The St. Alexander Nevsky parish was originally the center of a Russian community.

RICHMOND (AP) – As it celebrates its 50th birthday this weekend, Maine’s only Russian Orthodox church credits its growth in recent years to converts who now outnumber parishioners of Russian heritage.

Those who changed denominations to become part of the St. Alexander Nevsky congregation say they were drawn by the Russian Orthodox tradition and the beauty of its services.

“It gives my husband and I comfort that the church has been around since the Apostles. And with everything in the world changing, it gives me comfort that the church has stayed the same for all that time. It really gives me a sense of direction and order,” said Elizabeth Powers, a former Methodist who joined the parish eight years ago.

Abraham Fortier, who was raised as a Roman Catholic and later became a Protestant, said the church provided something he found nowhere else.

“It was the tradition in the Orthodox Church of the focus on the inner life and the fact of a 2,000-year unbroken tradition passed down from generation to generation of this inner life, this prayer of the heart, this mode of living that is not outward but inward,” he said.

The pastor, the Rev. Chad Williams, 48, is himself a convert from the Episcopal Church in 1980. He was ordained in 1985 and took over the Richmond parish in 1987.

At that time, he recalled, the church had slightly more than 60 members, more than two-thirds of whom were of Russian heritage. Then church membership dropped to a low of about 20 worshippers eight years ago.

But as the numbers in the congregation recovered, the Russian members’ dominance diminished, Williams said.

Williams said the increase in membership at his church comes largely as a result of non-Russians such as Powers and Fortier looking for a more traditional religious experience.

“The other Christian denominations have changed drastically over the centuries in what they believe and what their behavior code is,” Williams said. “The Orthodox Church hasn’t changed any of the things it believes, and its moral teachings are the same as they’ve always were.”

The St. Alexander Nevsky parish was originally the center of a Russian community of as many as 300 families that moved to the area with the help of Baron Vladimir von Poushental. A local resident, he bought inexpensive parcels of land after World War II and advertised them in Russian-language publications.

Now most of those families have either moved away or melded into the community at large.

Williams said his church is sanctioned by the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, which separated itself from the church in Russia after the Communist revolution.

The Rev. Serafim Gan, a priest at the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad’s international headquarters in New York, said church membership nationally is growing, largely on a wave of Russian immigration after the breakup of the Soviet Union. He estimated that the church has more than a million members across the United States.

AP-ES-12-06-03 1246EST

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