The Local Orthodox Churches

Ask an Orthodox Christian what church they belong to and the answer is likely to have a nationality in it: Greek, Russian, Antiochian, Serbian, Romanian. To an outsider that sounds exactly like the denominations down the road — as though Orthodoxy were a family of churches that mostly agree. It is not. These are not denominations, and they are not branches. They are one Church holding one faith and one Eucharist, organised — as it has been since the first century — by place.

The Church is local before it is anything else

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Open the New Testament and look at how the word “church” is used. It is the church in Corinth, in Thessalonica, at Ephesus; the seven churches of Asia are seven cities. From the beginning the Church exists as a gathering of particular people in a particular place around a particular table, with a bishop in the middle of them.

St Ignatius of Antioch, writing about the year 107 on his way to be killed in Rome, gives the rule that has governed Orthodox order ever since: where the bishop is, there let the people be, as where Jesus Christ is, there is the catholic Church. Note what he does not say. He does not say the local church is a branch office of a larger organisation. He says the whole catholic Church is present there, in that room, at that Liturgy.

This is the key to everything that follows, and it is the point most often missed. In Orthodox understanding the Church is not a worldwide body that divides itself into local branches. It is a whole thing that exists fully in each place, and the local Churches are one Church not by being governed from one desk but by holding one faith and communing at one table.

“Where the bishop is, there let the people be; even as where Jesus Christ is, there is the catholic Church.”St Ignatius of Antioch, to the Smyrnaeans, c. 107

How the order grew

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As the Church spread, the churches of the great cities naturally came to have a care for the churches around them — partly because the apostles had founded them, partly because that is where the roads went. The Council of Nicaea in 325 did not invent this arrangement; its sixth canon simply records it, confirming “the ancient customs” by which Alexandria, Rome and Antioch already held authority over the churches of their regions.

Two more sees joined them. Constantinople, the new imperial capital, was given second place after Rome in 381 — for a frankly stated reason, that it was the city of the emperor and the senate, which tells you that the order of honour has always had as much to do with geography and history as with mystique. Jerusalem, honoured everywhere as the mother church but administratively small, was made a patriarchate at Chalcedon in 451.

That gave the arrangement later called the Pentarchy: Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem — five patriarchs, five chairs, one Church. Cyprus, which the Council of Ephesus recognised as self-governing in 431 on the ground that it had been so from apostolic times, stood outside the five and still does; it is the oldest of all the autocephalies.

The four ancient sees

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Constantinople was a provincial town called Byzantium until Constantine made it his capital in 330. Within a century its bishop was the most powerful churchman in the East; within seven he was called Ecumenical Patriarch. The city fell in 1453 and the patriarchate remained, first as the head of the Christian community under the Sultan, then — after the population exchanges of the 1920s — as a see with almost no flock left in its own city. A few thousand Greeks remain in Istanbul. The Ecumenical Patriarch’s actual jurisdiction is now chiefly Crete, the Dodecanese, Mount Athos and the Greek diaspora, and his standing rests on the office rather than on numbers — which is worth knowing before reading anything about primacy.

Alexandria was founded, tradition says, by St Mark the Evangelist. It gave the Church Athanasius and Cyril, the catechetical school, the desert fathers, and the method of reading Scripture that the whole Church still uses. After Chalcedon in 451 most of Egypt went with the non-Chalcedonian party — today’s Coptic Orthodox Church — and the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria became small. In the twentieth century it did something remarkable: it turned outward into Africa. Its title today is Pope and Patriarch of Alexandria and all Africa, and it means it — there are dioceses from Ghana to Madagascar, and the Liturgy is served in Swahili, Luganda and Malagasy.

Antioch is where Sts Peter and Paul both worked, where the disciples were first called Christians, and where St Ignatius wrote the letters quoted at the head of this page. Its theological school gave the Church its great literal exegetes, St John Chrysostom among them. Its people have been Arabic-speaking for more than a thousand years, and since the wars of the last century a large part of the patriarchate has lived outside its own lands, especially in North and South America. The seat has been in Damascus since the fourteenth century.

