Texas is part of the Diocese of Wichita and Mid-America.
That’s a big diocese. It stretches from Kansas down through the Great Plains and Southwest, including Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas. We’re talking about 50-plus parishes spread across a huge swath of the country. The diocesan cathedral is St. George in Wichita, Kansas, where the chancery offices are located.
If you’ve been visiting St. Michael’s here in Beaumont, you’re part of this sprawling diocese. So is St. George in El Paso, way out west. That’s the nature of Orthodoxy in America, our dioceses don’t follow neat state lines like Baptist conventions or Catholic dioceses often do. We’re still a missionary church in many ways, with parishes scattered wherever Orthodox Christians have gathered.
The Antiochian Archdiocese divides the United States and Canada into eight territorial dioceses. Each has its own bishop who oversees the parishes, clergy, and faithful in his region. Bishop BASIL (Essey) retired in 2022, and our diocese has had no diocesan bishop since. Since June 2024 Archimandrite Calinic (Berger) has served as Archiepiscopal Vicar under Metropolitan SABA (Isper), who leads the entire Archdiocese from the headquarters in Englewood, New Jersey.
This diocesan structure is relatively recent. The Archdiocese reorganized in 2003, moving from a regional system to proper dioceses with their own bishops. Before that, we had what were called “regions” rather than dioceses. The change reflected our growth and maturity as an Archdiocese. It also aligns us more closely with how the Orthodox Church has long organized itself, bishops overseeing territories, not just administrative regions.
What does this mean practically? A diocesan bishop normally visits parishes for ordinations and parish feast days, and he is the one who ordains priests and deacons. If someone wants to become a catechumen, the priest notifies the diocese. When parishes face pastoral questions or need guidance, they can turn to the diocesan chancery. It’s how the Church maintains unity and apostolic succession across a vast geographic area, not a distant bureaucracy.
Living here, you might wonder why we’re grouped with Kansas and Colorado rather than, say, Louisiana and Mississippi. Geography isn’t the only factor. The Archdiocese had to balance the number of parishes, population centers, and practical considerations when drawing diocesan boundaries. Texas is big enough that it could theoretically be its own diocese, but we don’t have enough parishes yet to justify that. So we’re part of a multi-state diocese.
This is actually pretty normal for American Orthodoxy. The Orthodox Church in America has a similar setup, its dioceses also cover several states each. When you’re a minority church in a huge country, you work with what you’ve got.
If you want to learn more about our diocese, visit antiochian.org and look for the Dioceses page. You’ll find contact information for the chancery, a list of parishes, and information about diocesan events. Some years there’s a diocesan parish life conference where parishes from across the diocese gather for worship, fellowship, and education. It’s a chance to meet other Antiochian Orthodox Christians from Texas, Kansas, Oklahoma, and beyond, to see that you’re part of something much bigger than one parish in Beaumont.
