A November 2025 post at Good Guys Wear Black has recently made the rounds on social media. This post offered a warning to a young man considering the Orthodox priesthood. Much of it is pastoral: the priesthood is difficult, parish life can be brutal, bishops do not always support clergy well, and no man should enter seminary with romantic illusions.

Those concerns deserve to be taken seriously. But the post also makes a statistical claim: that a private study of St. Vladimir’s Seminary student files found that 92% of ordained former students “failed,” whether by quitting, divorcing, apostatizing, or being deposed.

That is a serious allegation. If true, it would represent a catastrophic institutional failure. But precisely because the claim is serious, it should not be made casually. Fortunately, one part of it is publicly testable: how many St. Vladimir’s MDiv graduates who were ordained to the priesthood are still priests in good standing?

To answer that, we reviewed publicly available SVOTS commencement data and jurisdictional clergy-status data for the 2010–2025 graduating classes. This review is limited to Master of Divinity graduates, as SVOTS has other programs but the MDiv is the degree most directly connected to priestly formation.

Across those years, SVOTS commencement programs identify 212 MDiv graduates. But not all are relevant to a claim about Eastern Orthodox priestly retention. Eight graduates, or 3.8%, were women, and therefore not eligible for ordination to the Eastern Orthodox priesthood. Another 39 graduates, or 18.4%, were Non-Chalcedonian Christians. Together, these groups account for 22.2% of the MDiv graduates in the sample.

That leaves 165 theoretically eligible Eastern Orthodox male MDiv graduates, or 77.8% of the total. Of these, 47 have not yet been ordained to the priesthood, meaning 28.5% of the eligible group did not become priests. The relevant denominator is therefore the 118 men who were actually ordained, representing 71.5% of the eligible group and 55.7% of all MDiv graduates in the sample (in other words, 55.7% of SVOTS MDiv graduates have become Orthodox priests over the last 16 years).

Among those 118, 3 were ordained outside U.S. jurisdictions. The remaining group consists of graduates ordained in American Orthodox jurisdictions. The result is straightforward:

• 102 remain priests in good standing or are ordained outside U.S. jurisdictions with no evidence of departure from the priesthood or from the faith.

• 13 are known to have been laicized or suspended

That means the priesthood retention rate among eligible SVOTS MDiv graduates who were ordained is 105 out of 118, or 89.0%. The inverse is 13 out of 118, or 11.0%. In other words, the public data show almost exactly the opposite of the claim in the Good Guys Wear Black article: Rather than 90% of St. Vladimir’s ordinands leaving the priesthood, roughly 90% remain priests in good standing.

This year-by-year graph should be read carefully. It does not show ordination year. It shows the MDiv graduating class year, and then asks what later ordination/status category each graduate eventually falls into. A man graduating in 2020, for example, may have been ordained before, during, or after that calendar year.

How does this compare with non-Orthodox data? A 2021 literature review by Allison Hamm and David Eagle in the Journal of Psychology and Theology found that alarmist clergy-attrition claims are common but poorly supported; the empirical literature generally shows attrition of about 1–2% per year across Protestant denominations and among Roman Catholic priests. Lifeway Research’s 2025 study of evangelical and Black Protestant pastors similarly found only 1.2% leaving ministry annually, though burnout and conflict remain real. Barna’s surveys show that many Protestant pastors have seriously considered quitting—24% in its latest data, down from the pandemic-era peak—but “considering leaving” is not the same as actually leaving. In any case, this 1-2% number is higher than the average rate at which SVOTS MDiv graduates leave the priesthood, though within the margin of error. In other words, there is nothing to suggest that there is something atypical about the retention of SVOTS ordinands.

There is also a broader seminary-outcomes caution. The Association of Theological Schools’ (ATS) 2017 alumni workforce survey found that almost half of recent theological-school alumni served in congregations, while more than half served elsewhere: education, health care, chaplaincy, nonprofits, and community service. Not every non-parish outcome is a failure.

None of these data measure burnout, financial stress, unhappy parish assignments, marital strain, or the challenges faced by clergy families. Those are real issues which should be thoughtfully addressed. But the headline claim is testable, and on the public evidence it does not hold up. For the 2010-2025 SVOTS MDiv cohorts, about nine in ten eligible ordained men remain priests in good standing.

Source notes

• SVOTS commencement data and jurisdictional clergy status data, 2010–2025 MDiv graduates.

• Hamm, Allison K., and David E. Eagle. “Clergy Who Leave Congregational Ministry: A Review of the Literature.” *Journal of Psychology and Theology* 49, no. 4 (2021): 291–307. https://doi.org/10.1177/00916471211011597

• Lifeway Research, “Pastors Remain Committed to the Pulpit,” 2025.

• Barna Group, “Pastors Quitting Ministry: New Barna Data Shows a Shift,” 2026.

• Association of Theological Schools, “Where are Theological Alums Serving? Insights from the 2017 ATS Educational Models Alums Workforce Survey.”

