S, I didn't express myself well. Virtually all of our Lebanese, Syrian, Ethiopian, Eritrean/Greek, Russian, Serbian, Albanian, Ukranian, Bulgarian, Roumanian, Egyptian and Turkish/Greek parishioners are really from those countries. My point is that when a single ethnicity Orthodox parish, like mine was, gets a real big influx of other, non Greek (or Arab or Russian, etc) ethnics, what ends up predominating is an American ethnicity with a distinctly Orthodox phronema (Its really astonishing how that Orthodoxy transcends ethnicity; We're a close group). This makes the parish welcoming to ethnically American converts since the old ethnic club mentality dies a relatively quick death.
I visited Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church in Dallas during their annual Greek festival fundraiser. The food was great, and I enjoyed baklava for the first time. The Greek tour guide of the church could have done much better if he had known anything about the regional ethnic culture he was living in.
He was showing about 40 of us (Texans) around the church explaining things and all was fine until he came to the baptismal font. He said that the Greek Orthodox Church would accept most Protestant baptisims except baptisims of Baptists, because they didn't believe in the Trinity!
His cultural ignorance couldn't have been worse. The largest Baptist churches in the U.S. are in Dallas, and it became obvious immediately that several in the group were Baptists. Before I could speak, a young man told him very politely that Baptists most certainly believed in the Trinity - a fact could have qualified as the understatement of the year. The guide said he'd been told that years before by a friend and thought it was true.
Everyone showed good manners in church and let it go, but hardly anyone paid attention to the bozo after that. Let's hope that "old ethnic club mentality" does die a relatively quick death