Category: Statistics
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How Many Orthodox Christians Are in America?
A quick bit of self-promotion: In January, I’ll be teaching a live, 4-week course on American Orthodox History for the Orthodox Studies Institute at Saint Constantine College. I hope many of you can join me — you can learn more and register for the course by clicking here. Lately, a meme has been circulating…
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The Massive Growth of the Orthodox Episcopate Since 2006
In 2006, there were 668 active, canonical Orthodox bishops in the world. Today, there are 947. That’s a net increase of 279 bishops, or 42% — and most of that growth is coming from the Moscow Patriarchate. Last week, I published an article estimating the number of Orthodox bishops in the world. (I’ve received updated…
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How many Orthodox bishops are in the world?
As best I can tell, there are 941 active, canonical Orthodox bishops in the world right now. Give or take. Compared to the 19th century, that’s a big increase — in 1859, we had just 278 bishops worldwide. But at the time of the First Ecumenical Council, there were a reported 1,800 bishops in the…
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Under-30 American Orthodox Priests Are Disappearing
A few weeks ago, I published some preliminary data from a study I’m conducting on the ordination ages of American Orthodox priests, as well as the waiting period between convert priests’ conversions and their ordinations. Since publishing those articles, I’ve expanded my sample considerably. Today, I am sharing some updated data. I now have ordination…
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How long do converts wait before ordination?
Last week, I wrote about the ordination ages of American Orthodox priests. In that article, I made some preliminary observations about the length of time converts to Orthodoxy wait before ordination to the priesthood — but I only had waiting period data for 47 convert priests. Since then, I’ve expanded that to 111 priests, which…
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How old are American Orthodox priests at ordination?
A few weeks ago, I published some data about American Orthodox bishops, including the fact that 58% of bishops in American Orthodox history were ordained to the priesthood before they turned thirty — this, despite the fact that the canons require a minimum age of thirty for priestly ordination. Today, I will dig deeper into…
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Statistics on Celibate & Widower Bishops in American Orthodoxy
I have a list of 213 Orthodox bishops who have served in America. Of these, 179 were never married (we’ll call them “celibates”), and the other 34 were widowers. So 84% celibates, 16% widowers. (Two of the “widowers” are special cases, because they were widowed before they joined the clergy, so they never served as…
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Orthodox bishops in 1859
I ran across this the other day — in 1859, there were 278 Orthodox bishops in the world: Church Bishops Constantinople (including Romania, Bulgaria, and part of Serbia) 136 Russia (including Georgia) 65 Greece 24 Antioch 17 Jerusalem 14 Austria (now Serbia, mostly) 11 Alexandria 5 Cyprus 4 Mount Sinai 1 Montenegro 1 TOTAL 278 Source:…
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American Orthodox Atlas Now Available in Electronic Format
If you’ve seen the Atlas of American Orthodox Christian Churches, edited by Alexei Krindatch, you know that it’s an indispensable and utterly fascinating wealth of information on Orthodoxy in America, both past and present. I was honored to play a small role in creating the atlas, writing two articles, compiling a timeline, and providing the…
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The Atlas of American Orthodox Christian Churches
Editor’s note: We’ve received the following announcement from Alexei Krindatch, the Orthodox researcher and sociologist. Very soon, the first-ever Atlas of American Orthodox Christian Churches, edited by Krindatch, will be published by Holy Cross Orthodox Press. I have made several contributions to the Atlas, including the historical census data, a timeline of American Orthodox history,…