Our Mission

Mission Statement

We exist to form faithful Orthodox Christian priests, deacons, and lay leaders into a scriptural, eucharistic, patristic, liturgical, and pastoral theological community oriented toward making disciples of all nations.

Understanding Our Mission

• We exist by recognizing St. Tikhon’s Seminary as a fundamentally incarnate and ecclesial institution. But who is this “we” in our mission? It is not our Trustees, Administration, Faculty, or even seminarians. We are, rather, an expression of the entire Holy Orthodox Church and a result of its timeless need for those who minister and preach the Gospel.
• The word “educate” is intentionally not explicit in our mission. Instead, we form the entire human person for ministry, with education as an integral means to fulfilling that purpose.
• Seminary is neither the beginning nor end of faithful Christian living. Thus, we aspire to enroll men who are well-prepared by life prior to seminary, building on a solid foundation laid in the parish. Seminary begins and ends in the parish.
• We serve the faith of Orthodox Christians, primarily as an institution of the Orthodox Church in America, with a collaborative spirit toward other canonical Orthodox Churches, and neighborly engagement with those beyond the canonical tradition. Ours is a Middle Way, neither compromising our faith nor insulating our views.
• Our core function is the formation of priests and deacons for ordained ministry, but we also prepare lay leaders for lay ministry in any capacity that benefits from our programs. 
• As with our forerunners in the faith, our formation and life together is saturated in scriptural truth. We uphold and esteem the Word of God in its properly exalted place and deem the Holy Scriptures indispensable to our formation approach.
• Our vocation is eucharistic, bound together at the chalice, striving in all things to offer our lives and our world back to God as a reasonable sacrifice.
• Education at St. Tikhon’s Seminary is essentially patristic, following in the doctrines, practices, and ways of life of the Church Fathers and Saints who go before us as a cloud of faithful witnesses.
• Worship and prayer at St. Tikhon’s Seminary is thoroughly liturgical, instilling sound practice in the Divine Services of the Orthodox Church and cultivating the spirit of a people called out from the world for heavenly worship on behalf of the entire universe.
• Our approach to theology, in keeping with Orthodox tradition, is always and irrevocably pastoral. Our model graduates are those who become all things to all people in order to tend their lives and guide them to salvation in Jesus Christ.
• Our local identity is that of a theological community, using training in exposition of the Christian Faith as an entryway into life together, as a lifelong spiritual family in Christ, that endures long after graduation and ordination. 
• Our institution remains oriented, not merely to produce a certain quality of graduate, but ultimately to keep the commandments of Our Lord.
• Among these commandments, and chief to our mission outcomes, is the Lord’s commission to make disciples of all nations. Our success is measured by the ability and willingness of our graduates to evangelize with a pure and undefiled religion, feed and clothe the poor, care for the orphan and widow, visit those in prison, teach others to go and do likewise, and to give this love and mercy to all as freely as they have received it in grace.

Seminary at a Glance

Founded in 1938 as a Pastoral School by resolution of the 6th All-American Sobor of the Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church in North America (North American Metropolia), the Seminary has historically grown on the fertile soil of the Orthodox faith, supported by the deep faith and love of several generations of Orthodox people, nourished by its Russian Orthodox roots, and reaching into the deep-flowing waters of a 2000-year spiritual and cultural tradition. Officially transformed from a Pastoral School into a Seminary by the Holy Synod of the Metropolia in 1942, the Seminary has visibly progressed along the educational path determined by its founders.

In 1967, the Seminary was chartered by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. A formal credit transfer agreement with Marywood College (now Marywood University), in nearby Scranton, was articulated and signed in 1975. In 1988, the Seminary was authorized by the Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE) to award the Master of Divinity (M.Div.) degree to its graduates. The first M.Div. degrees were conferred on the graduating class of 1989. In June 2004, the Seminary was accredited by the Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada (ATS).

Statement of Purpose

In the 200-year history of Orthodoxy in America, Orthodox theological education has continually had to face and meet special missionary challenges. The living tradition of Orthodox spiritual life, however, firmly and deeply rooted in the Church’s experience in the Old World, remains for us a source of inspiration and energy, courage and wisdom, patience and tolerance, and moves us to do the work of God here in the twenty-first century.