In 2020, the Orthodox Church in America's (OCA) website published a report entitled, "Vocation as a Church-wide endeavor." This report addressed a number of challenges for the Church in America as they were perceived at that time, specifically:

1. A “Priest Shortage” caused by a lack of new vocations and an aging clerical workforce, making it difficult to fill vacancies at existing parishes. “The crisis regarding an upcoming shortage of priests is apparent and can be reasonably inferred from the data...”

2. Insufficient vocations to fill the missionary needs of the Church; the report correctly identified that just filling vacancies would not actually fulfill the mission of the Church, which is to make disciples across America.

3. A need for other vocations: “...the Church urgently needs to see to the raising up of choir directors, leaders in religious education, and theologically educated men and women who can serve the Church in a variety of ways...”

In November 2025, the OCA Chancellor’s Office issued a new report declaring the Priest Shortage at an end. OSI is currently preparing a detailed analysis and evaluation of the 2020 and 2025 data, with a look forward into the years ahead. The present article addresses a surprising source of growth not explicitly anticipated by the OCA’s 2020 call for vocations: the rise of a “permanent” diaconate.

From 2010–2025, the OCA records 466 diaconal ordinations and 330 priestly ordinations. In every year except 2016, diaconal ordinations outnumber priestly ordinations. That alone is not surprising: all priests must first be ordained deacons. What is interesting is the shape of this trend over the last 15 years.

From 2010 to 2019, the OCA averaged about 27.5 diaconal ordinations per year. From 2022 to 2025, that average rose to 39.2 per year. In 2020, recorded diaconal ordinations fell to 10, while priestly ordinations fell to 14–an obvious COVID-related disruption to normal operations. But the recovery was uneven. Priesthood ordinations rebounded to the low-to-mid 20s: 26 in 2022, then 25, 24, and 24 from 2023 through 2025. Diaconal ordinations, on the other hand, rose sharply: 30 in 2022, then 42, 43, and 42 from 2023 through 2025.

In other words, the post-2021 period is not merely a return to a pre-COVID norm. In fact, the surge in diaconal ordinations comes roughly two years after the OCA’s 2020 call for vocations--the standard duration of the diaconal vocations program in the OCA.

Another way of understanding this difference is to compare the decade before COVID with the recent post-COVID years. When we do so, we see that priestly ordinations rose modestly, from an average of 20.2 per year in 2010–2019 to 24.8 in 2022–2025. Diaconal ordinations rose more substantially, from 27.5 to 39.2. The diaconate’s share of combined diaconal and priestly ordinations also increased, from 57.7% in 2010–2019 to 61.3% in 2022–2025. Notably, since 2022, the increased numbers of diaconal ordinations do not correspond to increased number of priestly ordinations the following year, which is the typical pattern we’d expect to see if these new deacons were seminarians on track for the priesthood. This is evident from the way the 3-year trend lines cease to track with each other post-COVID.

In other words, the diaconate in the OCA is growing dramatically, but that growth is not translating to priestly vocations, but rather into the expansion of a “permanent diaconate” to use a Western ecclesiastical term. The timing of this growth implies that the 2020 call for vocations was successful -- at least insofar as it motivated many men to pursue ordination to the diaconate.

While this does nothing to address a possible priest shortage (in the OCA, the path to the priesthood for a “permanent deacon” remains the same as that of a layman), it is an encouraging trend on its own. Indeed, in “On the Ministry of the Diaconate,” Metropolitan Saba (Isper) of the Antiochian Archdiocese of North America called for a reassessment of the role of deacons in modern times, from a merely liturgical role to an “army” prepared to address the complex pastoral needs of the faithful. A revitalized diaconate may prove to be an important part of the expanding mission of Orthodox Christianity in North America.

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A year ago, the UK Bible Society released its “Quiet Revival” report, which was based on a YouGov survey of over 13,000 people from England and Wales. The results were stunning: a 56% increase in monthly church attendance compared to the Bible Society’s previous (2018) survey, and a fourfold increase among 18- to 24-year-olds (up from 4% to 16%).

Many Christians viewed this as terrific news: a revival was happening — albeit a “quiet” one, since it seems not to have shown up in church attendance metrics from the Catholic Church or the Church of England. One skeptical scholar told the BBC, if the Bible Society’s findings were legit, “we’d be looking for literally millions of new churchgoers, and they’d have to be very quiet indeed, not to say invisible, to have escaped our notice.”

The skeptics were vindicated a year later. On March 26, 2026, the Bible Society issued a formal retraction of the entire Quiet Revival report. In an announcement on its website, the Bible Society explained what went wrong:

YouGov has quality control systems designed to exclude survey respondents who are not based in the UK, who attempt to complete the survey more than once, or who give inattentive or random answers. Bible Society was informed in early March that significant parts of these systems were not functioning correctly during the 2024 survey – the result of human error on YouGov’s part. YouGov only discovered this recently, following a thorough internal review. This meant that a statistically significant proportion of responses were of low quality or otherwise unreliable, and the data cannot now be relied upon.

