On Religion: The Flood Of Converts Reshaping American Orthodoxy (Part 1)
(ANALYSIS) For Orthodox Christians in America, the 20th century was shaped by waves of believers fleeing wars, revolutions and persecution in lands such as Greece, Syria, Russia and Romania.
The Orthodox did everything they could to preserve their faith and cultural traditions. When bishops visited these small flocks, it was rare to see converts.
Then, in the late 1980s, flocks of evangelical Protestants swept into the Antiochian Orthodox church and then the Orthodox Church in America, which has Slavic roots. These converts began reaching out to others. Then came the seeker-friendly internet. Then came COVID. Suddenly, streams of young families began exploring what was often called the mysterious, ancient "Eastern Church."
“Some observers liken this influx to a flood, and the comparison is accurate. I do not visit a parish without meeting catechumens there. In some parishes, they number more than 100,” said Metropolitan Saba, leader of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America, in a recent Denver address.
“While many long-standing believers see in the converts a source of renewal and vitality — and a spur to discover their own Orthodoxy personally and deeply, not merely as a social religious tradition — many also feel somewhat threatened by the cultural changes occurring in their parish.”
In a survey of his priests, Saba said, one wrote: “The century of the ‘church of immigrants’ has ended; the century of evangelization has begun. Orthodoxy's mission is no longer primarily geographical ... but existential.”
Orthodox Christianity remains a small flock in America, with two to three million believers in 2,000 parishes. The Pew Research Center has estimated that, globally, there are 260 million Orthodox Christians, the next largest communion after the Catholic Church with 1.4 billion.
The bottom line: The catechumenate class numbers are staggering. While some Orthodox parishes are shrinking, or have hit plateaus, many clergy are struggling to handle congregations that have doubled or tripled in size during the post-pandemic years. Parishes that rarely had catechumens now have 10 or more. Convert-friendly congregations that once had a dozen newcomers now have 50 to 150.
Thus, many parishes — especially Sun Belt parishes — have catechumenate classes larger than average mainline Protestant congregations. For example, a 2022 Episcopal Church report said 85% of its parishes averaged attendance figures under 100. The median figure was 37.
While the first post-pandemic wave of converts included a high percentage of single men, an even larger second wave has been led by young, growing families, often with multiple children, said Father Andrew Stephen Damick of the Antiochian archdiocese. He is part of Ancient Faith Ministries, a hub for streamed music, podcasts, weblogs, forums and more.
While many were skeptical of early reports of rapid growth, the trend lines are now clear, he said in a recent "American Orthodoxy in 2040" forum on YouTube.
“It’s happening, it seems, just about everywhere,” said Damick. “Not every single parish, but geographically, there is stuff going on almost everywhere." Orthodox mission leaders once worried if their new mission congregations would survive, but in this era of growth, it's clear that “if you build it, they will come,” he said.
Metropolitan Saba, who was born in Syria, noted that migrants have continued to arrive in recent decades because of upheavals in Orthodox lands -- speaking Greek, Arabic, Romanian and other languages. Finding the right worship balance is a challenge, with many growing parishes also blending new converts into services.
It is clear “we must use the language spoken by the catechumens," which is English, he said. However, many inquirers — especially in Texas — speak Spanish. “There is also a growing need to minister intentionally to the African American faithful and catechumens now increasingly present in our communities.”
Many Americans drive long distances to reach an Orthodox parish. Saba said this creates practical challenges in a faith in which intense schedules of worship and fellowship have traditionally been built around clusters of believers sharing villages or neighborhoods in their homelands. Websites cannot replace community life.
“The Orthodox Faith is not an idea but a lived experience,” he added. “There is a danger that Orthodoxy becomes an ideology. ... There is a danger that we rejoice in numbers and forget that conversion is a lifetime process of repentance, not numerical recruitment. We must be careful lest today's converts become tomorrow's apostates.”
Next week: The shape of American Orthodoxy in 2040
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Terry Mattingly is Senior Fellow on Communications and Culture at Saint Constantine College in Houston. He lives in Elizabethton, Tennessee, and writes Rational Sheep, a Substack newsletter on faith and mass media.