History

Saints Constantine and Helen Greek Orthodox Church traces its origins to Lawrence, Massachusetts, where Greek immigrants had been settling since the late nineteenth century, drawn by the mill towns of the Merrimack Valley and the promise of steady work in one of New England's great industrial corridors. On May 18, 1917, a group of eight Greek immigrants visited the Department of Corporation at Lawrence City Hall to complete the legal documents required for the establishment of a church. On July 16, 1917, the official state document was received, formally recognizing a Greek Orthodox Church bearing the name of Saints Constantine and Helena. The early congregation worshipped in a rented storefront on Essex Street before securing space on Broadway.

Simultaneously, the Greek immigrant women organized themselves into the Society of Grecian Ladies and worked diligently at fundraising, their efforts proving essential to the parish's survival and growth. In 1924 the Ladies Society purchased a plot of land at the corner of Essex and Gale Streets in Lawrence. Working hand in hand with the men of the community, they continued fundraising, and on August 1, 1936, groundbreaking ceremonies were held for what would finally become their own church structure, a permanent home for a community that had spent two decades building toward this moment.

For decades the Lawrence church served the Merrimack Valley Greek community faithfully, but as the surrounding neighborhood changed in the 1980s and the parish's members had spread across the northern Massachusetts suburbs, the decision was made in 1985 to relocate. The Doyle Lumber Company property on Chandler Road in the neighboring town of Andover was purchased, and the parish established its new home there. Through the late 1990s and into the 2000s the community experienced significant growth, and in 2007, on the occasion of the parish's ninetieth anniversary, a new twenty-thousand-square-foot Family Life Center was dedicated and celebrated by Metropolitan Methodios of Boston, completing a campus that could meet the needs of a flourishing suburban parish.

Saints Constantine and Helen Greek Orthodox Church at 71 Chandler Road in Andover serves the Orthodox Christian faithful of the greater Lawrence and Andover area as a parish of the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Boston within the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, a community that carried its faith from a rented storefront in Lawrence to a permanent home a century later in the suburbs of the Merrimack Valley.