YouGov is one of the biggest survey companies in the business. People join YouGov’s panel and take surveys in exchange for points, which can be redeemed for money or prizes. There’s obvious risk here, when it comes to the quality of respondents. YouGov has various measures in place to mitigate this risk, such as IP address checks and VPN detection. They also look for “speed runners” — people who complete the survey much faster than should be possible — and people who give nonsensical answers. According to the Bible Society’s announcement, this quality control system failed, in the case of their YouGov survey.

The implication of this is that many of the YouGov respondents weren’t who they claimed to be (for example, many weren’t actually based in the UK). It tainted the entire dataset, hence the Bible Society’s painful retraction.

This story felt uncomfortably familiar to us at OSI, in a “there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I” kind of way.

Last year, OSI participated in a larger survey effort by an established research team, using the platform of a market research firm. We had to raise $20,000 for this, but it seemed like too good an opportunity to pass up: the chance to design our own questions specifically for randomly selected Orthodox Christian adults in America. The scale of the broader survey — roughly 100,000 American adults — was such that we expected to get 500 or 600 respondents who were currently Orthodox, plus several hundred people who had previously been Orthodox but had left the Church. We’d be able — so we thought — to learn a ton of valuable information: not just the size of the American Orthodox population, but detailed demographic data, unprecedented insights into the retention of both cradle-born Orthodox and converts, and the opinions of hundreds of Orthodox people on a whole range of topics.

When the responses started rolling in, we were stunned. Based on hundreds of other general-population surveys, we expected the Orthodox share of this study to be roughly 0.5-0.7%. But the raw numbers, we were told, were totally different: 1.6% of the initial sample was currently Orthodox, and another ~0.75% were formerly Orthodox. If this were accurate, it would imply an overall US Orthodox population of 5.4 million. While I wish this were the case, I knew it wasn’t; it would mean that the average parish has something like 2,700 people.

Then, the people who conducted the survey did their own data cleaning, similar, as I understand it, to what YouGov does. They removed speed runners and people who gave logically impossible responses. In the end, I’m told that 2,853 respondents were rejected. And then, we received another shock: roughly 15% of the rejected respondents were current Orthodox, and another 2% were former Orthodox. In other words, current Orthodox respondents were roughly nine times more prevalent in the rejected respondents than in the original sample (and former Orthodox were something like two and a half times more prevalent).

In the end, we received a data file with 1,174 current and 695 former Orthodox Christians. This would imply a current US Orthodox population of 4 million, which is roughly double what I think the real number is (even with our legitimately significant growth in recent years). And most of these weren’t Oriental Orthodox: we had respondents select which type of Orthodox they were, and only 210 of them picked an Oriental Orthodox group. The implication being that — if these survey results were to be believed — Eastern Orthodox share of the US population was 0.964%, or close to 3.3 million people. More than a million more than expected. I was cautiously optimistic that maybe I had just been too conservative in my estimate, and that maybe there really were three million Eastern Orthodox in America.

My hopes were quickly dashed when I started digging into the data. Consider:

We asked people age-based questions, such as their current age and the age when they became Orthodox. For those who were currently Orthodox, we asked the age when they embraced the Orthodox faith as their own (which included the option “I haven’t”). For those who were formerly Orthodox, we asked them both when they emotionally disconnected from Orthodoxy, and when they stopped self-identifying as Orthodox. We got dozens and dozens of nonsensical responses to these questions. Dozens upon dozens of people gave impossible answers, saying that these various events occurred at ages older than their current age (many of them much older, such as a 43-year-old who claimed to have become Orthodox at 100).

In addition to those impossible ages, here are some of the other red flags we found:

• Impossible characteristics (e.g., a woman claiming to be major clergy or to serve in the altar)

• Becoming Orthodox ages 0-6 but without either parent being Orthodox when the person was growing up (not impossible, but extremely improbable and very common in the dataset)

• Suspicious ages, such as embracing Orthodoxy at (say) age 8 but becoming Orthodox at age 30

• Middle-aged and elderly non-immigrants who claim to have attended an Orthodox school growing up but were not Orthodox until adulthood (Orthodox schools aren’t very common today, and prior to the past couple decades, any school other than a parochial school was basically nonexistent)

We asked respondents which kind of Orthodox they were — basically their jurisdiction, although of course it’s likely that, say, an ethnic Greek who attends an OCA parish might choose “Greek Orthodox.” In our list of options, we included both Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox / non-Chalcedonian identifiers, since, we reasoned, members of both groups would likely select “Orthodox Christian” and end up in our data set.

The results were unbelievable. As in, literally, we did not believe them.