Jerusalem is the mother of them all, and for three hundred years it was administratively under Caesarea, which is a good illustration of how loosely honour and power have always fitted together. Its particular work is the guardianship of the holy places, shared under a fragile nineteenth-century arrangement with the Armenians, the Latins and others, and its flock is largely Arab while its hierarchy is largely Greek — a tension of long standing. Much of what the whole Church does in Holy Week was first done there, by pilgrims walking from site to site on the actual days.

What autocephaly means — and what it does not

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The word means “self-headed”. An autocephalous Church chooses its own bishops, including its own primate, without reference to any other Church. It runs its own courts, translates its own service books, canonises its own saints, and answers to no external authority. An autonomous Church — Finland, Japan, the Church of Crete — governs its daily life but receives its primate’s confirmation from a mother Church.

What autocephaly is not is independence in faith. There is no such thing as a Russian doctrine or a Greek sacrament. A Bulgarian priest may serve in a Serbian church and a Romanian may commune in Alaska without so much as a form to fill in. The differences between the Churches are of language, calendar, chant, vestment and custom — real differences, deeply loved, and not one of them touching what is believed.

The order in which the Churches are named — the diptychs, so called because the names were once written on hinged tablets and read aloud at the Liturgy — is an order of honour, not a chain of command. The Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople is first, and the Orthodox understanding of that primacy is precisely what is under dispute today: all agree he is first; the argument is over what being first entitles him to do.

How a new Church is born

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There is a shape to it, and it has been the same for fifteen hundred years. A mission is sent, or a merchant community settles, or a people asks for the faith. Priests are sent from a mother Church and serve under her bishop. In time there are enough of them for a diocese, and a bishop is consecrated for the new land, often out of its own people. Then there are enough dioceses for a synod, and the daughter Church is given autonomy — it runs itself, but its primate is confirmed from outside. Finally, when it can stand on its own, it is given a tomos of autocephaly, a document releasing it into self-government.

At which point the trouble begins, because the Church has never agreed on who may grant one. Everyone accepts that a mother Church may release her own daughter, and that an ecumenical council may settle the matter. What is disputed is whether the first see has a right to act where a mother Church will not — and since there has been no ecumenical council since 787, the question has never been decided in a way everybody accepts. Almost every modern quarrel between Orthodox Churches comes back to this one gap, including both of the disputes named further down this page.

It is worth noticing how ordinary the process is. A Church is not founded by a decree; it grows, the way a parish grows, until somebody notices it can look after itself. The Orthodox Church in America began with eight monks on a beach in Alaska, and this parish began with a handful of people and a rented room.

The Slavs, and a decision about language

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In 863 two brothers from Thessalonica, Saints Cyril and Methodius, were sent from Constantinople to Moravia. Rather than teach the Slavs Greek, they did something that had enormous consequences: they invented an alphabet for a language that had never been written, and translated the Scriptures and the services into it.

That decision — worship in the language of the people — is why Orthodoxy in the Slavic lands was never a foreign import, and it is why this parish can serve in English on a Sunday morning in Florida without anybody thinking it a novelty. It is also why the Orthodox world is a mosaic of languages rather than a single liturgical tongue: Greek, Arabic, Church Slavonic, Romanian, Georgian, Finnish, Japanese, Swahili, English.

Bulgaria took the faith in 864 and had a patriarch by 927 — the first Slavic Church to have one. Serbia received an autocephalous archbishop in 1219 in the person of St Sava. And in 988 St Vladimir was baptised at Kherson and the people of Kiev went down into the Dnieper, and the Church of the Rus’ began as a metropolitanate under Constantinople.

Georgia, and our patroness

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One Church belongs neither to the Greek world nor to the Slavic, and this parish has a particular reason to notice it. Georgia was converted in the 320s by a captive woman — St Nina, whom the Georgians call Equal to the Apostles — who came from Cappadocia, lived on the edge of the royal city of Mtskheta, healed the queen, and saw a whole kingdom baptised without an army and without a bishop. Her cross, tradition says, was made of vine-wood bound with her own hair, and it is still shown in Tbilisi.

The Georgian Church has its own alphabet, its own chant in three independent voices that sounds like nothing else in Orthodoxy, and one of the longest records of martyrdom of any Christian people — it lay for centuries on the road between Persia, the Turks and Russia. It was autocephalous from the fifth century, lost that status when Russia annexed the kingdom in the nineteenth, recovered it in 1917, and now stands ninth in the diptychs. This mission is named for its founder.

