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, covering Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, and parts of Louisiana and Iowa. 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 North America into nine territorial dioceses. Each has its own bishop who oversees the parishes, clergy, and faithful in his region. Our diocese is led by a bishop (I won’t name him here since bishops do change, but you can find current information on antiochian.org). He’s under the authority of Metropolitan Joseph, 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 always organized itself, bishops overseeing territories, not just administrative regions.
What does this mean practically? Your bishop visits parishes in the diocese for ordinations, confirmations, and parish feast days. He’s 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 not a distant bureaucracy, it’s how the Church maintains unity and apostolic succession across a vast geographic area.
Living in Southeast Texas, 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 region that shares a bishop.
This is actually pretty normal for American Orthodoxy. The Orthodox Church in America has a similar setup, their Diocese of the South covers everything from Oklahoma to Florida to Maryland. 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.
