Orthodox Churches in Kansas

Orthodox Christianity came to Kansas with immigrant communities, among them Lebanese, Serbian, Russian and Greek. In Wichita, immigrants began arriving in the 1890s, chiefly from Marj'ayoun in southern Lebanon, then part of Ottoman Syria, and many starting out as peddlers. Visiting priests served them, notably Nicola Yanney, ordained in 1904 by St. Raphael (Hawaweeny), head of the Russian Orthodox Church's Syro-Arabian Mission in North America. The community organized St. George in 1918, the city's first Orthodox church and now a cathedral; in 1932 one of its two founding clans started its own parish, St. Mary.

In Kansas City, Kansas, a Serbian immigrant community chartered St. George Church in 1906 and built a more permanent church in 1925. Holy Trinity Orthodox Church was founded in 1917 by immigrants in the Strawberry Hill neighborhood, then commonly called Russian Hill. The Serbian parish moved to Lenexa in 2006. Holy Trinity sold its small Russian Hill church in the late 1990s and built a larger temple in Overland Park; it has grown from a small ethnic community to include converts as well as multigenerational families.

Wichita's Orthodox history has been predominantly Antiochian. St. George Orthodox Christian Cathedral, consecrated on East 13th Street in 1991, became the seat of the Bishop of Wichita when the Antiochian Diocese of Wichita and Mid-America was established in 2004, with Basil Essey, a former pastor, as its first bishop. Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church traces its founding in Wichita to 1927.