diocese in 1921, with St. Sava Monastery in Libertyville, Illinois as its spiritual center. St. Nikolai Velimirovich, the great Serbian bishop and preacher, ended his days teaching at St. Tikhon's Seminary in Pennsylvania, dying there in 1956. A 1963 schism — driven by distrust of the mother church under Yugoslav communism — split parishes and families for a generation until reconciliation in 1992. The American parishes remain dioceses of the Serbian Patriarchate.
Theological family
Chalcedonian Eastern Orthodox; Serbian distinctives are devotional rather than doctrinal, above all the krsna slava — each family's hereditary patron saint feast, kept with candle, kolach bread, wheat and open house.
Who decides what
Dioceses of the Serbian Orthodox Church under the Patriarchate in Belgrade, with diocesan assemblies and strong lay parish boards — church-community organizations that historically owned the parish property, a legacy of immigrant self-organization.
What a first-time visitor would find
The Divine Liturgy in Church Slavonic and Serbian with increasing English; Serbian choral singing; the slava celebrated at church and at home; parish halls hosting folklore ensembles, tamburitza orchestras and enormous festival roasts.
What it has always cared about
The slava as identity's anchor — a household liturgy no other Orthodox people keeps in quite this form; the memory of Kosovo and of twentieth-century suffering; monastery-centered piety, with the Libertyville grounds serving as the diaspora's memorial ground.
Its gift to the wider church
St. Nikolai Velimirovich's writings — Prayers by the Lake above all — now feed devotional life far beyond Serbian parishes, and the slava shows the wider church what it looks like for a family, not just an individual, to have a patron saint. RCMS 2020 counts 121 parishes.
Commonly confused with
With other Slavic jurisdictions — Russian, Bulgarian, Macedonian; the Macedonian question is live history, since that church separated from the Serbian in 1967 and was received back into communion in 2022.
Range of views inside it
Parishes vary in language and generational mix; old church-community bylaws give the laity unusual weight in some parishes; the 1963–1992 division is healed but remembered by the families who lived it.
A note from the mapmakers: Nothing here may be asserted of a specific parish — least of all which side of the healed division its history runs through. Sentences drawn from this record hedge as "Serbian Orthodox parishes typically…" and yield to the parish's own materials.
Sources: Serbian Orthodox Church in North and South America — History (Serbian Orthodox Church in North and South America) · Orthodox Christians in America (John H. Erickson, Oxford University Press) · Handbook of Denominations in the United States (Abingdon Press)
Where Serbian Orthodox Church in North America churches are on the map
36 Serbian Orthodox Church in North America congregations appear on The Church Map, across 23 states.
More of the Eastern Orthodox story · Find these churches on the map