For starters, just 2% of current Orthodox respondents were Antiochian, and another 2% were Serbian Orthodox — dramatically lower percentages than we expected. And then, 2% were Albanian and 2% Macedonian, with both jurisdictions having fewer than 20 parishes in the United States. (Meanwhile, the Antiochians have nearly 300, and the Serbs have more than 120.) The idea that there are as many Albanians and Macedonians as there are Serbs and Antiochians is not realistic.

Even more bewilderingly, more than a quarter of the people who identified as Macedonian Orthodox were black or Hispanic — this, in a jurisdiction that is extremely ethnic, with, in real life, almost exclusively Slavic membership, from the Republic of North Macedonia. (It might be a coincidence, but I did learn that there are a dozen or so “Macedonia African Methodist Episcopal” churches in the United States.)

These “racial/ethnic mismatches” were common in the data set. A surprisingly high number of people (10.7%) identified as Armenian Orthodox, and of these, 23% were black or Hispanic. The Armenian Orthodox Church is essentially a refuge for ethnic Armenians, with worship almost exclusively in Armenian. I’d be surprised if even 2% of actual Armenian Orthodox in America are black or Hispanic; 23% is far outside the realm of possibility.

There were even more blacks and Hispanics among the Romanian Orthodox — 34.5%. I do know of some convert-friendly Romanian parishes, but still, the idea that more than one-third of Romanian Orthodox in America are black or Hispanic is laughable.

And then there was the problem of artificial intelligence. We asked three free-response questions, with text boxes provided for the respondent to fill out:

• If you could speak to all of the Orthodox bishops, what would you tell them?

• What is the single biggest problem in the Orthodox Church today?

• What are your current struggles with faith?

A very large number of the responses were obviously AI-generated. Many used identical or nearly identical wording, and clearly were the result of our question being used to prompt an AI to generate a response. In several cases, the submitted response literally identified the respondent as an AI (e.g., “I cannot struggle with faith in the way a human might" or “As an AI, I don’t experience faith or belief the way humans do"). Altogether, we found evidence of AI use in 16.5% of the free-response answers.

Our team went through the data file and removed the most obviously false responses — the impossible or extremely improbable ages, the ethnic/racial mismatches, the people who gave AI-generated free-response answers. When it was all said and done, we removed 574 of the 1,174 current Orthodox (48.9%) and 422 of the 695 former Orthodox (70.8%). Combined, we removed 53.3% of the respondents we were sent — and remember, that’s after a bunch of bad respondents were already removed in the data cleaning process prior to our receipt of the data.

It’s a little bit mind-boggling to get what is supposed to be a pre-cleaned data set and still find that over half of it is unusable. So what on earth happened?

I reached out to the market research firm that conducted the survey to try to get some answers. One theory was that perhaps they had somehow indicated to respondents that they’d get extra compensation for selecting Orthodox and thus getting our Orthodox-specific questions. But the firm assured me that this was not the case: they had not disclosed to participants that there was any such incentive. Nothing in their communications with respondents even mentioned Orthodoxy.

When I asked how our data was so unusually bad — how we made up such a high percentage of the pre-cleaned bad respondents — they said that the only explanation was that something about the survey itself pushed people to identify as Orthodox. Perhaps the Orthodox option had been listed at the top or the bottom of the religious affiliation options? But when we re-checked the exact text of the survey questions themselves, this was not the case: Orthodox Christian was actually the fifth in a long list of options.

At this point, we really have no idea why we ended up with so many unusable responses.

Once we removed all those obviously junk respondents, the current Orthodox share of the all of the survey respondents is just under 0.6%, which is right in line with the kind of numbers that big surveys like the Cooperative Election Study and the Pew Religious Landscape Survey found.

Our extra-cleaned sample left us with a total of 878 respondents, including both current and former Orthodox. And this cleaned sample does appear to offer some real signal.

Orthodox Identification in Adulthood and Childhood Parent Religion

For example, we found that respondents with only one Orthodox parent had a 61% retention rate, with virtually identical results regardless of whether the lone Orthodox parent was the father or the mother. But when the respondent had two Orthodox parents, their likelihood of remaining Orthodox as adults jumped to 85%. This tracks with both common sense and other data we’ve analyzed. It also suggests that our data cleaning was broadly effective at separating the wheat from the chaff.

I hope to be able to publish some other findings from this extra-cleaned sample in the future. But it’s still deeply concerning that we had to engage in so much line-by-line cleaning, relying on our own very domain-specific expertise. To be perfectly clear: we had to remove over half of the responses we received, and that was after the experts who provided this data to us had already carried out their own cleaning. Some of the weird responses were probably obvious to anyone looking at them — the AI free-response answers, the impossible ages — but other problems would only be apparent to someone familiar with Orthodoxy, such as the suspiciously high number of black and Hispanic respondents among those identifying as Albanian, Armenian, Macedonian, and Romanian.

