Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the USA
Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the USA belongs to the Eastern Orthodox family of churches.
Governance: hierarchical.
Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the USA reports 89 congregations in the United States (RCMS 2020 (ARDA national table), 2020).
The Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the USA — centered on a New Jersey memorial church built to hold the memory of a famine the world ignored, and under the Ecumenical Patriarchate since 1995.
Heritage
Ukrainian immigrants organized Orthodox parishes through the 1920s and 1930s under hierarchs of the Ukrainian autocephalous movement; Metropolitan John Theodorovich led the church for decades from his arrival in 1924. Its center is South Bound Brook, New Jersey — St. Andrew Memorial Church, built in memory of the victims of the 1932–33 Holodomor famine, with a cemetery that functions as a Ukrainian-American pantheon. In 1995 the church was received under the Ecumenical Patriarchate, regularizing its standing in world Orthodoxy. Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine has filled its parishes with new arrivals and new grief.
Theological family
Chalcedonian Eastern Orthodox; its historical burden has been the long fight over whether Ukrainian Orthodoxy would be permitted to exist as itself rather than as a province of the Russian church.
Who decides what
An eparchy under the Ecumenical Patriarchate: a metropolitan and hierarchy in the US, sobors (councils) of clergy and laity, and parish boards.
What a first-time visitor would find
The Divine Liturgy in Ukrainian and English with Kyivan chant; embroidered rushnyky draped on icons, pysanky at Pascha; memorial services carry unusual weight in a church so shaped by famine and war.
What it has always cared about
Holodomor memory as sacred obligation; Ukrainian language and culture; autocephaly for the church in Ukraine — a cause this diaspora advocated for generations before it was granted in 2019.
Its gift to the wider church
It kept truthful memory of the Holodomor alive in America while the famine was still being denied elsewhere — a churchly witness that remembering the dead honestly is a form of justice. RCMS 2020 counts 89 parishes.
Commonly confused with
With the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church — the larger Ukrainian church in America, in communion with Rome; and with Ukrainian parishes belonging to other Orthodox jurisdictions.
Range of views inside it
Parishes vary in language and generation — century-old communities alongside parishes now largely made up of recent arrivals; the war has pulled the church closer together than any period in its history.
A note from the mapmakers: Nothing here may be asserted of a specific parish. Our data cannot always distinguish this church from Ukrainian Greek Catholic parishes or other jurisdictions' Ukrainian parishes. Sentences drawn from this record hedge as "Ukrainian Orthodox parishes typically…" and yield to the parish's own materials.
Sources: Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the USA — History (Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the USA) · Handbook of Denominations in the United States (Abingdon Press) · Orthodox Christians in America (John H. Erickson, Oxford University Press)
Where Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the USA churches are on the map
45 Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the USA congregations appear on The Church Map, across 16 states.
- New York — 10
- Pennsylvania — 7
- Illinois — 6
- New Jersey — 4
- California — 3
- Maryland — 3
- Ohio — 3
- Connecticut — 1
- Delaware — 1
- Indiana — 1
More of the Eastern Orthodox story · Find these churches on the map