History

Saint John the Divine Greek Orthodox Church of Jacksonville, Florida is the third oldest Greek Orthodox church in the State of Florida, its story beginning in 1916 when fourteen parishioners came together to establish a Greek Orthodox community in the First Coast city. In those earliest years the Reverend Arsenious Davis, a visiting priest from Saint Paul's Greek Orthodox Church in Savannah, Georgia, celebrated the Divine Liturgy in the homes of Jacksonville's Greek residents while the community organized and secured a charter. The first dedicated church home was acquired on the corner of Laura and Union Streets in downtown Jacksonville, and Reverend Father Michael Sarris became the first assigned priest of the new parish.

The parish's first church building dates to 1916, followed by another in 1919, as the growing congregation worked toward more adequate facilities. In 1968 the community moved to 3850 Atlantic Boulevard, to a church designed by Jacksonville architect Ted Pappas, whose parents had immigrated from Greece. Pappas faced a theological challenge that became a Jacksonville legend: the church's north-south lot made the traditional eastward orientation impossible. Most of the congregation embraced the new design, but one faithful elder who had donated the organ always faced east during services, convinced the building would collapse if it deviated from ancient practice. The 1968 Atlantic Boulevard church won a national architectural award for its design, making it one of the more celebrated ecclesiastical buildings in the city's history.

As Jacksonville continued to grow southward and eastward through the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the parish acquired more than twenty-three acres of land on Beach Boulevard. After years of planning and capital campaigning under the leadership of successive priests and lay leaders, the new three-domed Byzantine campus was completed in time for Christmas 2018, and the Thyranoixia was celebrated with Metropolitan Alexios of Atlanta presiding, the first Opening of the Doors service in Jacksonville in fifty years. The historic one-hundred-year-old iconostasis from the original church was carefully disassembled into twenty pieces by Jacksonville master craftsman John Dillow and reconstructed in the new chapel, connecting the community's first century to its second.

Saint John the Divine Greek Orthodox Church at 12760 Beach Boulevard in Jacksonville serves the Orthodox Christian faithful of Northeast Florida as a parish of the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Atlanta within the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, the only Greek Orthodox church in Jacksonville and a spiritual home for approximately 400 families from as far away as Saint Augustine, Fernandina Beach, and southern Georgia.