c. 1997 Religion News Service

DES MOINES, Iowa _ As morning breaks across the Midwestern plains early Tuesday (Nov. 4), Dora Bitsos will join more than two dozen other members of her Omaha, Neb., church for a 2 1/2-hour bus ride to Des Moines and what she expects to be a high point in her life as a Greek Orthodox Christian.”I’m going to see the ecumenical patriarch!”said Bitsos, a member of Omaha’s St. John the Baptist Greek Orthodox Church.”It’s an honor just to be near him and maybe receive his blessing.” The American heartland is by no means a bastion of Orthodox Christian strength. But for about five hours Tuesday it will be the center of the Orthodox world when Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew stops here enroute from Chicago to Dallas as part of his current month-long tour of the United States.

Bartholomew is Orthodoxy’s leading figure. He has direct authority over the 13 million-member Greek Orthodox Church and is traditionally regarded as the”first among equals”by leaders of the more than one dozen other autonomous Orthodox churches, which share a common theology and worship style but are divided along ethnic and national lines.

The churches _ which have their roots in the Balkans, Slavic Europe and the Middle East _ have a combined membership of more than 250 million worldwide. An estimated 2 million to 6 million Orthodox Christians live in the United States.

Bitsos is one of hundreds of Orthodox church members from across the Midwest who will converge here to see Bartholomew, who during his relatively brief visit will lead two worship services and attend a public luncheon hosted by Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad. The largest of the services, set for the Des Moines Civic Center, is expected to attract about 2,700 Orthodox Christians.”For us, it’s not so much the person we’re going for, although we respect and honor him,”said the Rev. Nick Kasemeotes, pastor of Holy Anargyroi Greek Orthodox Church, the only Orthodox congregation in Rochester, Minn.”He symbolizes 2,000 years of Christian tradition. He’s a symbol that Christianity can survive in adverse conditions,”said Kasemeotes, who will spend much of Tuesday in a bus along with members of his parish also making the trek to Des Moines. The drive is four hours each way.

In Muslim Istanbul _ the church’s headquarters ever since the city was called Constantinople and was the eastern capital of the Holy Roman Empire _ Orthodoxy’s adversities include Islamic fundamentalists upset by the patriarch’s continued presence there and the ongoing political tensions between Greece and Turkey that periodically boil over.

In Des Moines, Orthodox Christianity faces adversity of another sort. Here, where Orthodoxy is a little-known minority faith _ and sometimes mistakenly lumped in with Orthodox Jews _ the issue is basic survival.”We’re an outpost,”said the Rev. Peter Cade, pastor of Des Moines’ St. George Greek Orthodox Church.”We have to fight just to keep from minimizing our traditions just to fit in.” The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America claims some 1.5 million members, but just 124 families are affiliated with St. George, the only Orthodox congregation in Iowa’s capital city and one of just six in the entire state. The next largest branch of Orthodoxy in the United States, the 1 million-member Orthodox Church in America, which has its roots in Russian Orthodoxy, does not have a single parish in Iowa.

Instead, Midwestern Orthodox Christians tend to be centered around Chicago, Cleveland, Minneapolis, Detroit and Gary, Ind. _ cities that offered enough jobs to attract the bulk of the tens of thousands of immigrants from Orthodox nations who settled in the region in the late 1800s and early part of this century.

Des Moines is on Bartholomew’s schedule because the 57-year-old patriarch asked to visit a small Midwestern parish to see how it differs from the big city congregations he will visit during most of his 16-city tour, which ends in Pittsburgh Nov. 17.”It’s his pastoral way of saying, `I think you’re also important and I think you matter,'”said Cade, whose church has received a $50,000 gift to spruce up in anticipation of Bartholomew’s visit.

In the United States, Orthodoxy’s minority status has thrown together members of the various ethnic churches who traditionally remained apart in their native lands. In cities such as Des Moines, this forced ecumenism has pushed local Orthodoxy to the faith’s cutting edge.

The absence of church options has prompted Orthodox Christians from more than a half-dozen ethnic jurisdictions to worship together at St. George. The congregation is now home to Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Antiochian, Cypriot and Latvian Orthodox Christians, in addition to the descendants of the Greek immigrants who founded the parish in 1928 and who still predominate.

One result of this mixing is the greater use of English at St. George as a common liturgical language. Worship services today are half in Greek, half in English. A decade ago, they were entirely in Greek.”The emphasis today is on the American way of life,”said Krino Wright, 65, a life-long member of St. George.”There’s not so much emphasis anymore on Greek independence day, for example. It’s not a ghetto environment anymore.” Opening the church to the larger American culture has brought with it controversy and conflict, however.

For one, the tensions that have erupted in American Orthodoxy over attempts by Bartholomew and Archbishop Spyridon _ the ecumenical patriarch’s hand-picked head of the American Greek church _ to maintain authority over Orthodoxy in the United States have found their way to Des Moines.

Many Orthodox Christians in Des Moines supported the 1994 efforts of some American Orthodox bishops to modernize their church by uniting under an autonomous U.S. leadership _ an effort rejected by Bartholomew.

One member of the parish committee planning for Bartholomew’s visit here quit to protest Spyridon’s role in the ecumenical patriarch’s attempt to maintain his traditional authority.”Administrative unity is the number one issue here,”said Cade.”We may be geographically distant from the Orthodox population centers, but distance means little in the world of telephones and e-mail.” Intermarriage, primarily involving younger Orthodox Christians, has also impacted the parish.

(BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM)

In 1995, the latest year for which figures are available, nearly two-thirds of the marriages performed by priests of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese’s Chicago diocese, which includes Des Moines, involved a non-Orthodox Christian spouse. Orthodoxy allows its members to be married in the church if they marry a”trinitarian”Christian.”The big change in this regard began in the late 1970s,”said the Rev. Demetri Kantzavelos, chancellor of the Chicago diocese.”What will happen with the next generation is a guess.” In Des Moines, about 80 percent of the marriages at St. George involved a non-Orthodox spouse. Many of the non-Orthodox spouses eventually converted to Orthodoxy after being attracted by its conservative theological views and ornate, high-church worship style, Cade said.

(END OPTIONAL TRIM)

Converted spouses, along with other converts, account today for almost a third of St. George’s membership. With that has come further pressure to dilute St. George’s ethnic roots.”The downside is they (converts) have a Western, very American mindset that sees ethnicity as detached from faith,”said Cade, himself a convert from the United Methodist Church, where he was once a minister.”I have to differ with that. The idea of faith meshing with culture is precisely the point of Orthodox Christianity, which is about transforming culture rather than abandoning it.” Cade believes Orthodoxy will flourish in cities such as Des Moines, thanks in part to the nation’s current swing toward traditional religions. Just what face Orthodoxy will present in the future is the big question.

The challenge facing St. George, he said, is to”broaden the appeal of pan-Orthodoxy while retaining Greek in the name of our church.”

MJP END RIFKIN