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It's not quite a ten-gallon hat; the soft, tall cap of black cloth could hardly cover a one-gallon milk jug. Fronted by a gold metal cross, the hat tops a Dallas clergy leader who looks more like a mountain man than a televangelist. Archbishop Dmitri Royster, 78, has a deeply lined face, and a full white beard spills over his black cassock. He has done the work of the Lord all over the country, and now he's back where he started, in the great state of Texas.

When the archbishop was just a teenager in the small town of Teague, near Dallas, he was known as Robert Royster. He and his older sister were "strong Bible-believing Baptists, and very involved in our church," he says. That church fostered in them a deep love of Jesus Christ and a hunger to study the Scriptures. In fact, Archbishop Dmitri says they wanted even more Bible than they were getting. Although Dallas is surely one of the most Bible-centered communities in the nation, the Royster kids still "felt they were leaving half of it out." These were not typical teens.

The siblings began researching the original scriptural community and the roots of the early church. Eventually they showed up at the door of Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church, the only Orthodox church in Dallas at the time. Within those icon-covered walls, the worship was chanted, swathed with incense, lit with candles, and entirely in Greek. If the Royster kids were confused, so was the immigrant congregation, which didn't often have American-born teenagers drop in to ask questions. The kids felt they'd come home, however, and soon both became members of the church.

Robert, then 18, adopted the name Dmitri, after a young soldier (martyred by the Emperor Maximian), whose courage and faith he hoped to emulate. Today, Dmitri is to Dallas as "world music" is to country line dancing. Though he's a true Texan at heart (with an affinity for Tex-Mex cuisine), his faith transcends the borders of American religion.

"There was an awful process whereby the Christian church was condensed into a 'Western religion,' " he says. The mere fact of being an Orthodox bishop works against such an illusion, since a single week's travels may bring him into contact with American Christians whose worship roots are in places as diverse as Lebanon, Siberia, Romania, Ethiopia, or Cyprus. (A facility with languages helps the archbishop here; he has been a professor of both Greek and Spanish, and during World War II served as a Japanese interpreter on the staff of General Douglas MacArthur.) At St. Seraphim Cathedral in Dallas, the archbishop's base, services are offered in Russian, Spanish, and Serbian.

Yet Dmitri would be the last to encourage Orthodox believers in this nation to cling to divisive "hyphenated American" status. It was an accident of immigration history, he says, that caused the establishment here of a dozen separate ecclesiastical organizations—a Russian Orthodox church on one corner and a Greek Orthodox church on the next. Dmitri is among those American church leaders who advocate that these divisions be overcome and a united church emerge—a position that is still controversial. His own authority derives from the Orthodox Church in America, an autonomous body that was previously administered from Moscow.

The Orthodox do not yet have the knack of keeping great membership records, but it's estimated that there are 10,000 Orthodox Christians in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and about a million in the Southwest overall. Though the archbishop has his offices in Dallas, his responsibilities extend so much farther than the city that his work is not really comparable to other local leaders. His "beat" covers 14 southern states and Mexico, so he is constantly on the road, and doesn't get to have home-style Dallas cooking as often as he would like. Though he oversees the diocese's mission work in Dallas, he must tend other flocks all over the South, and routinely makes the round of airports, slowed by the extra baggage necessary to carry the loads of vestments he must don for liturgical events.

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May 21 2002, Vol. 46, No. 6