The Holy Ascension Orthodox Church in Albion, Michigan planted St. Olga of Alaska Orthodox Church as an outreach in Hillsdale in August 2024.
The St. Olga of Alaska mission rents the building of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, located in downtown Hillsdale. The timeline for its establishment as a permanent church is unknown, according to Rev. Joshua Frigerio, the priest at St. Olga of Alaska mission and Holy Ascension.
“Because the Orthodox came later to this country, we’re underrepresented here, but we’re growing rather quickly at the moment,” Frigerio said. “So, churches are getting fuller, and missions are popping up here and there in places where there didn’t used to be one.”
Until the church plant, Orthodox Christians in Hillsdale traveled to Holy Ascension Orthodox Church for worship, the closest Orthodox church to Hillsdale, according to Frigerio.
“All of the current Orthodox in Hillsdale come to my parish in Albion, essentially,” Frigerio said. “There are maybe 50 or so people from Hillsdale, I’m guessing, plus kids. Probably about one-third of my parish is from Hillsdale.”
The drive from Hillsdale to Albion, about 35 minutes, can be taxing, according to Brent Cline, associate professor of English and faculty adviser for the Orthodox Christian Fellowship.
“The commute starts to wear on you, and it makes you double think going to some of the services that aren’t liturgies, because you just think, ‘yeah, that’s a lot of gas, and that’s a lot of time, and it’s a lot of money,’” Cline said.
St. Olga does not yet have liturgies on Sundays, so Orthodox Christians in Hillsdale continue to attend Holy Ascension, according to Frigerio.
“We don’t have space or a priest for Sunday mornings in Hillsdale,” Frigerio said. “We’ll have irregular Saturday morning liturgy, probably once a month.”
The Hillsdale Orthodox community has already been established in Albion, making it easier to transition to a new plant in Hillsdale, according to Cline.
“It makes it easier, at least for me, this is just a personality thing, that I am not stepping foot in a new community, this is actually a continuation of the community of Holy Ascension,” Cline said.
Although the mission does not have Sunday liturgies, they host other events during the week, according to senior Alexandra Laird, president of the Hillsdale College Orthodox Christian Fellowship.
“Our priest from Albion comes down to do Vespers every Thursday,” Laird said. “Then afterwards we have either a Q&A session or catechism, which is how the converts learn about Orthodoxy.”
The Orthodox community has grown rapidly at Hillsdale and continues to thrive with this new mission, according to Laird.
“I came in here and it was a really good community, but it was very small. And now I’m president, and I’m a senior, and it’s tripled in size,” Laird said. “It’s really nice that we have St. Olga’s mission now, because we can do events there.”
The Orthodox Christian Fellowship hosts occasional events at St. Olga’s mission for students to become more ingrained in the Orthodox community, according to Laird.
“We had one event a few weeks ago that was ‘Meet the Orthodox Professors,’ because there are a lot of Orthodox professors on campus,” Laird said. “So, we had professors and students mix and get to know each other.”
The church may eventually break off from Holy Ascension Church and become its own parish, according to Frigerio.
“At some point we would need a different building, because the Episcopalians use their building on Sunday morning,” Frigerio said. “I don’t know when — someday — we would just switch to a Sunday morning service and actually split off our parish.”
A couple challenges would need to be met in order to establish St. Olga’s as a permanent church in Hillsdale, according to Frigerio.
“One is finding a space, and two would be finding a second priest because I can’t be in two places at once,” Frigerio said. “So those are kind of the two final hurdles to get the mission really off and running. But this is the preparatory stage.”
