Living Our Orthodox Faith

Living Our Orthodox Faith is the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America's graded religious education series, and it is the closest thing American Orthodox homeschooling families have to an official catechism-with-workbook set published by their own hierarchy.

Last updated: 2026-04-24 · Every Homeschool Editorial Team

At a glance

Method	Traditional / graded catechesis
Worldview	Christian-Orthodox (Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America)
Grades	1-5
Formats	Print student texts, teacher guides, printable worksheets
Cost tier	Budget
Parent intensity	4
ESA-common	No
Accredited	No
Established	Grade 5 released 2015; subsequent grades through 2024, per the Department of Religious Education
Website	goarch.org

Our scoreboard (1-5)

Criterion	Score	One-line reason
Academic rigor	3	Solid catechetical content; not a standalone academic spine
Ease of teaching	3	Teacher guides provided; parent must shape the lesson for a home setting
Content quality	4	Archdiocese-vetted, doctrinally precise, well-illustrated for catechesis
Flexibility	3	Designed for Sunday school; adapts to homeschool with some effort
Value for money	5	Very inexpensive; texts and guides are priced near print cost
Worldview scope	1	Specifically Greek Orthodox catechetical content
Visual/design	3	Clean layout, liturgical imagery, icon photography throughout
Support resources	3	Printable worksheets and teacher guides available; no video course

Who the publisher is

Living Our Orthodox Faith is published by the Department of Religious Education of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, the American jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. The Archdiocese is headquartered in New York and oversees roughly 500 parishes across the United States. The Department of Religious Education produces catechetical materials for parish Sunday and Saturday schools; Living Our Orthodox Faith is its flagship graded series for elementary-age students.

The series was developed incrementally over roughly a decade. Grade 5 was released first in 2015; Grade 4 followed in 2018; Grade 3 appeared in 2024. Each grade pairs a student text with a separate teacher guide, and both are distributed through orthodoxmarketplace.com, the Archdiocese's official retail channel. Printable catechism worksheets tied to the series are available as downloads through the Department of Religious Education's resource pages.

The audience is primarily parish catechists, adults teaching children in a Sunday school classroom, but Orthodox homeschooling families have adopted the series as a structured spine for religious education at home. There is no widely used alternative with the same credentialing. Other Orthodox catechetical materials exist (the Orthodox Christian Education Commission publishes across jurisdictions, and individual Orthodox presses like Ancient Faith and Conciliar Press publish Bible story books and children's lives of saints), but Living Our Orthodox Faith is the only grade-by-grade Archdiocesan series currently in active publication for the American Greek Orthodox context. Families from other Orthodox jurisdictions. OCA, Antiochian, ROCOR, sometimes use it as well, though content choices reflect Greek Orthodox practice specifically.

The core pedagogy

Living Our Orthodox Faith is structured around a five-theme catechetical framework used by the Department of Religious Education: worship, community, discipleship, service, and witness. Each grade's student text is organized into units that move through those themes, with content calibrated to age. Grade 1 introduces children to the liturgical year, the sacraments as practiced in a parish, key figures from Scripture and hagiography, and age-appropriate prayer. By Grade 5 the student is engaging with doctrinal content at a catechism register, the Nicene Creed explored phrase by phrase, the seven sacraments treated systematically, the Divine Liturgy walked through in its parts, and the lives of major saints presented as theological exemplars.

Scope and sequence posture is traditional catechesis: a teacher reads or presents, the student responds, and content is reinforced through discussion, workbook tasks, memorization of key prayers and creeds, and occasional craft or service activities. The student book serves as a reading spine with illustrations and photographs of iconography; the teacher guide contains the lesson plans, discussion questions, and suggested activities. The program assumes the student is also attending liturgical services in a parish; the curriculum references Sunday Liturgy, feast days, and sacramental life as lived practice, not as abstraction.

Signature mechanics: (1) Liturgical calendar as backbone, lessons are calibrated so that units on major feasts land near those feasts in the liturgical year; the curriculum assumes a family that is churching regularly. (2) Five-theme structure, every grade touches all five themes, spiraling through them at increasing depth, which gives the series coherence across levels. (3) Icon literacy, students learn to read icons as theological texts, not merely as decoration, with structured attention to iconographic conventions. (4) Archdiocesan doctrinal review, content is vetted by the Department of Religious Education against Greek Orthodox teaching, which matters to families who want catechesis that aligns with their jurisdiction.

