Month: August 2009

The First Churches, State by State

There is an argument, made by many, that the first autocephalous Church to expand into a new territory "gets" that territory. I call it the flag-planting theory, because it reminds me of 15th century European explorers who reached the shores of undiscovered (for them) lands, stuck a flag in the...

The New Orleans Gospel Book

In 1927, Fr. Boris Burden wrote the following: The Church of the Holy Trinity in New Orleans, La., claims to have been the first Greek church in the United States. On the occasion of its dedication in 1860 Alexander II, Czar of Russia, sent to its Greek Priest, the Reverend...

Fr. Ingram Nathaniel Irvine: Why I Became Orthodox

On today's episode of my American Orthodox History podcast, I discuss Fr. Ingram Nathaniel Irvine, a famous Episcopal priest who converted to Orthodoxy under St. Tikhon in 1905. We'll have lots more to come on Irvine, but for starters, here are his seven reasons for converting to Orthodoxy. This is...

St. Innocent’s Vision

On October 18, 1867, the Russian Empire formally ceded Alaska to the United States. The next month, St. Innocent was elected Metropolitan of Moscow. Shortly after this, Innocent sent the following letter to the Ober-Procurator (the Tsar's representative) of the Holy Synod.[*] Rumor reaching me from Moscow purports that I wrote to...

Language in American Orthodoxy, 1916

As you might expect, most American Orthodox parishes in 1916 used foreign languages. From that year's Census of Religious Bodies, conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, we find the following unsurprising information: Both of the Albanian parishes used exclusively Albanian. The four Bulgarian parishes used Bulgarian and Slavonic. The 87...

The stability of the Syrian Mission under St. Raphael

Back in June, I wrote a post on parish priest stability in the 1910s, and I found that the Syrians under St. Raphael had a higher clergy retention percentage than any other American Orthodox group. Way higher. Of the 14 Syrian parishes that had resident priests in 1911, 10 of...

Honcharenko in San Francisco

From the Congregationalist and Boston Recorder, January 16, 1868: Many will remember that, some two years ago, a famous service was held in Trinity Chapel, New York city, in which, with a great flourish of trumpets, one "Father Agapius," who purported to be a Priest of the Greek church, celebrated...

Nicolas Benachi, founder of the New Orleans Greek church

In the early years of the New Orleans parish, resident parish priests were few and far between. Fr. Agapius Honcharenko visited for a short while in 1865. Fr. Stephen Andreades served the parish in the late 1860s, and Fr. Gregory Yayas was the pastor from 1872-74. But the real leader...

The First Orthodox Liturgy in the American South

As we discussed earlier, Fr. Agapius Honcharenko celebrated the first Orthodox liturgy in New York City on March 2, 1865. At the time, he was the only Orthodox priest in America outside of Alaska. And as we've also discussed, there were Greeks and other Orthodox Christians living in New Orleans in...

The <strike>First</strike> Second Convert Orthodox Bishop in America

2019 UPDATE: Years after I wrote this article, I learned about Stephen Dzubay, who converted to Orthodoxy from the Ruthenian Catholics and became Orthodox, being consecrated in 1916 to head a Carpatho-Rusyan diocese under the Russian Metropolia. He is therefore likely the first convert bishop in American Orthodox history. Like...