ORTHODOX STATISTICS, ETC.

[updated 4-5-00]

     Today, of the 200 million Orthodox Christians in the world, 6,390,000 live in North America north of Mexico, compared with 37 or more million Baptists (of no  few denominations) in the USA.  The number of papal Catholics in the USA is roughly one-fifth of the national population, and the total of the various Orthodox Christians is about one-twelfth of the number of Roman Catholics.  Next to the Latins, with just under a billion members in the world, Orthodoxy is the most numerous single form of Christianity in the world; according to the World almanac, 1998, there are 218,350,000 Orthodox in the world. (It is unclear whether this number includes Eastern Christians who are not Orthodox--the Copts [180,000 in the USA] and Abyssinians, the Armenians, and the Jacobite Syrians and Mar Thoma Christians of India.)  With the 981,465,000 Latins in the world, compare the 1,126,325,000 Muslims in the world and the 793,075,000 Hindus. The publication just referred to gives the total number of Christians in the world at 1,955,229,000. Orthodoxy in the USA falls into four major jurisdictions--all holding the same Faith handed down from Apostolic times--the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese (GOA), the largest group; the autocephalous Orthodox Church in America (OCA), descended from Russian missionary work in Alaska (CLICK HERE) from 1784 on, later was augmented with the accession of numbers of Latin uniates and the incorporation of Romanian and other ethnic bodies; the independent Russian Orthodox Church outside of Russia (ROCOR/ROCA "Russian Orthodox Church Abroad"; also HERE & HERE); and the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America (AOCA), very rapidly growing as the result of Protestant and Latin conversions in recent years and their missionary zeal.  The ROCOR and AOCA have been reported to be growing faster in the Southern States than elsewhere, both having received monasteries and other converts from other Orthodox jurisdictions; smaller jurisdictions include the True Orthodox Church of Greece (TOCG; see the related excellent website), the Holy Orthodox Church of North America (HOCNA), the Orthodox Church of Canada (OCC), The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of Australia--some of which, like ROCOR, use the old calendar.  (SEE HERE for the main Orthodox jurisdictions in North America.  SEE HERE for other independent Orthodox and other non-Reformation bodies.)  

A few years ago, the Antiochians received numerous converts from members of the Campus Crusade and their congregations. North American Orthodoxy also numbers several small "old calendar" groups, some allied with the ROCOR; none of these groups is very numerous, but all are very loyal to the holy tradition.  Next to North America, the greatest growth of Orthodoxy in a previously non-Orthodox region has been Africa under the omophorion of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Alexandria and All Africa (currently His Holiness Petros); Kenya now has about 300 parishes.