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Well, I was going to wait for comments from some of the converts, but I have a couple of initial reactions.

George Matsoukos is one of the nicest men you'd ever want to meet, but his organization is very anti-old country patriarchs and is just about the most liberal, protestant leaning grouping in American Orthodoxy. His organization is made up of people who in the past felt perfectly at home with Episcopalian structure and theology as representing an "American" way to be Orthodox, including serious discussion of female ordination to the priesthood. It has sued the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese, and lost I believe though the case may still be on appeal, over the recent revisions of the Archdiocesan Charter as given to the GOA by the EP. The phronema of this organization is all wrapped up in talk of individual rights, etc...in a word, it is thoroughly Western and for all intents and purposes antithetical to an Orthodox phronema.

Many Orthodox theologians have opined that the Orthodox Church in America, especially in a time when converts are coming into the Church in large numbers while the influence of the immigrant generations is waning, is in a particularly perilous time. In earlier times the various jurisdictions provided not just a religious home for the members, but also a social and cultural place where Greeks could be Greeks, Serbs, Serbs, Russians,Russians, etc. even as they became part of the American mainstream. Because these people were imbued with an Orthodox mindset, there was no great danger that the American culture around them, a culture frankly hostile to an Orthodox way of life. Gradually through a couple of generations, though, the immigrant desire to become fully American, at least as they saw it, lead to a certain relativism with the Church and its relationship with the society around it. For reasons best known to the Holy Spirit, after a few decades of this, converts began to find Holy Orthodoxy, but the Orthodoxy they found often had been compromised by the virtually pagan American society around it. Their demonstrations of fidelity to a strict praxis of the Faith, if in a way which serious cradle Orthodox might have found a bit off the beam, I believe gave some impetus to many ethnic Orthodox to rediscover the proper praxis of The Faith and in many parishes a sort of renewal or revival of the Faith has occurred. The result of all of this has lead to three groups in Orthodoxy in this country. First, cradle and convert Orthodox who are fully imbued with the phronema of Orthodoxy and who strive to live their lives in accordance with the ancient teaching of the Church; second, a group of converts who can quote chapter and verse from the Philokalia but are still learning the Orthodox phronema; and finally the fully secularized and Americanized Orthodox, usually cradle, who are intent on creating a new type of "Orthodoxy" which would look more like Epicopalianism, than the Churches of our ancestors. One can call it "American Orthodoxy", I call it a dangerous form of phyletism.

Given the foregoing, a separation from the Mother Churches, in my opinion, is a prescription for disaster. The oversight of the Patriarchs and Archbishops of the Orthodox old countries is an assurance that the pervasive influence of secular American culture on the hierarchs of the various jurisdictions here in America will not get completely out of hand. I know some of these people...trust me I'm not seeing boogeymen under the bed.

Now, I do think it would be a good idea to form a united Orthodox jurisdiction here in America, maybe even an autonomous one, but only under the oversight of a powerful, Orthodox world Patriarch or Archbishop.

No, the OCA was given a grant of autocephaly by Moscow--though its autocephaly is recognized only by Moscow and Bulgaria, thanks to the stiff-necked attitude of Constantinople which began interfering in North America in the wake of Bolshevik Revolution and the Greek loss of the Second Greco-Turkish War (which moved most of its faithful into the jurisdiction of the autocephalous Church of Greece or into 'diaspora', mostly in the Americas).

(The Church of Japan was also granted autocephaly at the same time, but declined and remained autonomous.)

I believe the Church of Greece gives another counterexample to the claim that the chief hierarch of an autocephalous church is always titled Patriarch: there is no Patriarch of Athens. (Of course then there if Georgia, with its Catholicos.)