June 5, 2026
Photo: grantsbuddy.com
The Orthodox Church in America (OCA) is growing in both parishes and faithful, but a significant and worsening gap has emerged between the number of communities needing a priest and the number of priests available, according to a new report from Dcn. Seraphim Rohlin and Matthew Namee of the Orthodox Studies Institute (OSI).
The report draws on the OCA’s own published Pastoral Changes records from 2010 to the present, offering the most detailed picture yet of clergy supply and demand across the jurisdiction.
The findings come in response to a November 2025 report from the OCA’s Office of the Chancellor, which stated that “an acute clergy shortage” wasn’t expected in the near future. OSI’s March 2026 initial analysis argued that the Chancellor’s report raised as many questions as it answered, and the new report uses the OCA’s own records to address them directly.
On ordinations—the primary source of new priests—the OCA averaged roughly 20 per year from 2010 to 2019, rising to approximately 25 per year since 2022. The dip in 2020–21 is likely attributable to Covid, and the recovery may be partly due to a 2020 Chancellor’s Office report that sounded the alarm on vocations. Whether the recent rate of 25 per year represents a new baseline or a temporary uptick remains to be seen.
On the loss side, the OCA averages about 16 retirements per year in recent years, plus roughly 3–4 deaths and 4 depositions annually, totaling around 25 losses per year. Transfers into and out of the OCA have balanced out to essentially zero over the 16-year period studied. With 124 OCA priests currently at or above retirement age, retirements are unlikely to decrease and may well rise in coming years.
The cumulative effect has been a steady erosion of the active priest pool. In 2010, the OCA had slightly more active priests than parishes. By early 2026, the OCA directory listed 776 parishes and missions while only 693 priests were in active service—leaving 83 more communities than priests. The active priest count bottomed out in 2021 at 683 before a modest recovery.
Compounding the problem is continued parish growth. Between 2021 and 2025, the OCA opened approximately 41–42 new parishes while closing only 12–14, a net gain of roughly 29 communities. The closures were largely dying parishes in areas of decline; the openings were in areas of growing interest in Orthodoxy. Given the ongoing convert surge, OSI sees no reason to expect new parish openings to slow down.
OSI’s modeling suggests that even if the OCA were to stop opening new parishes entirely and increased ordinations to 30 per year, it would take 17 years to close the current deficit.
The report concludes that unless something changes, the priest shortage is a serious problem for the jurisdiction and is likely only going to worsen as Orthodoxy continues to grow in the United States in the coming years.
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