Autocephaly & Church Organization

The standing of a Church that is its own head: it elects its own primate and bishops through its own synod and answers to no other Church, while holding the one faith and the one Eucharist with all the rest. The ancient canon behind it tells the bishops of each nation to know who is first among them and to do nothing weighty without him, and he nothing without them. The Churches are listed in the diptychs, in an order of honour that they do not entirely agree on: Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem first, then Moscow, and after it, in the order Constantinople keeps, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Georgia, Cyprus, Greece, Poland, Albania, and the Czech Lands and Slovakia. Below autocephaly stands autonomy, as at Sinai, Finland and Japan. How a Church becomes autocephalous is not agreed: Constantinople holds that it may grant it, others that the consent of all is needed, which is why the Churches of America, Ukraine and North Macedonia are counted differently by different Churches.