The languages of St. John's

The story of today's Orthodox Church in America, and that of our parish, is in part one of an ongoing effort to share the riches of Orthodoxy with Americans of all backgrounds, not just those with roots in traditionally Orthodox countries. All ethnic groups of course feel the pull of the homeland and the mother tongue, not just Russians or Greeks. Until relatively recent times for example many churches in the Missouri Synod of the Lutheran church were insistent on the use of German in worship.

The history of the OCA, being connected as it is with missionary efforts of the Russian Orthodox Church in North America, means that for many years it was common for services to be conducted in "Church Slavonic," which is a sort of old style of Russian. Until comparatively recently many clergy in the OCA and it's predecessors were Russian immigrants, and often spoke Russian by preference. (Shown here is the cover of a bilingual service book, in Slavonic and English.)

By way of illustration, at a council of bishops in 1967 of our predecessor, the "Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church," the proceedings were conducted in Russian, not English. And it wasn't until well into the 1970s that a wide range of liturgical music, theology and so forth were being actively translated into English.

Despite the emotional tug of attachment to mother tongues, and traditions of Church Slavonic, visionary leaders realized that to be a truly American church, the use of English was of vital importance. Metropolitan Leonty, despite the fact that he himself was more comfortable in Russian than English, was a strong proponent of the use of English in church services, and under his leadership in the 1950s and early 1960s many English language parishes were started, including ours.

Even so, in the early years of St. John's there was a little use of Slavonic, since that is what some were familiar with, but over time that ceased. What we enjoy today is a parish that while delightfully multilingual, with speakers of Carpatho-Russian, Ethiopian, Greek, Macedonian, Romanian, Russian, Ukrainian and other languages among our members, we are blessed to be able to share the treasury of Orthodoxy together in English.