Orthodox Churches in Tennessee

A 2009 state-by-state survey names a Greek parish in Memphis as Tennessee's first, dating it about 1915–16 and adding a Nashville parish in 1917. The Memphis Greek community's own history counts its beginnings from 1891 and reports that by 1904 twenty families had invited a priest and established a church in a simple building on Front Street. Knoxville's Greek community traces its beginning to about 1915. Some Greeks from eastern seaboard cities moved to Chattanooga in the 1920s and 1930s; the Annunciation parish there incorporated in 1939 and bought a former Episcopal church in 1941.

Greek Orthodox parishes remain in Memphis, Nashville, Chattanooga and Knoxville, where the early immigrant communities settled. Antiochian, Orthodox Church in America and Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia parishes serve places such as Franklin, Clarksville, Oak Ridge and Lenoir City, and Serbian and Romanian communities worship in the Nashville area. St. Basil's Cathedral in Nashville describes itself as a locally governed community worshipping in the Western Rite Orthodox tradition.

The Monastery of the Life-Giving Trinity in Grand Junction began in 1995, when the parish council of St. John Orthodox Church in Memphis committed itself to helping start a monastic presence in the Midsouth. A couple in the parish offered land, and Mother Nektaria arrived in Memphis in 1996 to begin an Antiochian monastic community. After her death in 2023, a monk of the Great Schema arrived in 2024 to establish an Athonite-style monastery for men.