History

The Orthodox Mission Church of Arizona in Florence traces its origins to the presence of Saint Anthony's Greek Orthodox Monastery, the largest Orthodox monastic complex in the Western Hemisphere, which Elder Ephraim of blessed memory established in the Sonoran Desert outside Florence in the summer of 1995 when six monks arrived from the Holy Mountain of Athos. From the monastery's earliest years, pilgrims traveled from across the globe to benefit from its rich spiritual life, and in time families began relocating to the Florence area to live near the monastery and draw continuously from its Christ-centered environment. As more families settled in the Coolidge and Florence communities, the need for a local parish became evident, with the closest Orthodox churches more than an hour away.

The mission parish began taking shape in 2018, when Father Earl Cantos, still assigned to Holy Cross Church in Flagstaff, lived in Florence and commuted to Flagstaff each weekend for Divine Services. By the spring of 2023, the congregation gathering on Sundays had outgrown Father Earl's home, and the community began holding Sunday Liturgy in local venues across Florence and Coolidge, including Mount Athos Café, Pita Patio Grill, the Green Tree Hotel, Three Hierarchs Academy, and the American Legion Post 9, with each host extending the kind of generous hospitality that has sustained mission communities throughout the history of the Church. Around this same time the mission secured fourteen acres of land on the outskirts of Florence to build a permanent home.

The community that has gathered around the mission reflects the diversity of Orthodox Christianity in the modern American West, with members hailing from Greece, Russia, Ukraine, Romania, Serbia, Estonia, China, Mexico, and the growing community of American converts who have embraced Orthodoxy in search of the Truth. All liturgical services are celebrated primarily in English in the Byzantine musical tradition.

The Orthodox Mission Church of Arizona in Florence serves the Orthodox Christian faithful of Coolidge and Florence as a mission parish of the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of San Francisco within the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, a young community rooted in the soil of the Arizona desert and nurtured by the ancient monastic tradition of the Holy Mountain.