Our Parish
Please allow us to tell you a little about ourselves, and our church.
Welcome!
Please allow us to tell you a little about ourselves, and our church.
Who Are We?
We are Orthodox Christians – those who confess the Nicaean-Constantinopolitan Creed (composed at the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 325 AD, and the Second Ecumenical Council at Constantinople in 381 AD) as it was originally written. Our Faith stands on the pillars of Holy Scripture and Holy Tradition.
Our members are Serbians from Serbia proper, and the regions that composed the former Yugoslavia – Montenegro, Dalmatia, Kordun, Krbava, Lika, Banija, Slavonia, and Bosnia-Hercegovina (Republika Srpska), as well as Serbians born in the United States and converts to Orthodoxy.
Our Church is hierarchical; we are part of the Serbian Orthodox Diocese of Eastern America, and our Bishop (His Grace, Rt. Rev. Irinej) has his See in New Rochelle, New York. Our Diocese is part of the fully self-governing (autocephalous) Serbian Orthodox Church headed by His Holiness Patriarch Porfirije, whose See is in Belgrade, Serbia.
Our Church is part of the family of fully self-governing Eastern Orthodox Churches: Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, Russia, Romania, Greece, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Poland, Albania, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the Orthodox Church in America (OCA), and Sinai. In addition, there are several “autonomous” Churches: Finland, Japan, and China. While divided purely for administrative purposes, we are united by our common confession of Faith and teaching.
Our Church in Philadelphia
The first Serbian ever to enter the United States of America was George Shagich, who came to Philadelphia in 1814. The first large-scale migration of Serbs to this area occurred at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. On November 30th, 1902, the “Serbian Benevolent Society Dositej Obradovich” was organized under the auspices of the Serbian National Federation, to gather Serbs in Philadelphia and nurture their national and religious consciousness.
The Balkan Wars of 1912–1913 and World War I prevented our first immigrants from organizing a church. The small size of the community, the Great Depression, and World War II led our people to rely on local Russian and Romanian Orthodox churches for their spiritual needs. The aspirations of Philadelphia Serbians for their own church were finally realized by a “Foundational Assembly for a Church-School Congregation” on February 20th, 1949.
Iconography
Upon entering any Eastern Orthodox church, one cannot help but notice the icons and frescos. That icons are not idols was decreed by the Seventh Ecumenical Council, held in Nicaea in 787 AD. This Council decreed that icons are to be kept in churches and honored with the same relative veneration (but not worshipped, which is reserved exclusively for God) as is shown to the precious and life-giving Cross and the Book of the Gospels.
At the front of our church an iconostasis, or icon screen, separates the Altar from the Nave. The iconostasis exists to show our unity with Christ, His Mother, and all the angels and saints – our unity with God. Over the doors we have the icon of Christ’s Mystical Supper with His disciples, the icon of the central mystery of the Christian faith and the unity of the Church in the world.