After receiving Metropolitan Hilarion’s blessing in 2018 to form a mission dedicated to the memory of St. Thecla, Equal-to-the-Apostles and Protomartyr, a small group began to plan the realization of that blessing. In February of 2019 preparations were finalized, and a month later, on Clean Monday (March 11), the mission served its first service, Great Compline with the reading of the Penitential Canon of St. Andrew of Crete, on the first day of Great and Holy Lent. Our inaugural Divine Liturgy was served at the beginning of the following week. These and all the services for our first 3-½ weeks were served in the cafeteria of Sligo Creek Middle School in Silver Spring, MD, as we continued our search for a suitable rental property.

Our search for our next worship home ultimately took us to Kensington MD, where we rented space in an office building next to a Mormon bookstore, which had sublet a portion of their own space as they downsized. Our first service in our new home, a Vespers service, took place on Saturday evening, April 6, with our first Divine Liturgy in Kensington following the next morning. With a few exceptions, the entirety of our parish’s liturgical, sacramental, and communal  life to date has been experienced from this location.

While the space is not optimally laid out for use as an Orthodox temple, it has nonetheless been our home for almost four years at this point. We’ve celebrated several baptisms, prepared couples for a number of weddings, educated our parish youth, and provided catechesis and adult spiritual formation, all within our single-room parish, which has served as temple, trapeza (refectory), and classroom. We have also been blessed with two archpastoral visits from Metropolitan Jonah for the celebration of our annual parish feasts in 2021 and 2022, and we look forward to inviting our beloved First Hierarch, His Eminence Metropolitan Nicholas, as soon as is practical.

As 2022 draws to a close, we’re praying for God’s guidance as we find ourselves again searching for a new parish home, having received word from our current landlord that we must vacate our current space in Kensingon by March 31, 2023.

In this as in all things, God’s providence is at work, as the mission began its existence during the Great and Holy Lent in 2019 and we’ll need to relocate during the same salvific season in 2023. We are actively looking for a new property, preferably to purchase but also to lease should that prove to not be possible within the relatively small window we have between December 2022 and March 2023.

In our initial years in first Silver Spring and subsequently in Kensington, we’ve been blessed to see our community experience slow but steady growth, even during the fraught years of 2020 and 2021. God is merciful, and in His lovingkindness He has granted us four glorious Paschal Feasts in two locations—our current worship space in Kensington and the multipurpose room of Warner Memorial Presbyterian Church, also in Kensington, for the one year (2021) in which we were unable to celebrate the Resurrection of Christ in our own church.

We are thankful for the support we’ve received from a host of benefactors and friends of the parish; without all of them we would not exist. We also thank God for the innumerable blessings he has bestowed upon us, in times both joyous and trying, and in imitation of the example shown by our holy Hierarch and father John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople, we too exclaim Glory to God for all things!