Orthodox Churches in Arkansas

Orthodoxy in Arkansas dates from the 1890s. In 1894 four Russian Orthodox families reached what is now Slovak, in Prairie County, among settlers from Austria-Hungary, some of them Uniate (Eastern Catholic). In 1899 Father John Kochurov, later declared a saint, visited from Chicago and led the Uniates' reunion with Orthodoxy. The settlement's Orthodox church held its last service with a priest in 1948, and only its cemetery remains in Slovak. Greek immigrants reached Little Rock in 1892, and their parish, chartered as Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church in 1920, is the state's oldest continuously operated Orthodox church.

Serbs, mostly from Chicago, came to Hot Springs for the thermal spas and founded St. Archangel Michael Serbian Orthodox Church, built in 1979; St. George followed in 1992. Converts George and Iris Brooks built a chapel on their De Queen farm that became All Saints of America, a Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia parish, in 1995. Ss. George and Alexandra in Fort Smith began in 1994 from the legacy of a Greek chapel unused since 1974.

Antiochian parishes began in Little Rock (Holy Trinity, 1997) and Springdale (St. Nicholas), where families had traveled to Tulsa for services. St. Thomas the Apostle in Mountain Home, an Anglican church from 2003, became Orthodox in 2015 and joined the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the USA in 2020. St. John in Rogers, begun in 2011 as an Orthodox Church in America mission station, is named for Kochurov. Parishes today include many converts, and English is the principal liturgical language.