As a community, we are committed to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, as proclaimed by the Apostles, articulated by the Holy Fathers, and manifested fully in the Orthodox Church. Holding fast to these commitments, we believe that it is essential to provide an educational experience that fosters the personal, spiritual, and pastoral formation of our students in preparation for service to Christ in ordained and lay ministry. At St. Tikhon’s, we embody the Holy Tradition of the Orthodox Church in a lived community as the authentic means of acquiring the Orthodox spiritual, theological, and pastoral ethos. Through participation in this community, our students acquire that which is necessary to carry out the divine, ordained task of the Church in contemporary society.

Because of its well-known Faculty dedicated to the Patristic Tradition and through its close relationship with St. Tikhon’s Monastery, our Seminary has gradually emerged as a significant center of Orthodox theological education and spiritual formation that serves the pressing needs of the Church in North America. Through our relationship with the Monastery, we provide our students with an ideal environment for pastoral formation that integrates worship, theological study, field education, and personal transformation in the context of authentic Christian community. With God’s blessings, we can expect the continued growth and spiritual enrichment of the institutional life of the Seminary, and the increase of its sustaining contribution to the life of the broader Church community.

Statement On Diversity & Unity

As an institution of the Orthodox Church in America, a jurisdiction of the worldwide Holy Orthodox Christian Church, St. Tikhon’s Orthodox Theological Seminary’s primary mission consists in the provision of the “necessary theological, liturgical, spiritual, and moral foundations” (Statement on the Identity and Mission of the Seminary) for the formation of Orthodox clergy. The Seminary’s mission is founded upon our Lord Jesus Christ’s affirmation of the Church as the “light of the world” and His accompanying exhortation “to let your light so shine” (Mathew 5:14, 16), thereby calling each member of the Body of Christ to become a living embodiment of the Gospel. Indeed, insofar as “there are many members, yet one body” (1 Corinthians 12:20), we recognize the Church’s need for the diversity of gifts and talents present in her membership, and affirm that those gifts are manifest in unique ways within each member of Christ’s Church whether male or female, young or old, ordained or lay. Accordingly, St. Tikhon’s also regards the training of individuals for lay-leadership and non-clerical ministry as indispensable, striving for the inclusion and education of men and women seeking to serve the Church in roles outside of ordained ministry positions or simply for personal enrichment. 

In keeping with its commitments to biblical foundations and the Holy Tradition of the Orthodox Church, St. Tikhon’s operates in accordance with the fundamental theological precept disclosed by Genesis 1:26–27: every human being from the beginning of time bears the distinct image of God and is called to realize His likeness. In the superabundance of His divine love, God invited all of humanity to participate in eternal life and into an ineffable communion with the members of Holy Trinity. The forebears of the human race turned away from this divine-human relationship, choosing the cultivation of self-love and pride in place of unity and communion. The human rejection of God’s love brought evil into the world, leading to a rupture in divine-human relations and causing fragmentation and division in human nature. Rather than imitating the unity of the Triune God as He intended, human beings barbarically turned one against the other in a manner resembling wild beasts. Not content that humanity should remain in this degraded and divided state, the merciful God did not forget His creatures but sent His Son to redeem fallen humanity and renew our nature, Who, through the Cross and Resurrection, reopened the path to divine-human communion and the transformation of a divided human race into a unified people. It was to this end that Christ established the Church through the Holy Spirit: to regather fragmented humanity into a unified whole, distributing the fruits of His redemptive works through the medium of a common sacramental life. We affirm that this divine work is for all people, and we echo the Gospel’s call to unity in Christ regardless of sex, age, race, occupation, socioeconomic status, language, or nation. This understanding is undergirded by the words of St. Paul when he writes: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). The Church as the nexus of both this age and the age to come preserves a principle of “unity with distinctions,” recognizing and affirming the diverse backgrounds and experiences of humanity yet striving for the transformation and integration of all “members” into a univocal “Body of Christ.” This call to “transformation” thus functions on both particular and universal levels: each individual in the Church contributes to the achievement of unity through the personal realization of the divine likeness, becoming a microcosmic instance of Christian love and voluntarily sharing in the macrocosmic Ecclesia.

