Orthodox Christian dating in England

Orthodox Christians in England

London first. In 1674 a group of the London Greek community led by a priest founded a church in Soho; it passed to Huguenot refugees in 1682, the building was demolished in 1934, and the inscription that commemorated its foundation is in the narthex of St Sophia today. For a century and a half the Greeks of the City worshipped where they could, in the Russian chapel off the Strand and at the Imperial Russian Embassy on Welbeck Street, until in 1837 the merchants of Finsbury Circus set up a chapel of Christ the Saviour in gratitude for the liberation of Greece, and then a church of Christ the Saviour, in use from 1849, that attracted attention for its Byzantine style, almost unknown in London at the time. By 1870 the merchant families had moved west to Bayswater and Holland Park; the General Assembly of January 1874 agreed to build there, John Oldrid Scott drew a church that evoked Hagia Sophia, the contract was signed in May 1877 and the foundations marked out that June. St Sophia on Moscow Road is the cathedral of the Archdiocese of Thyateira.

The Russians were in London even earlier. The parish that is now the cathedral of the Russian Church Abroad was founded in 1725 and moved several times in three centuries before it built, in Chiswick, a cathedral in the Pskov style consecrated in 2018; it is the seat of the bishop for the whole of Western Europe. The other Russian cathedral, of the Patriarchate of Moscow, is the church of All Saints on Ennismore Gardens, built by the Anglicans in 1849 with a west front copied from San Zeno in Verona; when the Anglican parish merged with another in 1955 the empty church was given to the Russian parish, which moved in in 1956 and made it the cathedral of the Dormition, and the Diocese of Sourozh was formed around it in 1962. The Serbs have St Sava on Lancaster Road in Notting Hill, in a church built in 1900 and 1901 as St Columb's, and the Antiochians have the cathedral community of St George in Kensington Square.

The provinces built early too. In Manchester the Greeks, many from Chios after the War of Independence, voted a place of worship and a constitution in April 1843, used improvised churches until they laid a foundation stone, and finished the Annunciation in October 1861 as a classical basilica, with an iconostasis by Theodoros Vryzakis, the first modern Greek painter; it is which the archdiocese calls the oldest purpose-built Greek church in England. Liverpool's St Nicholas stands on Berkley Street; Birmingham has a Greek cathedral of the Dormition on Arthur Place; Oxford's Greeks worship at the House of St Gregory and St Macrina on Canterbury Road; the Archdiocese of Thyateira lists sixty communities in England outside London, from Alnwick to Plymouth. The Diocese of Sourozh has parishes and communities in every region, Brighton to Newcastle, most of them worshipping in borrowed Anglican and Catholic churches, and a pan-Orthodox chapel at the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham. In 1959 Archimandrite Sophrony Sakharov, who had gone to Athos in 1925 and served as secretary to St Silouan, founded the Monastery of St John the Baptist at Tolleshunt Knights near Tiptree; it is a stavropegic monastery of the Ecumenical Patriarchate.

The newest parishes are English in a different sense. The Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese of the British Isles and Ireland keeps its parishes under the names of the saints of these islands, St Aidan of Lindisfarne in Manchester, St Constantine in York, St Dunstan in Poole, St Botolph in London, All Saints of Lincolnshire in Lincoln, and most of them worship in chapels and churches lent by others; its site carries a line of St Paisios, that the Church in the British Isles will only begin to grow when she again venerates her own saints. These are the parishes founded by converts, and they are where the inquirers go.

The people filling them have been counted in the United States, not in England. The Orthodox Studies Institute surveyed twenty American parishes across six jurisdictions and fifteen states and reported, of the converts received since 2013, that two thirds were under forty at their reception, that people in their thirties outnumbered every other decade, and that 44 percent were single when they came in.

Those are American figures, and England is not in them; but the person they describe will be at coffee after the Liturgy on Henderson Street or in the chapel at Kensington Square: raised Anglican or Catholic or nothing, received as an adult, not yet married. The Antiochian parishes exist for that person, and the Greek and Russian parishes have made room for them.

Six jurisdictions cover England. The Ecumenical Patriarchate's Archdiocese of Thyateira and Great Britain has St Sophia and six other cathedrals in London, cathedrals in Birmingham and communities in sixty English towns, and the monastery in Essex. The Patriarchate of Moscow's Diocese of Sourozh has its cathedral on Ennismore Gardens and parishes across the regions. The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia has its cathedral in Chiswick. The Antiochian Archdiocese of the British Isles and Ireland has its cathedral community in Kensington and parishes from Poole to Morecambe. The Serbian Orthodox Church has St Sava in London and Holy Trinity in Bradford. The Romanian Orthodox Church's Metropolis of Western and Southern Europe has parishes in London and beyond. The Episcopal Assembly of Great Britain lists them all.

Where the community gathers

England's Church is London, two university towns, the Midlands and the North, and the west, with a monastery in the Essex marshes.

Distances that decide everything

The Orthodox year in England

Dating across jurisdictions, and with converts

Ten minutes on foot separate the Russian cathedral on Ennismore Gardens from the Antiochian chapel on Kensington Square, and a Tube ride separates both from the Greeks of Bayswater and the Serbs of Notting Hill; two hours of train separate all of them from a convert parish in Levenshulme. The cana.love form was written for that distance, and here it is from the end most people ask about first.

Meeting safely

• Money goes to no one you have not met in person; on cana.love a request for money is a reason to report, and the one who asked is removed permanently.
• Meet first in a public place, with someone you trust told where you are, and keep the conversation on the site until moving it is your own decision.

Reviews, reports and appeals are set out on the guidelines page.

Common questions