How could the faith be lived in the new land? Besides keeping the church’s yearly cycle with its feasts, fasts and saints’ days, there were many pressing needs—to baptize children, to bury the dead, even to marry in the new land. By 1896 there were more than seventy families settled in the area near Edmonton wanting to establish parish life, intent on having a place to gather for worship and cemeteries for burial. When their appeal met with success in 1897, the first visit of an Orthodox priest, Father Dmitri Kamnev, brought out huge numbers—600 persons at the Nemirsky farm gathering near Limestone Lake (later known as Star) and nearly 100 persons at Theodore Fuhr’s farm near Rabbit Hill (Nisku). By the time western Canada was being settled, Slavic immigrants were also establishing themselves in rural Minnesota, Russians and Greeks were populating the Seattle area, and swelling numbers of central Europeans were settling in the eastern U.S., particularly New York and Pennsylvania. Many of these were, or would become, adherents of the Orthodox faith. It was a period of great re-grafting into the Church of those who were previously Uniate.

In 1870, a separate Diocese of the Aleutian Islands and Alaska had been created that had formalized the work of the early Alaskan missions and the growing church on the American continent. "Russo-Orthodox" was a contrived term that implied the common Kyivan roots of all eastern Slavs, as opposed to specifically Russians or Ukrainians. Various bishops assigned to the new Diocese would left their mark on the Church’s development, most notable among them Bishop TIKHON (Belavin), later Patriarch of Moscow and canonized a saint in 1989.

Leaders

Archbishop VLADIMIR (Sokolovsky), who served the Diocese from 1888 – 1891, was a devout bishop, a linguist and musician. He was the first archpastor to traverse the entire continent, making three transcontinental Episcopal journeys, serving both the Orthodox and dialoguing with those of the Unia (Eastern Catholic) faith who were seeking to be reunited to Orthodoxy. For America he set his English translation of the Divine Liturgy into the common chants of the Russian liturgical tradition, making the use of English language increasingly possible.

Bishop NICHOLAI (Ziorov), who succeeded him, expanded the diocese with more parishes. He also visited Alaska, and he would be the first Orthodox bishop to visit the young Canadian parishes. Through his efforts the Russkii-Americanskii Pravoslavnii Vestnik (Russian American Orthodox Messenger) an English-Russian bimonthly, began publication. As a journal of church activity, with articles, printed correspondence, appeals for parishes, reports on settlers’ lives and the travel of clergy, Vestnik did much to extend the vision of the Church, encouraging a united effort for Orthodox growth.

When St. John of Kronstadt’s famous diary, My Life in Christ was published in English for the first time in April, 1897, Vestnik informed its readers that the Bishop NICHOLAI had bought two hundred copies for distribution,”the book will prove most useful to our Orthodox missions in America and Japan, and it should generally become widely diffused among Orthodox readers who know English.” During the time of Bishop Nicholai, the Orthodox mission school was moved from San Francisco to Minneapolis, which would serve to benefit the Orthodox faithful over the Canadian border.