George Hyde

Who is George Hyde?

George Augustine Hyde was an American bishop. He founded the Society of Domestic Missionaries and co-established with John Kazantks the first Christian congregation in the United States to minister openly to and with openly homosexual parishioners. He later served as metropolitan archbishop of the Orthodox-Catholic Church of America from 1970 to 1983.

Hyde was a native of Chattanooga, Tennessee, who grew up in a Southern Baptist family in Atlanta and attended a seminary though he did not complete his seminary education. He was a high school teacher in Atlanta when he met Kazantks, an immigrant from Greece and former bishop of the Greek Orthodox Church who had been forced out of his native country after coming out.

Affected by the denial of communion to, or outright excommunication of, openly homosexual parishioners, Hyde and Kazantks set out to form their own independent congregation that would welcome openly homosexual members. Their newly formed independent parish held its first formal meeting at the Winecoff Hotel in Atlanta on July 1, 1946, on the occasion of Hyde's ordination to the priesthood of the parish at the hands of Bishop Kazantks.