Welcome to St. Athanasius
Come and See the Beauty of Orthodox Christianity
Services
Saturday
Sunday
Other
For weekday and feast day services, please check the calendar.
What is Orthodox Christianity?
What is the Orthodox Church?
To be Orthodox is to have the correct and complete (Ortho-) doctrine and worship (-dox) of Jesus Christ and to live as He taught us to live; that is, to love God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself.
The Orthodox Church is the gathering of the believers to be the Body of Jesus Christ
We gather in His name
We share a common faith and love in Him
We affirm the truth and fullness of our faith and experience of Him
We proclaim the Good News of Jesus Christ in word and deed.
The Orthodox Church traces its origin back to Jesus Christ and His Apostles and came into the fullness of its life on Pentecost, 50 days after Jesus Christ's defeat of death by His rising from the dead. We are part of the unbroken chain of the Apostles' laying on of hands from one Bishop to the next as they established communities that worship, fellowship, serve, and grow in discipleship throughout the world. Today there are over 250 million Eastern Orthodox Christians throughout the world and over 1.5 million in the United States who gather in some 2800 parishes and monasteries.
What will I see?
In our parish you will see a community united together as we turn toward our Savior and God, Jesus Christ, the Son of the Heavenly Father. You will find people embracing a way of life set apart from the world even as we live in it. You will experience a community preserving, through the activity of the Holy Spirit, the deposit of Faith given to us from Jesus Christ through the Apostles. You will see a people experiencing and acknowledging the holiness and majesty of God.
What we believe
We believe in the Holy Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; one in essence and in love and distinct only in persons, whom we worship and glorify. We believe in the Son who became Man for our salvation who suffered and died and rose from the dead during the reign of Pontius Pilate.
We believe in the scriptures of the Old and New Testament as the record of God's works with His People and understand them through the activity of the Holy Spirit who preserves and guides unchanging Tradition of the Church. We believe that the Tradition is Holy and is the life of God's people and unites us believers throughout time. All of these attest to our salvation in Jesus Christ.
We believe that the Church is One Holy Catholic and Apostolic and preserved by the promise of Jesus Christ that "the gates of hell will not prevail against it."
We believe that the Church is where we are able to work out our salvation in Jesus Christ freely with fear and trembling that we may be united to God.
Every Sunday During the Divine Liturgy, and at many other times, we proclaim these things in unison by reciting the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed.
How we live
We serve God through our public worship, the serving of the Sacraments and in our private prayers. Weekly we gather to proclaim His salvation, participate in the common action of the Divine Liturgy, and commune with God in the Sacrament of Eucharist. We gather more often during the week for communal prayer services to know God, discern His will, to thank Him, and to ask for his mercy and grace. Through the year we celebrate Feast Days that are commemorations and enactments of the events of our salvation. We regularly serve the sacraments to be united to God throughout our lives.
We serve others through fellowship, discipleship, and stewardship. In our fellowship we are united in our common faith and life as we travel further into the Kingdom of God. We serve each other with love, respect, and hospitality as fellow members in the Body of Christ. We are discipled in the Church through the Pastoral relationship with our priest to deepen our communion with God. We are stewards of the gifts God has given us by offering our time, talents, and treasures back to Him in the communal life of the parish.
Contact Us
Address
300 Sumida Gardens Lane, Santa Barbara, CA 93111