The Society of Saint John of Shanghai and San Francisco is a nationwide, pan-Orthodox fraternity of Orthodox Christians in the United States, founded in 2025 to strengthen the life of the Church in America through concrete works of faith, fellowship, and service.

We believe that the building up of an American Orthodox Church—faithful to Holy Tradition and rooted in the soil of this land—requires Orthodox Christians to labor together across jurisdictions, cultures, and regions in the work of the Gospel. The Society exists to help make that cooperation real, durable, and lasting.

Inspired by the missionary witness of Saint John of Shanghai and San Francisco, we are dedicated to evangelizing the American people; building, preserving, and sustaining churches, monasteries, and holy sites; organizing pilgrimages; publishing and educational initiatives; and defending the rights of Orthodox Christians at home and abroad.

We are non-partisan and apolitical, yet firmly committed to the defense of religious freedom as a fundamental right given to man by God—as enshrined in our nation’s constitution—wherever they are threatened.

At its heart, the Society of Saint John is a coalition of parish brotherhoods and sisterhoods—local communities of Orthodox Christians working together for the life of their parishes and the good of the wider Church. By uniting these local efforts into a national fellowship, we seek to help our communities meet the spiritual, material, and pastoral challenges facing Orthodoxy in America today.

The Society works in close cooperation with our hierarchs and clergy, both to receive guidance for its vision and operations and to support their ministries in practical and meaningful ways. At the national level, the Society seeks to provides workshops, mentorship, common cause, and organizational support to help parishes establish healthy, enduring brotherhoods and sisterhoods capable of sustained service over generations.

As a center of connection for parish organizations at the local, state, and national level, the Society of Saint John serves as a vessel through which larger works—beyond the capacity of any single parish—can be undertaken together, in unity, for the good estate of the holy churches of God and the union of all.