We believe in the perennial import of this Christian vision for the transfiguration of the world through the spiritual renewal of each person, and this belief underlies and governs all the practical realities associated with St. Tikhon’s mission and our institutional understanding of unity and diversity. In service to this larger vision, the Seminary also seeks to contribute to diversity and inclusion within the larger socio-cultural framework of North America through the education of underrepresented and marginalized religious demographics. Orthodox Christians constitute a religious minority in the United States, Canada, and Mexico, with few institutions of their own and limited media in which to express their distinctive voice or cultivate the unique aspects of their tradition. It can also be noted that Orthodox Christianity encapsulates within its communities many indigenous populations within North and South America. As an accredited institution in the continental United States, St. Tikhon’s is uniquely positioned to contribute to the preservation and cultivation of traditions beloved by the ethnically diverse members of the worldwide Orthodox Church. In addition to the students of diverse ethnic backgrounds from various Orthodox jurisdictions in North America, the Seminary also hosts and educates students from overseas, providing opportunities for clergy candidates from underprivileged circumstances or countries afflicted by political and social upheaval. Such students have come to us from Africa, the Middle East, Eastern and Western Europe, India, and Australia. St. Tikhon’s also has accepted and continues to accept and help form students from confessions and traditions outside its own, who, when taken together, represent a sizable portion of our student body.

Institutional Effectiveness Statement

As an institution of higher education of the Orthodox Church in America, St. Tikhon’s Orthodox Theological Seminary seeks to fulfill its guiding mission – “The primary mission of the Seminary lies in providing the necessary theological, liturgical, spiritual, and moral foundations for Orthodox men to become, as God so wills, good shepherds of His Holy Orthodox Church. At the same time, however, the Seminary also recognizes that many individuals choose to enroll in a professional theological training program for the fulfillment of needs other than those of ordained ministry.”

Fulfilling this mission since 1938, St. Tikhon’s Seminary has acted as a major center of formation for those seeking to serve the Orthodox Church in various ministry capacities within North America and abroad. Our effectiveness in fulfilling this mission is manifest in several ways.

We can first point to the findings of our most recent self-study process with the Association of Theological Schools that concluded in the Fall of 2023. In recommending St. Tikhon’s for a reaffirmation of accreditation for 10 years, the Comprehensive Site Visit Committee made several significant and positive references to the teaching and learning process here at St. Tikhon’s. In spending time on campus and reviewing the school's Self-Study report and numerous data points provided within its documentation, the Site Visit Committee noted that the present work of the community of scholars and practitioners “has led to a palpable enthusiasm for the mission of the school and its formation goals. The quality of full-time and adjunct faculty, as evidenced by their scholarship in publications, and effectiveness in the classroom, as evidenced by the feedback gathered from current students during the visit, is significant. Both faculty and students report that their studies and coursework encourage positive interaction and theological conversation within the wider learning community.” Among the Seminary’s inherent strengths, the Comprehensive Committee spoke of the Seminary as: “A strong community of formation that is enhanced by the integral relationship with the monastery affording students a profound practice of liturgy, ascetics, and music.” And finally, the Seminary community was possessed of “a highly committed and qualified faculty, a talented leadership team, and dedicated students.”

Tikhon’s Seminary Master of Divinity Program has consistently had a tight-knit community of learning, which members have consistently described as allowing for significant interaction between faculty and students. As reported in our last self-study, over our last period of accreditation, we have seen an average Student-Faculty ratio of 15:1 for all courses taught at the Seminary during this period. This relatively small class size allows our students to have significant interaction with dedicated Faculty, experts in their respective fields, both inside and outside the classroom. As our program also incorporates a field education component, the student-faculty ratio provides for close supervision and guidance in practical, hands-on experiences within ministry settings (i.e., prison, nursing home, and hospital). Of this tight-knit environment, the 2023 ATS Site Visit Committee noted: “Students consistently reported that the degree program faculty were accessible and supportive in their academic and formational progress.”

The success of our M.Div. Program is also manifest in the degree completion rate of our program and placements of our students in positions of ministry from our graduating classes. Looking at data from 2021-2026, we see that all class years have a 99.8% degree completion rate within the expected three years of full-time M.Div. study. This completion rate tracks with a 100% retention rate of students across all class years during the same period of time.

