A diocese is a territorial region of the Church overseen by a bishop. It’s the basic unit of Church administration, grouping parishes and clergy under one bishop’s pastoral care and sacramental authority.
Think of it like counties within a state. The Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America covers the entire United States and Canada, but that’s too large for one bishop to shepherd effectively. So the Archdiocese is divided into dioceses, each with its own bishop who knows his clergy, visits his parishes, ordains new priests, and provides hands-on pastoral oversight.
St. Michael’s here in Beaumont is part of the Diocese of Wichita and Mid-America. That’s a big territory: Kansas, Nebraska, parts of Iowa, South Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, western Louisiana, and Oklahoma. More than fifty parishes scattered across the heartland and the South. The diocesan cathedral is St. George in Wichita, Kansas, where Bishop Thomas has his see.
What does a diocesan bishop actually do?
He’s not just an administrator. A bishop is first and foremost a pastor and the chief celebrant of the sacraments in his diocese. He ordains priests and deacons. He consecrates churches and antimensions (the cloth altars that make a table into an Orthodox altar). He visits parishes to celebrate the Divine Liturgy, hear confessions, and encourage the faithful. When there’s a pastoral crisis or a priest needs guidance, the bishop is the one they call.
The bishop also represents his diocese at meetings of the Holy Synod, the gathering of all the Antiochian bishops in North America. Decisions about policy, discipline, and the life of the Archdiocese are made collegially by the bishops together, not by one man acting alone. That’s how Orthodox Church governance works. We don’t have a pope. We have bishops who act in communion with each other under the leadership of the Metropolitan.
How does this relate to the Metropolitan?
The Metropolitan is the primate of the entire Archdiocese. Currently that’s Metropolitan Saba, who serves as Archbishop of New York and Metropolitan of All North America. He presides over the Holy Synod and provides leadership for the whole Archdiocese, but he doesn’t micromanage every diocese. Each diocesan bishop has real authority in his own territory.
It’s a both-and structure. The dioceses aren’t independent, they’re part of one Archdiocese, which itself is under the spiritual authority of the Patriarch of Antioch in Damascus. But diocesan bishops aren’t just branch managers taking orders from headquarters. They’re successors of the Apostles with genuine episcopal authority.
This matters practically. When you have a question about parish life or you’re preparing for chrismation, you’re dealing with your local parish and its priest. But that priest was ordained by the diocesan bishop. And that bishop is in communion with the other bishops of the Archdiocese, who are in communion with the Patriarch, who is in communion with all the Orthodox bishops worldwide. You’re connected to the whole Church through these living relationships, not through paperwork or organizational charts.
The diocese isn’t just bureaucracy. It’s how the Church stays local enough to know your name while remaining universal enough to be the same Church that baptized your great-grandmother in Lebanon or Russia or Greece. Your bishop knows the challenges of ministry in Texas, the refinery schedules, the hurricane evacuations, the fact that your Baptist mother-in-law thinks we worship Mary. He’s not in some distant chancery. He’s the shepherd of this particular flock in this particular place.
If you want to understand Orthodoxy, start paying attention to your diocese. Notice when the bishop visits. Read the diocesan newsletter. Pray for Bishop Thomas by name. The Church isn’t an abstraction. It’s bishops and priests and deacons and laypeople bound together in specific places under specific shepherds, all serving the one Lord.
