I am not Orthodox, but I am ministering in a rural area (in Australia). I would suggest that the 10-minute thing might make sense in the cities, but in rural areas, many folks live more than 10 minutes from the nearest anything, and would certainly expect and accept having to go further than that to church. Perhaps that kind of difference ought to be taken into account?
I think that’s a very good point!
Right now there are very many people who commute two hours or more, round trip, to access an Orthodox church, in areas of the US that have the population to support one, and new missions have been opening, for example, the new Antiochian Orthodox mission in St. George, Utah, which improves coverage in the Southwest, but there is another nearby metropolitan area to the south of Las Vegas which is two hours away from any Orthodox church, and then there is the town of Pahrump, the capital of Nye County, which has Orthodox Christians in it who have to commute across the scorching desert to Las Vegas. And things actually get worse as one heads east across the Rockies, so that when one reaches the sparsely populated areas of the Western Prairie States, in places like Wyoming or Eastern Colorado or Montana, the commutes become even more untenable, and it is not until one heads south towards Oklahoma or Texas or East to the more populated areas that parish density returns to normal. It’s ironic, but there are people in the sparsely populated areas of Alaska and rural Pennsylvania who have better access to Orthodox churches than people in a massive portion of the interior of the lower 48.
Just in California, Nevada and Arizona I can think of twenty population centers that should have an orthodox church, and which have plenty of churches from other denominations, and which have Orthodox Christian residents, but no local church.
One unpleasant area for the Orthodox is the High Desert of the San Bernardion County, where the only Orthodox churches are, to my knowledge, the Coptic Orthodox monastery in Newbury Springs and the OCA parish of St. George the Martyr (which also is home to St. Julian Syriac Orthodox Church), which results in round trip travel times that are quite severe, at least an hour, for many residents of that area, which is increasingly highly populated.
A problem we have is that our parishes tend to be concentrated in inner suburban areas, but many of them were established when those were in the outer suburbs.
