Most American churches navigated the patchwork of COVID-19 restrictions on public gatherings by periodically closing their doors and broadcasting services online as a substitute.
But for nearly half of U.S. Orthodox Christians, whose liturgy involves processions, incense, kissing icons and crosses and receiving Communion from a shared spoon and chalice, liturgical services continued for anyone wanting to attend in person, in keeping with a recent study of how the denomination weathered the pandemic.
The recent study finds that Orthodox churches overall were reluctant to embrace virtual worship in comparison with all religious congregations. By spring 2023, 75% of all U.S. congregations provided distant options in comparison with only 53% of Orthodox churches.
Fewer online options likely contributed to the numerous drop in Orthodox church participation in the midst of the pandemic in 2021, but in comparison with other U.S. congregations which are on average 8% below pre-COVID-19 attendance, Orthodox churches had recovered in-person attendance on average by spring 2023.
At the identical time, Orthodox churches overall have seen a drop in volunteer participation, from 40% in 2020 to 25% in 2023, in comparison with 40% and 35% in all U.S. congregations.
The Orthodox tendency to “ignore” the pandemic has produced a “mixed bag,” said research released Thursday (Aug. 22) by the Hartford Institute for Religion Research and Alexei Krindatch, national coordinator of the U.S. Census of Orthodox Christian Churches. Orthodox churches within the U.S. are more likely than other religious congregations to have gained members through the COVID-19 pandemic, even while battling declines in participation and volunteering.
Using survey data from 2020 through 2023, the study found 44% of Orthodox churches remained open through the pandemic, in comparison with just 12% of all U.S. congregations. Only 31% of Orthodox priests publicly encouraged parishioners to get vaccinated in comparison with 62% of all clergy.
“They were attempting to avoid conflicts,” said Krindatch, the study’s lead researcher, who has published earlier reports on how the pandemic impacted Orthodox Christians.
There isn’t any single Orthodox Church within the U.S. Instead, several jurisdictions — the biggest are the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese, the Orthodox Church in America and the Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese — are administered independently of each other and exist side by side, sharing the identical teachings and in full communion with each other. Many Orthodox parishes mix several immigrant groups and their descendants, from Russians and Ukrainians to Arabs and Greeks, in addition to converts from other faiths and denominations.
Bishops provided pandemic guidance to the priests serving them, corresponding to whether to require masking or not, often across a swath of states that clashed on masking and lockdown mandates. Priests then selected whether and the way to follow or adapt that guidance to their specific circumstances, sometimes casting doubt on the bishop’s authority.
“I figured persons are going to make their very own medical decisions (in regards to the vaccine),” said one Orthodox priest who participated within the survey, the Rev. Lawrence Margitich of St. Seraphim of Sarov Cathedral in Santa Rosa, California, a parish of the Orthodox Church of America. “I’m the priest. What do I learn about that stuff?”
Margitich said his church has grown from about 80 people on a Sunday morning within the pre-pandemic months of 2020 to about 180 people today. To reduce the spread of the coronavirus, in 2020, the church moved services to its outdoor courtyard with an amplified sound system. Then in August 2020, smoke from a serious wildfire pushed them back inside.
During that double crisis, wherein a whole lot of local homes burned to the bottom, people began showing as much as St. Seraphim.
“They began pondering more about everlasting realities, I suppose, and their life on this world,” said Margitich.
According to several Orthodox clergy who’ve spoken to RNS, the pandemic lockdowns provided more time at home to browse the Internet and self-reflect, leading many spiritual seekers to come back across Orthodoxy for the primary time across a proliferation of English-language resources online after which visit an area church.
This 12 months, St. Seraphim of Sarov Cathedral has experienced more baptisms than ever before in Margitich’s 27-year profession, he said, with 20 people catechized within the spring and 20 more within the means of conversion.
An earlier report by Krindatch concluded that while most Orthodox churches within the U.S. shrank a median of 15% in regular attendees from 2020 to 2022, 1 in 5 parishes as a substitute grew their membership and in-person attendance by 20%. The growing parishes are likely to be those who not only remained open for in-person worship through the pandemic, but additionally didn’t offer online worship, have a better percentage of converts and have greater unity of opinions, amongst other aspects.
By spring 2023, 15% of the members of a median Orthodox parish were newcomers who had joined because the start of the pandemic in 2020, in comparison with only 10% amongst other U.S. religious congregations, the newest study showed.
“It is a statistically significant difference,” Krindatch said. “But there are larger differences between Orthodox jurisdictions. People were definitely on the lookout for anyplace they may join.”
The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, commonly called ROCOR and thought of probably the most conservative jurisdiction, picked up significantly more members than the Orthodox Church of America, which in turn picked up greater than the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese, in keeping with Krindatch’s data.
The Rev. Luke Veronis of Sts. Constantine and Helen Greek Orthodox Church in Webster, Massachusetts, near the Connecticut border, called the pandemic a “positive” experience for his parish, despite describing his congregation as “extremely divided” politically, with each progressives and Donald Trump loyalists, who he refers to as “a family.” The COVID-19 restrictions pushed the church to livestream services and meet on Zoom, alternatives they’ve continued to supply for liturgies and Bible studies alongside the in-person gatherings.
Veronis’ church also experienced atypical growth, from 150 regular monthly attendees in 2019 to about 220 today, he said. Most joined through the pandemic and are young adults under the age of 35. Many of the Greek Orthodox churches in New England are either declining or struggling to stay open, while only a handful are growing.
“The key to our success is we have created a really welcoming church,” said Veronis, who also teaches a category about cultivating “missions-minded” parishes at Hellenic College and Holy Cross Orthodox School of Theology in Brookline, Massachusetts. “I at all times preach to my people, our church welcomes everybody … but then, after all, the challenge for everyone is when you come into the church, all of us are on a journey of change and transformation. So don’t come together with your agendas.”
He calls the surge in membership some churches are experiencing “each a blessing and a curse.”
“One of the actual challenges we within the Orthodox Church are going to have is now we have lots of people coming into our church now, especially young men,” he said. While expressing gratitude for the boys who’ve found his parish, he added, “I could be afraid if a few of these men went to another Orthodox churches, where the priests themselves have given in to those ideological wars and these priests would just feed into what these men are already on the lookout for, the right-wing, extreme craziness.”
The study is an element of a national mixed-methods project titled Exploring the Pandemic Impact on Congregations and funded by the Lily Endowment that’s investigating changes to congregational life resulting from COVID-19. Faith Communities Today provided 2020 survey data of over 15,000 congregations on the pre-pandemic congregational landscape.
The next survey in November 2024 will follow up on lots of the same themes to look at how the pandemic’s impacts proceed to alter how congregations operate and collect perspectives from not only clergy but additionally lay individuals.
© Religion News Service
