Toward the American Church

St. Innocent as a founder of American Orthodoxy: the seminary and the native clergy through which he meant to make the Alaskan Church indigenous; the ordination of the first native Alaskan priest, St. Jacob Netsvetov; his foresight, on the 1867 sale of Alaska to the United States, that the mission’s future lay with an English-using American Church served by American clergy; and the line that runs from his vision through the transfer of the see toward San Francisco to the body that would become the Orthodox Church in America.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox / American (canonized 1977)

The Seed of an Indigenous Church

From the beginning Innocent’s aim was not a Russian colonial chaplaincy but a native Church that could stand on its own (see The Principles of Mission). The most concrete expression of this was his work to create an indigenous clergy. As bishop he founded a seminary at Sitka to train priests, including native Alaskan and creole candidates, for the American mission — an institution explicitly meant to grow the Church from within the peoples it served rather than to staff it indefinitely from Russia (Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 6; Oleksa, Orthodox Alaska, ch. 5).

The fruit of this vision is seen above all in St. Jacob (Iakov) Netsvetov, an Aleut-creole whom Innocent ordained and who became the first priest of native Alaskan ancestry. Netsvetov served the Atka district and then carried the mission to the Yup’ik peoples of the Kuskokwim, translating Scripture and worship into their tongues as Innocent had into Aleut — the indigenous-clergy principle bearing exactly the fruit Innocent had intended. Netsvetov was himself glorified by the Church in 1994 (Oleksa, Orthodox Alaska, ch. 5; American Saints, Orthodox Church in America materials; see Orthodoxy Guide: American Saints). Through such men the Alaskan Church became, in part and in his own lifetime, what Innocent had hoped: a Church of the native peoples, served by their own.

The significance of Netsvetov’s career is hard to overstate, for it shows the indigenizing principle reproducing itself across a generation. Innocent had learned Unangan and given the Aleut their first book; Netsvetov, a son of that same Aleut-creole world, in turn learned the language of the Yup’ik of the Kuskokwim and rendered the faith into their tongue. The method did not stop with its founder but passed into the hands of the very peoples it had reached, who carried it onward to peoples Innocent himself had never met. This is precisely what distinguishes a planted Church from a mere mission station: it grows from within, and its native sons become its apostles to their neighbors. That the Orthodox faith persists among Alaska Natives to this day — among Aleut, Sugpiaq, Yup’ik, and Tlingit, often as the marker of native identity rather than a colonial imposition — is in large part the long fruit of this insistence on a clergy drawn from the people and a Gospel preached in their own words.

1867: The Sale of Alaska and Innocent’s Foresight

In 1867 Russia sold Alaska to the United States, and at a stroke the American limb of Innocent’s diocese passed out of the Russian Empire and into a foreign, Protestant-majority, English-speaking republic (Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 9; see Orthodoxy Guide: Orthodoxy in America). Many in Russia saw this as the likely end of the American mission. Innocent — by then Metropolitan of Moscow — saw it differently, and his response is one of the most prophetic acts of his life.

Rather than treat the transfer as a disaster, he counseled that it might be a providential opening, and he urged a strikingly forward-looking policy for the mission’s future: that the center of the work should shift from Sitka toward the American population; that clergy should learn and use English; that services and instruction should increasingly be in English; and that the mission should aim to serve not only the native Alaskans and the remnant of Russian colonists but the wider American people (Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 9; Oleksa, Orthodox Alaska, ch. 6). The same conviction that had given the Aleut the Gospel in Unangan and the Sakha the Liturgy in Yakut now pointed toward an American Orthodoxy in English — the vernacular principle applied to a new continent.

The breadth of this vision is easy to miss at the distance of a century and a half. In 1867 the Orthodox presence in the former Russian America was a small, scattered, and suddenly orphaned thing: a handful of churches and chapels, a native and creole flock, a remnant of departing Russians, all now under the flag of a Protestant republic that regarded the Orthodox as an exotic and foreign body. The natural Russian response — and the response many in Russia expected — was retrenchment or abandonment. Innocent’s counsel was the opposite. He grasped that the very loss of the colony freed the mission from the role of imperial chaplaincy and opened to it a far larger field: the American people themselves. The same logic that had moved him, as a young priest, to put the Gospel into Unangan rather than to make the Aleut learn Church Slavonic now moved him to insist that the Church in America must learn to pray and teach in English. It was not a concession to circumstance but the consistent application of a lifelong principle: that the Church must speak to each people in its own tongue, and that in America that tongue was English. Few churchmen of the 1860s, Russian or otherwise, saw so clearly that Orthodoxy in the New World would have to become, in time, an American Church and not a transplanted Russian one.