In the way of placement, over the period of 2021-2026, the Seminary has sent out 80 Graduates, 61.2% of whom are presently serving as priests within the Church, 11.2% as Deacons, and 11% in minor orders of the clergy. Ninety-five percent (95%) of those ordained to the Holy Priesthood are actively serving in ministry as rectors, assistant priests, and/or military chaplains. Eighty-six (6) percent of the deacons are actively serving in ministries that include youth director/pastoral assistant, diocesan administration, and parish deacons.

The Seminary Seal

In the established and time-honored tradition of institutions of higher education, the seal of St. Tikhon‘s Seminary symbolically expresses core values found at the heart of the Seminary‘s institutional life and ethos. These values inspire and guide the learning and teaching process, as well as the public service of our students and faculty.

Emblematic of the symbolic legacy of the Orthodox theological schools of Russia, the seminary seal depicts the image of the Lord Christ 'Not Made with Hands,' traditionally borne by the People of God on processional banners and standards of the Christian faith, set against the background of a Greek cross.

The Slavonic letters IC XC, characteristic of the Slavic historical roots of the Seminary‘s ethos, affirm the Lord to be the historical Jesus, Who was crucified under Pontius Pilate, Who suffered, and was buried, and resurrected on the third day, in accord with the Scriptures. The Greek letters O ON, meaning 'He Who Is,‘ or 'The Existing One,‘ exemplary of Orthodox Christian patristic theology, proclaim Him to be God, the Pre-Eternal Divine Word of the Father, Who in the perfect harmony of His theanthropic nature, as God and Man, is at one and the same time the Divine Teacher and Source of Orthodox Theology, as well as the Divine Object of Orthodox worship, the very Image and Likeness of the Father, and the Victorious Champion of our Eternal Salvation.

The two fronds of laurel in the lower part of the Seal are emblematic of the Confession of Faith and the Triumph of Victory in spiritual struggle, while the date '1938' signifies the year of the founding of St. Tikhon‘s Seminary.

The Seminary and the Monastery: A Synergistic Relationship

Throughout the centuries, the great Christian abbeys and monasteries of Europe have forged and nurtured uniquely symbiotic and synergistic relationships between monastic endeavor and theological scholarship. The relationship between St. Tikhon’s Monastery and St. Tikhon’s Seminary is a prime example of that great tradition. The special accord of spirit, interdependency, and mission shared by the monastery and the theological school has been traditional in Orthodoxy for at least a thousand years.

Orthodox theological education, rooted deeply in the Christian mystical and spiritual tradition, was safeguarded and passed down through the centuries by the monastic community, and revived in the eleventh century by one of the great mystics and theologians of the Orthodox Church, St. Symeon the New Theologian (949-1022). This revival providentially coincided with the beginning of the great Orthodox missionary effort among the Slavic peoples, especially those of Ancient Rus’ and Russia, and was eventually brought by them to North America.

Theological knowledge can never be seen as merely the acquisition of academic information about matters ecclesial and theological. On the contrary, by its very nature, all theological knowledge is rooted in the soul of man, from whence his intelligence springs, and in the relationship that exists between man and his Creator. In this lies the great insight of the mystic theologians. True theological education is thus, first of all, the acceptance of the highest spiritual knowledge—the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Theological schools do not offer a course of study about God as such, as might be taken about man, his anatomy, and his nature; they offer, instead, a course of study about the relationship between God and man. In theological education, the ultimate goal is to fulfill the evangelical mandate: “Come and follow Me and I will make you fishers of men… Go into the whole world, preach the Gospel, teach, and baptize in the Name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”The knowledge of God the Holy Trinity is, at once, the object of theological inquiry and also its means, or methodology. Through the simple act of beginning every discourse or study with prayer, the theological school proclaims that its first—and ultimately, its only goal—is to teach the student to draw nearer to God. The only certain way to accomplish that goal is by means of study that begins and ends in dialogue with God. Indeed, a person is not a theologian unless he not only knows about prayer, but actually prays. A theologian, in short, is nothing more than a good Christian who prays, studies, and acts, and then continues to pray. It is in close association with the place of prayer par excellence, the monastery, that the seminarian finds himself in the environment that is most conducive to the development of his spiritual life, without which any theological or pastoral effort would be in vain. To that end, St. Tikhon’s Seminary and St. Tikhon’s Monastery strive to maintain a well-defined and mutually fulfilling relationship, one altogether natural in the Orthodox Church.