This experience was unsettling enough to cause us to rethink both our use of this specific data set, and, more broadly, our ability to rely on data collected via large-scale, opt-in online surveys where respondents are compensated for their participation. This methodology seems to come with heightened risk as we see advances in AI and other technologies that open the door to greater fraud and otherwise false or misleading data.

Here is how Professor David Voas, perhaps the most vocal critic of the Quiet Revival study, explains the problem:

Gold standard social surveys are based on random (probability) samples of the population: everyone has a chance to be included. […]

By contrast, people opt in to YouGov’s survey panel and are rewarded after completing a certain number of surveys. The risk of low-quality or even bogus responses is considerable.

YouGov creates a quota sample from its large self-selected panel. The sample will match the population on a number of key characteristics, such as age and sex, but that does not make it representative in all respects. As quota samples do not give each person in the population a known chance of being selected, statistical inference is not possible and findings cannot be reliably generalised.

It’s notable that the Cooperative Election Study, which we’ve cited many times ourselves here at OSI, relies on YouGov panelists — meaning, it’s not probability-based. That doesn’t invalidate the study, but it does mean the data still comes from an opt-in, non-probability panel that requires careful matching, weighting, and validation to approximate representativeness.

In contrast, the Pew Religious Landscape Study is probability based, as it is sent to a random sample of US households.

Our problematic data set came from a non-probability survey. As I understand it, the biggest differences between YouGov and the market research firm that conducted the survey we participated in is that YouGov maintains its own opt-in panel, whereas this other firm instead works with external online panel providers to find respondents. But in both cases, the methodology is not probability-based, and thus is more at risk of being tainted by bad data — especially for rare subgroups like Orthodox Christians.

Our experience, and the high-profile problems of the Quiet Revival study, are not the only examples of recent, tainted religious survey data collected via non-probability methodologies. Another notable example is that of the Fuller Youth Institute, which, like us at OSI, was able to catch the data integrity problems before they published anything. Fuller was conducting a survey of Gen Alpha youth on religion, but midway through the process, they realized that their data was tainted due to AI and VPN use. They ended up scrapping an entire survey’s data set and starting the whole study from square one. The results of that second, more secure study were published in January 2026. Here is how Fuller described it in the report:

In the summer of 2025, we constructed, piloted, and conducted the National Survey on Teen Spirituality & Religion, designed by the Fuller Youth Institute in consultation with Future of Faith. It was administered in July 2025 on Qualtrics via both a purchased Centiment panel and a nationally-recruited sample through FYI and Alpha Youth USA networks. Following thorough data validation, cleaning, and analysis, we ultimately chose to discontinue our nationally-recruited panel due to contamination concerns and solicited another Centiment panel in November 2025. These efforts combined yielded a total usable sample of 2,783 participants.

I spoke with the lead researchers for the Fuller Youth Institute as I was drafting this article, and they offered some details on their experience. AI use was rampant in their original survey. They told me that one of their consultants found an AI script designed to teach an AI how to take surveys in a way that mimics human behavior, such as varying responses and response time. But their experience with VPNs was particularly unsettling: they described the bizarre experience of follow-up video calls with participants whose identity in real life didn't match their identity in the survey; for example, a participant listed as a US-based teen girl turned out to be an African-based male. Interviewers had to terminate a number of interviews due to this sort of mismatch.

In the end, there were just far too many problems for Fuller to trust the data they had collected, so they made the difficult (but high-integrity) decision to cut their losses and start over. The UK Bible Society didn’t discover the problems with their data until it was too late, but they also opted for self-effacing transparency over trying to save face.

When the UK Bible Society retracted their Quiet Revival report last month, I felt both pained for them, grateful for their transparency, and relieved that we ourselves dodged a similar bullet. Had we not been so suspicious and circumspect about the surprising results we received from our own survey last year, it easily could have been us at OSI retracting a study with big, exciting findings. And going forward, researchers probably need to be extra cautious about this sort of data.

“We are not expecting to face an acute clergy shortage in the near future.” That was the conclusion of a November 2025 report issued by the Office of the Chancellor of the Orthodox Church in America, Fr Alessandro Margheritino. It’s a significant change of tone from the same Chancellor’s Office (under then-Chancellor Fr Alexander Rentel), which warned in 2020, “The crisis regarding an upcoming shortage of priests is apparent and can be reasonably inferred from the data.”

So what changed between 2020 and 2025? Did the OCA suddenly solve its priest shortage despite the headwinds of Covid and the increasing pressure from the convert surge? Or was the previous Chancellor’s Office wrong back then? Is the OCA actually fully-staffed with priests, and is their seminary pipeline adequate to meet expected future needs?