Moscow, and the weight of an empire

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The Russian Church went its own way in 1448, when its bishops elected a metropolitan without Constantinople — a response to the Union of Florence, which Moscow rejected. Constantinople fell five years later, and in 1589 the Patriarch of Constantinople, travelling in search of alms, raised Moscow to a patriarchate: fifth in the diptychs, after the four ancient sees.

Then in 1721 Peter the Great abolished the patriarchate outright and replaced it with a governing Synod under a lay official — an arrangement borrowed from Lutheran Sweden, and one that lasted nearly two hundred years. The Church was rich, learned, enormous, and tied to the state. It produced in those same centuries St Seraphim of Sarov, the elders of Optina, the Philokalia in Slavonic, and the Alaskan mission.

The patriarchate was restored by a council in Moscow in the autumn of 1917, in the days when the guns were already firing in the streets, and the lot fell on St Tikhon. What followed is the largest persecution in Christian history: tens of thousands of clergy and faithful killed, the monasteries emptied, the churches blown up or turned into warehouses and swimming pools. The Russian Church commemorates them as the New Martyrs and Confessors, and by the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 it was beginning again from almost nothing.

The nineteenth century, and a warning

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Under Ottoman rule the Orthodox of the Balkans and the Middle East had been governed as a single community with the Patriarch of Constantinople answerable for all of them — the millet system. When the nations broke free, their Churches followed: Greece in 1833, Romania recognised in 1885, Bulgaria in the same period after a long quarrel, Albania in 1937.

This was a mixed blessing, and the Church said so at the time. A council at Constantinople in 1872 condemned phyletism — the principle of organising the Church by ethnic group rather than by place, so that Greeks and Bulgarians in the same city would have separate bishops. It was condemned as a heresy, and the reason is the one this article began with: if the Church in a place is defined by blood rather than by the place, it is no longer the catholic Church gathered around one bishop; it is a club.

The condemnation is easier to sign than to keep. Something very like phyletism is the unhealed wound of the Orthodox diaspora, where a single American city may have a Greek bishop, an Antiochian bishop, a Serbian bishop and a Russian bishop, all canonical, all in communion, and all overlapping — which the canons of the ancient Church do not envisage at all.

How the faith came to America

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It came from the west, across the Pacific. In 1794 eight monks and two novices from the Valaam monastery landed on Kodiak Island in Russian Alaska. Among them was a lay monk who never sought ordination, St Herman, who ended his days in a hut on Spruce Island teaching children, keeping a garden and defending the Alutiiq people against the fur company.

After him came St Innocent (Veniaminov), who learned Aleut, gave it an alphabet, translated the Gospel of St Matthew into it and built his own church furniture; he died Metropolitan of Moscow. The see moved from Sitka to San Francisco in 1872 and to New York in 1905, as the flock became less Alaskan and more Carpatho-Russian, Greek, Arab and Serb — for a time the Russian bishop in America had them all under his omophorion, and it was St Tikhon, the future patriarch, who held that office and who first proposed that America should one day have a Church of its own.

The Revolution cut the mission off from its support and from its mother Church, and the twentieth century in America was consequently a tangle of overlapping jurisdictions that has still not been resolved. In 1970 the Church of Russia granted a tomos of autocephaly to its American daughter, which took the name the Orthodox Church in America; in the same year it glorified St Herman on Spruce Island — the first saint canonised in the New World.

It should be said plainly, on a parish website of that Church, that the 1970 autocephaly is not universally accepted. It is recognised by Russia, which granted it, and by Georgia, Bulgaria, Poland, and the Czech Lands and Slovakia. Antioch, Serbia, Romania and Albania have not recognised it but have not opposed it. Constantinople, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Cyprus and Greece hold that it was not Moscow’s to give. What is not in dispute is communion: an OCA priest and a Greek priest may serve the same Liturgy, and their people receive from the same chalice.

