Orthodox Church in America
| Orthodox Church in America / Pravoslavnaya Tserkvova Americhkaya | |
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| Recognition | by the Russian, Bulgarian, Georgian, Polish, and Czech and Slovak Churches |
| Primate | Metropolitan Tikhon (Mollard) |
| Headquarters | Syosset, New York, United States |
| Territory | United States, Canada |
| Possessions | Mexico, Australia,South America |
| Language | English, Church Slavonic, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Koine Greek, Albanian |
| Members | 1 million adherents, 90,000 (U.S. only) |
| Bishops | 14 |
| Parishes | 700 |
| Monasteries | 20 |
| Website | oca |
The Orthodox Church in America (OCA) is an Eastern Orthodox Church in North America. The OCA consists of more than 700 parishes, missions, communities, monasteries and institutions in the United States and Canada. In 2011, it had an estimated 84,900 members in the United States.
The OCA began when eight Russian Orthodox monks established a mission in Alaska, then part of Russian America, in 1794. This became a diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church after the United States purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867. By the late 19th century, the Russian Orthodox Church had grown in other areas of the United States due to the arrival of immigrants from areas of Eastern and Central Europe, many of them formerly of the Eastern Catholic churches ("Greek Catholics"), and from the Middle East. These immigrants, regardless of nationality or ethnic background, were united under a single North American diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church.
After the Bolshevik Revolution, Patriarch Tikhon of Moscow directed all Russian Orthodox churches outside of Russia to govern themselves autonomously. Orthodox churches in America became a self-governing Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church in America in 1924 under the leadership of Metropolitan Platon (Rozhdestvensky), popularly called the Metropolia. The Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church in America was granted autocephaly by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1970, and renamed the Orthodox Church in America. Its hierarchs are part of the Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops of North and Central America.
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