Although Orthodox churches were historically immigrant communities, the study found that nine out of 10 parishioners are now American-born. Thousands of members had converted to the faith as adults: 29% of Greek Orthodox are converts, as are 51% of the OCA.
'I would not have expected this many,' said Alexei Krindatch, the Orthodox Institute's research director. 'My sense was that in Greek Orthodox, it would be around 15%, and OCA maybe one-third.'
It would be interesting to see how that correlates with the language used in services. I suspect that more OCA parishes use English in their services.
5 comments:
Your comment about language use fits my expereince of visiting Greek and OCA churches in the US. All Greek Orthodox churches I have attended have used at some Greek in the service, usually still mostly in Greek. While I have never been to an OCA church that used anything other than English in their service.
Larry,
Good to have confirmation of what was only a suspicion.
Another observation is that the OCA has far better English liturgical translations than most of those emanating for the Greek Orthodox Church in America.
One of the great problems for English-speaking Orthodox is the proliferation of different translations, most of them bad. The OCA ones are not perfect, but on the whole they are euphonious.
I think it is interesting that Orthodoxy has a growing appeal in general, it is one of the few areas of growth in Churches in the UK. i THINK THE EMBRACE OF MYSTERY IS A LARGE PART OF THIS.
sorry for the caps!
The Krindatch studies, while interesting, have some methodological problems. See the comments here (including one from me).
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