The Churches today

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Fourteen Churches are named in every diptych, in the order given in the panel at the head of this page: the four ancient patriarchates of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem; then Russia, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria and Georgia; then Cyprus, Greece, Poland, Albania, and the Czech Lands and Slovakia. Alongside them stand the autonomous Churches — Finland, Japan, Estonia, Crete, Sinai, the Church of Ukraine — and the self-governing Churches whose standing is agreed by some and not by others, among which the OCA is one.

They are very unlike each other in size. Russia counts its faithful in the tens of millions and Romania not far behind; Jerusalem, first in dignity among the Churches of the Holy Land, is small and under constant pressure; the Patriarchate of Alexandria, once the intellectual capital of Christendom, is today chiefly a missionary Church across the whole of Africa, with a growing flock in Kenya, Uganda, Madagascar and the Congo. The Church of Antioch serves a people who have been through war and emigration, and much of it now lives in the Americas.

The present ruptures

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Honesty requires saying that the communion described above is at present damaged, and this parish will not pretend otherwise.

In 2018–19 the Ecumenical Patriarchate granted autocephaly to a Church in Ukraine, on the ground that Ukraine had remained canonically its own territory and that healing a long schism there fell to the first see. The Patriarchate of Moscow holds that Ukraine has been its territory since 1686 and that no other Church may act in it, and it broke eucharistic communion with Constantinople, and subsequently with those hierarchs of Alexandria, Greece and Cyprus who commemorated the new Church’s primate. The question remains open. Behind it lies the older and deeper one: what the primacy of the first see actually entitles it to do.

The Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church in America, in its archpastoral letter on Ukraine, expressed its deep sorrow at the rupture, stated its desire and intention to remain in full communion with all the universally recognised autocephalous Churches, and called on its clergy and faithful to pray that unity be restored and every schism healed according to the canonical tradition of the Church. That is where this parish stands, and it is all this page will say about it.

It is worth keeping the proportion. The Orthodox Church has been here before — Antioch and Alexandria were out of communion for stretches of the fifth century, Constantinople and Rome several times before 1054, Moscow and Constantinople in the 1990s over Estonia — and in the ordinary life of a parish nothing has changed: the same Creed without alteration, the same Liturgy, the same fasts, the same saints. Disputes between patriarchates are real and painful and they are not the faith.

What actually holds them together

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Given fourteen governments, a hundred languages, two calendars and a quarrel or two, it is fair to ask what makes this one Church rather than a friendly association. Five things, and none of them is an office.

One Creed, unaltered. Every Orthodox Church recites the Creed of 381 without addition — the point on which the West and the East divided, and the reason that argument is treated in a separate article here. No Local Church may add to it, and none has tried.

The seven councils, and the canons. The same body of law, received everywhere, applied with considerable local variation but never repealed. A Church that set the councils aside would have left, whatever its address.

One Liturgy. An Orthodox Christian who walks into a strange church in a strange country and does not know a word of the language will still know exactly where the service has got to. The Liturgy of St John Chrysostom is served from Kodiak to Kampala, and the differences are of chant and custom rather than of substance.

The diptychs. Every primate commemorates the others aloud at the Liturgy. This sounds like protocol and is not: to name someone in the anaphora is to say that you are one Church with him, and to stop naming him is exactly what a rupture consists of. The lists are how the Churches tell each other, every Sunday, that they are still one.

And the chalice. In the end there is one test, and it is not administrative. Can this person receive communion at that altar? Where the answer is yes, it is one Church; where the answer is no, something is broken and must be mended. Everything else in this article — the tomoi, the synods, the order of honour — exists to serve that one question.

And this parish

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Saint Nina Orthodox Mission in Orlando is a parish of the Orthodox Church in America, in the Diocese of the South. Our patroness is a Georgian saint — the woman who brought the faith to Iberia in the fourth century and whose Church is ninth in the diptychs. Our services are in English and Church Slavonic. Our people come from a dozen countries and from none. We keep the old calendar. We are, in the strictest sense of the word, a local church: a bishop’s people gathered around one table in one place on a Sunday morning in central Florida.

And that is the whole of it. Twenty centuries, five patriarchs, fourteen Churches, a hundred languages, and it all exists in order that somewhere — in Damascus, in Bucharest, on Spruce Island, in Azalea Park — a few people can stand together and be given the Body and Blood of Christ.