The Move Toward San Francisco

In line with this vision the administrative center of the American diocese began to move away from remote Sitka toward the growing centers of the American West Coast. The episcopal see for the Aleutians and Alaska was relocated southward, toward San Francisco, in the years after the sale, positioning the mission to serve a continental American Church rather than a shrinking Russian colony (Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 9; Orthodoxy in America, OCA history). [Disputed: the year usually given for the relocation of the see to San Francisco is 1872, but the precise administrative sequence and dating in the years 1867–1872 are reported with some variation; the secure point is that, on Innocent’s encouragement, the see moved from Sitka toward San Francisco in the years following the 1867 sale.]

The geography of the move tells the story of the reorientation. Sitka — Novo-Arkhangelsk, the capital of Russian America — had been the natural seat of a colonial Church bound to the Russian-American Company; with the colony gone, it was a remote outpost on the far northern edge of the new American territory, ill-placed to reach the population of the United States. San Francisco, by contrast, was a booming Pacific port and the gateway to the American West, where a bishop could minister to a growing and varied flock and from which the Church could begin to think of itself as American rather than colonial. The southward shift of the see was thus not a mere administrative convenience but the concrete enactment of Innocent’s counsel: the Church’s center of gravity was being moved out of the dying Russian colony and toward the living American republic it was now called to serve. From San Francisco the mission would, in the decades that followed, extend eastward across the continent to meet the great immigrant Orthodoxy of the industrial cities — the next chapter in the slow becoming-American of the Church Innocent had founded.

The Line to the OCA

From this reorientation runs a direct line to the body that would become the Orthodox Church in America (OCA). The American mission that Innocent had founded and that he steered, after 1867, toward an English-using, American-facing future passed through the episcopate of his successors — including the future Patriarch St. Tikhon (Bellavin), who as bishop of the American diocese around 1900 carried Innocent’s vision forward, broadening the mission to the many Orthodox immigrant peoples and laying the groundwork for a multi-ethnic American Church (see St. Tikhon of Moscow and Orthodoxy Guide: Orthodoxy in America). That mission, through the upheavals of the twentieth century, became the OCA, which received its autocephaly in 1970 — and which venerates Innocent as one of its founders, the petition for whose 1977 glorification it itself brought forward (see Canonization 1977).

The work of the future St. Tikhon deserves a closer word, for in him Innocent’s American vision found its most consequential heir. As ruling bishop of the American diocese around the turn of the twentieth century, Tikhon governed a Church transformed by a new tide: no longer chiefly the native Alaskan flock of the Russian period but a swelling immigrant Orthodoxy — Carpatho-Russians and Galicians returning from Eastern-rite Catholicism, together with Serbs, Syrians, Greeks, and others — pouring into the industrial cities and mining towns of the United States and Canada. Tikhon broadened the mission to embrace them, moved its center eastward to the immigrant heartland, fostered the use of English alongside the old-country languages, and even sketched plans for an American Orthodoxy that might in time hold its many peoples together in a single self-governing Church. In all of this he was extending the logic Innocent had first articulated in 1867: that the Church in America must become genuinely American, serving the people of this land in their own tongue rather than remaining a colonial outpost of Russia. The line is unbroken — from Innocent’s Aleut alphabet and his counsel that the mission should turn to English, through Tikhon’s gathering of the immigrant peoples, to the autocephalous OCA of 1970, which received from its mother church in Moscow the self-governance that Innocent’s whole missionary theology had pointed toward.

It is for this reason that Innocent is rightly called not only the Apostle to America but a founder of the American Church. The Aleut alphabet, the Sitka seminary, the native priests, and above all the foresight that English Orthodoxy was the mission’s American future — these were the seeds from which American Orthodoxy grew. The boy from Anga who learned the Unangan tongue had grasped, decades early, that the Church in America would one day have to speak American.

References

Garrett, Paul D. St. Innocent: Apostle to America. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1979. (The Sitka seminary and native clergy; the 1867 sale; Innocent’s counsel toward an English-using American mission; the move toward San Francisco.)
Oleksa, Michael J. Orthodox Alaska: A Theology of Mission. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1992. (St. Jacob Netsvetov and the indigenous clergy; the post-1867 reorientation of the mission.)
Orthodox Church in America: History and American Saints. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org). (The path from the Alaska mission to the OCA; St. Jacob Netsvetov; the see’s move toward San Francisco.)