The 2025 report makes no mention of the 2020 report, even though it is clearly drawing on that earlier report, with, in some cases, similar or identical language used, despite polar opposite conclusions. The 2020 report said that there were 640 active priests in the OCA, while the 2025 report had just 502. On its face, that’s a very large drop, but I’m told that the definition of “active priest” changed between the two reports. The 2020 report simply refers to “active priests,” without defining the term. The 2025 report specifies that “active priests” are “priests who are currently in charge of parishes serving as priests-in-charge, acting rectors, or rectors.” The 2025 report offers no explanation for this definitional shift or any reconciliation with the 2020 findings. I am told that the 2020 definition included assistant priests, and possibly also chaplains and some others, who are not serving as head priest of a parish. This would explain why the numbers are so different.

In this article, I’m going to dig into the 2025 report, but I should say at the outset: I commend the Chancellor’s Office for sharing this internal data with the broader Church. It’s extremely valuable. But while the report provides important current data, it’s silent on other equally vital metrics, and the absence of any reference to the 2020 warning (despite overlapping language and metrics) raises questions about institutional continuity and how the earlier concern has been resolved.

Parishes. The 2025 report states that there are 502 “active priests” in the OCA — that is, priests in charge of parishes — across the jurisdiction’s 683 parishes. The report also says that 118 parishes do not have a rector. (Others may share a rector; if you subtract 502 priests from 683 parishes, you get 181, not 118, which is explained by the same priest serving as rector of multiple parishes.) The Chancellor’s Office explains, “It must be remembered these vacancies may have any number of causes: they may be temporary, or they may be due to very small numbers, great remoteness, and so forth. Some of these communities may be drawing near to closure due to geographic and demographic realities; it should not be assumed that all or even most of these vacant parishes are prepared to support a priest, even on a somewhat limited basis.” The report does not provide any detail on how many vacant parishes fit into these various categories. Even granting the report’s caveats, the scale of vacancies suggests ongoing difficulty in assigning dedicated rectors to all parishes.

The OCA is opening more parishes, too. According to the above chart, which comes from the 2025 report, between 2020 and 2025, 46 parishes were opened while only 19 were closed. And a disproportionate number of the closures happened in the Covid year of 2020; if we focus only on 2021-25, we get 41 opened versus 12 closed — a net gain of 29 parishes. In light of the convert surge, there’s no reason to believe that parish openings will slow down any time soon.

Indeed, the Chancellor’s Office acknowledges, “The post-COVID period has seen the rapid growth of our parishes, with many communities welcoming significant numbers of inquirers, catechumens, and new converts. To maintain their liturgical and pastoral life under the conditions of constant expansion, many communities may now or soon benefit from the presence of an assistant priest or a seminary-trained deacon. In some cases, the establishment of daughter missions or new parishes may also serve as a natural and fruitful way to meet the demands of expanding membership.”

Growing communities and new missions are great news, and the Chancellor’s Office highlights this as “a general burgeoning and readiness for growth.” Yet it does not address how the clergy pipeline will keep pace with this expansion, particularly in convert-heavy areas where demand for pastoral care is surging.

Priest Ages. The age distribution of OCA active priests (shown in the above chart from the 2025 report) also presents a challenge. The Chancellor’s Office stated, “A total of 124 currently active priests are at or above the conventional age of retirement (65 years). This number represents 25% of all priests.” And 28 of those are 75 or older, a cohort for which we can expect very high attrition.

The report continues, “The total number of active priests aged 55 – 64, who will achieve retirement age within the next 10 years, is 107, or 21% of the entire number of active priests. Meanwhile, we note that the number of priests below the age of 44 is only 102, which is 20% of the total number.”

So there are 124 post-retirement-age priests, and only 102 under-44 priests. This would seem, on its face, to indicate a shortage: an aging clergy population with more old priests than young ones.

What’s missing from the Chancellor’s Office report is any data on actual retirements. How many active priests retire each year? Has that number gone up or down in recent years? And additionally, how many die while still on active duty? These numbers are not reported.

Ordinations. Perhaps, though, the OCA’s seminaries are producing an abundance of priests? According to the Chancellor’s Office, “Looking to our seminaries, there are currently 55 Master of Divinity students from the Orthodox Church in America enrolled at Saint Vladimir’s (23) and Saint Tikhon’s Seminaries (32), and who will graduate over the next three years. That is an average of 18 potential priests per year. Additionally, St. Herman’s Seminary, a diocesan seminary educating students for ministry specifically in Alaska, currently has 15 students (10 full-time) and sees approximately 1 to 2 students ordained to the priesthood each year. At the Diocese of Mexico’s Colegio Pastoral Ortodoxo San Basilio, there are currently 8 students, all ordination track, in the program; the program has produced 9 ordained clergy already.”

Compare this to the 2020 report, which stated, “There are currently 36 Master of Divinity students from the Orthodox Church in America enrolled at Saint Vladimir’s and Saint Tikhon’s Seminaries, and who will graduate over the next three years. That is an average of 12 potential priests per year. This rate is, therefore, insufficiently meeting the urgent priest shortage the Church is already experiencing today. If the enrollment at our seminaries remains steady, over the next 5-10 years, when the 164 priests in the age group 55-64 currently serving will enter retirement age, another 40+ parishes across the Orthodox Church in America will not have a full-time parish priest. Additionally, the Church will lack priests that can be sent out to the many areas in the United States and Canada where there is presently no Orthodox presence.”

