www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life Faith & Theology Antiochian Orthodox Church in America Membership

I think this is the right forum to post this question - moderators please re-assign if it is not, I was not sure.

Does anyone have any numbers on the size of the AOC by adherents or have a break down in how many clergy are serving as deacons, priests and bishops?

according to wikipedia (as you know, it is not known for its accuracy) says they have 83,700 adherents of which 42,000 are full members. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiochian_Orthodox_Archdiocese_of_North_America

This may be a silly question, but, does the AOC have their own website? If so, this would likely be the most reliable source of info. As well, what are the references on the Wikipedia site, they may lead you to some more info too.

Dear May,

Try www.antiochian.org [antiochian.org]

In IC XC,
Father Anthony+

Lol good thinking I checked the links at the wikipedia article which brought me to orthodoxwiki, according to them:

http://www.orthodoxwiki.org/Antioch...cese_of_North_America#Membership_figures

(first smaller number is parishes, second larger number is people)
Archdiocese membership figures (2005)
Diocese Parishes Baptized souls
Archdiocesan District 13 4407
Ottawa 19 6029
Oakland (PA) 26 5757
Wichita 40 6434
Toledo 41 10231
Eagle River 18 1994
Worcester 11 4452
Miami 34 3841
Los Angeles 34 8175
Total 236 51320

Here is the one I use for Los Angeles and the West...


http://www.antiochianladiocese.org/

The statistics I seek are not available there. A call to the chancery of the Archdiocese lead to some unofficial numbers of clergy - but the person with whom I spoke could not tell me if those numbers were current, were of all active clergy, or included those that were retired...

The site is not exactly the most user friendly one around since the last upgrade. It might be listed in their last convention's reports.

In IC XC,
Father Anthony+

I have been working on a paper for a class I am taking about the demographics of religion and change... I had some free reign in this sociology course when it came to picking a traditional social grouping to examine. I thought this would be an interesting one to tackle. Accurate numbers are proving elusive though.



From same source:
And also
Of course reliable ecclesial statistics are as easy to obtain as nailing jello to the wall. Hard to tell who is a lapsed member, who has moved, who is worshipping in another jurisdiction and perhaps being counted twice OR not at all... It can be difficult to track who makes effort to get their status changed, and who simply moves, attends a new parish, or begins to adhear to a new or no faith...

The view from the Byzantine forum - if you'll pardon the play on words - makes one suseptable to look around and say "Its all Greek to me." But in the course of the past year I have been left wondering how it is that Eastern Christians - of both the Catholic and Orthodox varieites - are shrinking so very much.

The news of 2,000+ Evangelical converts and a handful of parishes of disaffected Anglicans and other protestants going "Western Rite" seems much lauded and heralded... But the headline is 20 years old.

As recently as last month I read And once again it occurs to me that this is on par with the same news articles I have been reading for 20 years with a different convert clergyman and a different convert layman.

In the AOC and OCA the clergy is thick on the ground to be sure.

In the BCC we have a corresponding phenomena of a goodly number of bi-ritual priests willing to serve. For them I am very thankful...

Whole diocese in some jurisdictions (Catholic and Orthodox) have fewer members than Cathedrals once did. Byz Catholic eparchies which once boasted a ratio of vocations to faithful that would make Romans salivate (even largely precluding the married from candidacy to Holy Orders) seems to have given way to a great deal of dependence to bi-ritual priests. If my suspicious prove correct, in the next ten years more than a few of the dozens of men ordained to the diaconate could be trading in their diaconal orarion for the presbyteral epitrachelion as bishops evaluate their service and grow bolder with the ordination of married men to the priesthood... but I am of the thinking it will put us all in the same boat - tiny parishes with a goodly number of priests who are married.

But no matter how many clergy the EO have in the west, or how many Latins are generously assisting as BR priests, I am left to wonder - is Eastern Christianity growing anywhere? The Antiochians seem to be lauded as the standard bearers for growth, evangelization and converts... I am not sure that I can find accurate numbers that attest to this growth.

You might have a good start with the research studies conducted by the Glenmary Research Center every 10 years starting in 1952, 1971, 1980, 1990, and their latest: 2000.

They have also a "continuities and changes series," the most recent of which was published in December 2004.

These research studies cover Evangelicals Protestants, Mainline Protestants, Catholics, Eastern Christians (Orthodox), Mormons, Jews, Muslims, and Other Faiths.

http://www.glenmary.org/grc/default.htm

Among U.S. religious demographers, I think Glenmary has a more precise methodology. However, it included the Orthodox only in 2000, without any base data for comparison purposes.

How many souls in the Bridgeville PA parish, as the physical building looks very large from the exterior?

Ungcsertezs

Speaking of statistics... if Orthodox statistics don't seem convincing, Catholic statistics don't seem to be convincing either. The Melkites, for example, claim that they have some 1.3 million members, outnumbering the Antiochenes nearly 2 to 1. And yet in stats published until the 1970's the Antiochenes were always in a clear majority. Furthermore, the Maronites say that they have 3 million -- a statistic that, if true, would put about 80 - 90 % of ALL Maronites outside Lebanon. There are many other Catholic statistics that I've seen which strike me as "too good to be true". I am reminded that the UGCC had to drastically revise its own statistics downwards in the 1990's; the BCC has done the same in the last couple of years.

I have to say that my long-term admiration for Glenmary's demography was more than a bit off-put by the following footnote that I discovered in looking at US Catholic data there:

- emphasis added

http://www.glenmary.org/grc/new/Catholic_data_dioceses/Table%201.pdf

Many years,

Neil