History

Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church of Kansas City, Missouri was founded in 1910 by a small group of Greek immigrants who had settled in Kansas City after the great wave of Greek immigration in the early years of the twentieth century. Though as many as five thousand Greeks had passed through Kansas City in the early 1900s, most were itinerant railroad workers who eventually moved on. The small number who stayed put down roots, went into business for themselves, and banded together to form the city's first Greek Orthodox community under the leadership of Father Chariton Papagopoulos, the parish's first pastor.

The community's first permanent church was built at 14th and Broadway, completed in 1912 and consecrated in 1920, giving the Kansas City Greek community the institutional home it had worked toward. Through the following decades the parish grew and flourished, until a fire in 1938 destroyed the Broadway building, leaving the congregation in temporary quarters. In the interim, Grace and Holy Trinity Episcopal Cathedral offered its facilities to the parish for services. In 1941 the community relocated to a new church on Linwood Boulevard, where it experienced a period of rapid growth described by parish historians as proud and full of enthusiasm, with parishioners rivaling one another in contributions to pay off the mortgage, which was retired in full within the first few years.

The Linwood Boulevard era was defined by the full flowering of parish organizational life: the founding of GOYA in 1951, the growth of Sunday School, Greek School, and choir, and an outpouring of community activity that brought all generations together. As membership spread across the metropolitan area and the Linwood neighborhood changed, the parish searched through the 1960s for a new home. The Wornall Road property was purchased on October 9, 1968, and in 1973 the congregation closed the Linwood church and moved to temporary quarters at Loretto Academy at 125th and Wornall while the present facilities were completed, taking up permanent residence on Wornall Road in the late 1970s.

Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church at 7010 Wornall Road in Kansas City serves the Orthodox Christian faithful of the greater Kansas City metropolitan area as a parish of the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Denver within the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, a community of more than a century's continuous witness to the Orthodox Christian faith in the Heart of America.