One comparison we can make between the 2020 and 2025 reports, which looks pretty good for the OCA, is that OCA MDiv enrollment is up from 36 to 55. That’s good! That’s 19 more MDiv students, or +6 per year. The 2020 report stated that 36 MDiv students (12 per year) was insufficient to meet the OCA’s needs. It’s not clear how an increase of six graduates per year solves the problem identified in 2020, especially given that, according to the Chancellor’s Office, the OCA has added +6 net new parishes per year since 2021.

And while all of those MDiv students might be potential priests, historically, not all male Orthodox MDiv graduates end up getting ordained. For example, we analyzed the commencement records of St Vladimir’s Seminary from 2008-21 and found that, of the 132 North America-based, Eastern Orthodox males who graduated from the SVS MDiv program in those years, only 83 (that is, 63%) were currently serving as Orthodox priests in 2025. This analysis looked at SVS seminarians not only from the OCA but also from other Orthodox jurisdictions, and the data only goes through 2021, so I’m not sure how useful it is in predicting the future share of OCA seminarians who will become priests. I present it here simply to show that, historically, not all Orthodox MDiv graduates go on to become priests.

The bigger issue with this part of the Chancellor’s Office report is the report’s omission of any data on actual ordinations. How many new priests are ordained each year? Knowing this number, along with the number of retirements and deaths, would give us a much clearer understanding of what we can expect going forward.

Other Inflows and Outflows. One metric that the Chancellor’s Office does report on, albeit in a limited fashion, is clergy transfers: the reception of clergy into the OCA from other jurisdictions, and, on the flip side, the canonical release of OCA clergy. According to the 2025 report (see the above table), in 2024 and 2025, the OCA gained 7 and 4 clergymen, respectively when you compare transfers in to transfers out.

We aren’t told whether all of these clergymen are priests, or whether the table includes deacons (since both are classified as “clergy”). Also, do these numbers include both active priests and others, such as retired priests? And what do the numbers look like for years prior to 2024? The Chancellor’s Office says, “Clergy transfers are thus a minor but not insignificant source of younger clergy to help meet the needs of our growing communities.” But without pre-2024 transfer data, there’s no way to say whether the net positives of the past two years are predictive of future trends.

The Chancellor’s Office report also neglects to mention another important metric: depositions. How many active OCA priests are returned to the ranks of the laity each year, whether due to misconduct, apostasy, or their own request?

Deacons. The 2025 Chancellor’s Office report says that the OCA boasts 319 deacons, of whom 301 are active — and that the Diaconal Vocations Program currently has 81 students and 6 graduates awaiting ordination. Truly, the growth of the diaconate is a wonderful thing. But it’s not clear how this helps with the priest shortage.

The Chancellor’s Office goes on, “Moreover, some number of these deacons may one day be ordained to the presbyterate, should they have both the calling and the qualifications (an M.Div. degree from an Orthodox theological seminary, or, rarely, some equivalent accepted on a case-by-case basis by the Board of Theological Education of the Orthodox Church in America).”

In the OCA (unlike, say, the Antiochian Archdiocese), the jurisdiction is pretty strict about the requirement that priests must have a Master of Divinity degree. Which means that, while the OCA may have over 300 deacons, for purposes of the priest shortage, they’re no different than laymen: just like any non-priest, an OCA deacon must go to seminary if he wishes to become a priest. Yes, deacons can be of great help to parish priests, but they are not a direct solution to the OCA’s priest shortage, except insofar as they can assist parish priests with some of their duties.

Questions. The Chancellor’s Office report raises as many questions as it answers. For example:

• How many priests are ordained in the OCA each year?

• How many active priests does the OCA lose each year due to retirements, deaths, and depositions?

• Does the OCA in fact have an annual net gain when it comes to transfers of active priests, or do transfers in and out tend to balance out over time?

• How many parishes are currently vacant because they simply do not justify the assignment of a full-time priest, versus those that are vacant because the OCA doesn’t have enough priests?

• How many parishes are currently sharing a rector? And how many parishes have a rector who is stretched too thin because of parish growth? For example, how many parishes have a parishioner-to-priest ratio of more than 200:1?

• How do the OCA’s active priest and parish numbers compare to prior years? Is the situation improving, remaining the same, or getting worse over time?

Without answers to these questions, it is difficult to say whether the notable shift in tone between the 2020 and 2025 reports is justified. At OSI, we’ve gathered our own data on the OCA, and after Pascha, we’ll be releasing a comprehensive report that will answer most of these questions. To get a copy of the report as soon as it’s published, subscribe to this Substack, and also sign up for our OSI email list at www.orthodoxstudies.org.

