What Is the Orthodox Christian Church? (p.3)
In more recent times, most of the Orthodox world has found itself oppressed at some time by non-Christian political powers-Moslems in the Middle East and Greece, and in the last century, communists in Russia and Eastern Europe. (The Russian communists murdered 40 million of their countrymen, most of whom were Orthodox believers.) As a result of this oppression, large numbers of Orthodox Christians have emigrated to the free countries of Western Europe, America, and Australia.
These Christians maintained administrative ties with the Mother Churches of the lands they came from, so that in the United States today, for example, one may find Greek, Jerusalemite, Antiochian, Russian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Carpatho-Russian, Ukrainian, Armenian, Georgian, and various other varieties of Orthodox churches (called "jurisdictions"), each answering ultimately to a metropolitan or patriarch "back home." (The one fully self-governing American Orthodox church is the Orthodox Church in America, which is the descendant of the original Russian mission to America.)
All these names can be very confusing to a newcomer. The important thing to keep in mind is that, while all these churches may worship in different languages, with some variations in music, and follow slightly different customs in their worship, all are united in maintaining unaltered the doctrine of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.
In recent decades, the numbers of Orthodox immigrants have been augmented significantly by thousands of people converting to Orthodoxy from other denominations or religions. As the national churches have become more assimilated into their new home countries, there has been increasing cooperation and intermingling among them, so that in North America, many churches now worship in English, use music from a variety of national traditions, gather with other local churches for festivals, and support ministries jointly run by several jurisdictions.
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