How many people who grew up Orthodox remained Orthodox into adulthood? Put another way, what’s our retention rate for cradles? And is it changing over time? That’s what we’re going to focus on with this analysis.

It’s difficult, if not impossible, for Orthodox entities to collect our own data on this sort of thing. If we at OSI put out a survey of cradle Orthodox, we’d get a disproportionate number of responses from cradles who are still Orthodox, just because the sort of people we can reach, and the sort of people who take Orthodox surveys, are going to be active Orthodox people. So, studying the question of cradle retention isn’t easy.

Fortunately, some secular surveys of the general US adult population ask not only about current religion, but also childhood religion. We can use these surveys to examine retention.

The Data From Pew

The biggest surveys that ask about childhood religion are the Pew Religious Landscape Studies from 2014 and 2023-24. Here’s the unweighted retention data for 2024:

(If you look at Pew’s own report, the numbers will be slightly different. This is because we’re reporting the unweighted, actual respondent data, whereas Pew applies weights to account for biases in their respondent pool.)

What this graph means is that 64% of the 260 people in the 2024 Pew survey who grew up Orthodox are still Orthodox today. That’s a bit better than Catholics but worse than Protestants – with the caveat that Pew doesn’t show, in its publicly-available 2024 dataset, any distinction between different types of Protestants. So a cradle Presbyterian who’s now non-denominational will show up as being “Protestant” both as a child and an adult, even if the reality is that they left their childhood religious tradition.

Pew’s previous Religious Landscape Study was in 2014, and the numbers were similar: 58% retention for the 231 cradle Orthodox who were surveyed. Basically, about 6 in 10 cradle Orthodox in the Pew surveys still identified as Orthodox.

There also wasn’t a significant difference between men and women. In the combined 2014 and 2024 datasets, male retention was 63% and female retention was 60%. If we look at individual years, there are apparent differences – 2014 retention was 55% for men and 62% for women, whereas in 2024 it was 70% for men and 58% for women. But at this point, we’re dealing with small enough samples that these differences aren’t meaningful.

Where Did They Go?

The next obvious question to ask is, where did those ex-Orthodox go?

In the 2024 Pew study, there were 96 “apostate cradles,” of whom 54 (so, the majority) left religion altogether. Of these now-unaffiliated ex-Orthodox, 20 became “nothing in particular,” 17 became atheists, and 17 agnostics. Of the rest, 28 became some kind of heterodox Christian (22 Protestants, 5 Catholics, 1 other). Eight ticked the box for “Other Faith,” and five became some other non-Christian religion.

It’s a roughly similar picture if we go back to the 2014 Pew report. Of the 97 ex-Orthodox that year, 51 left religion altogether (28 nones, 14 atheists, 9 agnostics). Another 42 joined a heterodox Christian tradition (28 Protestants, 9 Catholics, 5 others), and a handful more joined a non-Christian religion.

So, in 2024, while 64% of cradle Orthodox remained faithful to the Church, 74% still identified as Christians. It’s similar if we go back to 2014: 58% remained Orthodox, but 76% continued to identify as Christian.

Other Sources

No other study with childhood and current religion data can compare to Pew when it comes to sample sizes. But we’ve tracked down numerous smaller studies that ask about childhood and current religion. Individually, these studies aren’t very helpful – for example, the 2019 PRRI American Values Survey polled 2,526 people, of whom a dozen grew up Orthodox – and of those, 5 were still Orthodox as adults. We obviously can’t draw any conclusions at all from a dozen people. But – and I know this is sort of technically irresponsible, but bear with me – if we aggregate these various little surveys, we can come up with another estimate of the cradle retention rate.

We found 10 of these smaller surveys conducted between 2014 and the present. Combined, there were 237 respondents who grew up Orthodox, 128 of whom were still Orthodox as adults. That works out to 54% – not too far off from the 2014 and 2024 Pew numbers. In those same years, the General Social Survey, which is done every couple years, had 94 cradle Orthodox respondents, of whom 49 were still Orthodox (52%).

Going back a bit earlier, we have have another 10 smaller surveys conducted between 2000 and 2012. These had, in the aggregate, 186 respondents who grew up Orthodox, of whom 117 were still Orthodox. That’s 63% – once again, roughly in the range of the Pew data. In those years, the GSS had 84 respondents who were raised Orthodox, with 71% retention.

63%, 54%, 58%, 63%... something like six in ten cradle Orthodox in America have remained Orthodox. The GSS hints that retention may have declined in recent years (from 71% in 2000-12 to 52% in 2014-24), but the sample sizes are so small that we can’t put too much stock in them — especially in light of the Pew data, which showed a slight (but statistically insignificant) increase in retention.

~60% retention isn’t terrible, in the context of American Christianity, but as the father of seven kids, I can say that it certainly isn’t acceptable, either. At OSI, we’re planning to do our own research into the question of cradle retention and engagement in the future, so that we can better understand why some kids leave the Church while others grow up to become faithful adults.