A day in the life

A third-grader using Living Our Orthodox Faith in a homeschool setting typically has religious education scheduled for two or three sessions a week, each running thirty to forty-five minutes. A session opens with a short prayer, the Trisagion prayers or a feast-day troparion, depending on the liturgical season. The parent then reads the day's lesson from the teacher guide's lesson plan, which includes the student text's reading passage, discussion questions, and activity suggestions. The student reads or is read to (depending on reading level), responds to the discussion questions orally, and completes the corresponding worksheet. On Feast of the Annunciation week, for example, the lesson covers the icon of the Annunciation, the troparion and kontakion of the feast, and the Gospel reading used in that service; the student colors a simplified icon, memorizes the troparion, and discusses why this feast falls on March 25.

A homeschooling Orthodox family typically pairs Living Our Orthodox Faith with secular academic coursework in math, language arts, science, and history, the Archdiocesan materials do not address any subject beyond religion. Families who want broader Orthodox-infused enrichment often add books from Ancient Faith Publishing or saint biographies from Conciliar Press, but these are add-ons rather than integrated components of the program.

What they do exceptionally well

Doctrinal fidelity. This is material vetted by the Archdiocese's own Department of Religious Education for use in its parishes. For a family that wants catechesis aligned with Greek Orthodox teaching, not a broadly Christian children's Bible story book, not a pan-Orthodox compilation, but specifically Archdiocesan content, nothing else in the American homeschool market provides the same alignment.

Liturgical integration. The curriculum assumes the student is living inside the liturgical year, and it teaches accordingly. Children who use Living Our Orthodox Faith alongside regular parish attendance build a durable understanding of how the feasts, fasts, sacraments, and saints relate to one another. Catechetical materials that ignore the calendar often produce students who know doctrine in the abstract but cannot place it in lived practice.

Price. The student texts and teacher guides are priced near print cost, roughly $10-$20 per component as of April 2026 per orthodoxmarketplace.com listings. A family covering grades 1 through 5 for one child will spend less total than a single year of most other graded religious education programs. This is a function of the Archdiocese subsidizing publication rather than pricing for profit.

What they do poorly

Sunday-school formatting. The materials were designed for forty-five-minute sessions once a week in a parish classroom. Homeschool families have to re-sequence, pace, and expand lessons to fill a daily or thrice-weekly religion block. The teacher guides are helpful but do not anticipate the homeschool use case, and the workbooks run out faster than a five-day-a-week schedule assumes.

Uneven release cadence. The series was released over nearly a decade, grade by grade, and production values have shifted across releases. Grade 3 (2024) is more visually polished than Grade 5 (2015). Families moving up through the series should expect the materials to look and feel somewhat different year to year, though doctrinal content is consistent.

No companion math, reading, or history track. Living Our Orthodox Faith is catechesis only. Orthodox homeschooling families must build the rest of their curriculum from secular or pan-Christian sources. This is a feature, not a bug, the Archdiocese is not in the general-education curriculum business, but first-time Orthodox homeschoolers sometimes expect more coverage than the series offers.

Who it fits / who it doesn't

• Pick Living Our Orthodox Faith if: your family is Greek Orthodox or aligned with Greek Orthodox practice; you want Archdiocese-vetted catechetical content; you are looking for a structured religious education spine rather than an ad-hoc pile of children's books; you value affordability and are comfortable adapting parish-oriented material for home use.

• Skip Living Our Orthodox Faith if: you are not Orthodox and are looking for broad Christian religious education; you want a daily open-and-go curriculum with no adaptation required; you need video or online components; you want your religion materials to double as language arts or history; you are Orthodox but in a non-Greek jurisdiction (OCA, Antiochian, ROCOR) and want material specifically from your own hierarchy.

Cost honest assessment

As of April 2026, student texts and teacher guides for each grade of Living Our Orthodox Faith are listed at roughly $10-$20 per component on orthodoxmarketplace.com. A complete grade-3 package, student text plus teacher guide, lands at roughly $25-$35. A family covering all five grades over time for one child spends approximately $125-$175 total, spread across five years.

Compared to Seton Catholic Home Study Religion (roughly $30-$50 per grade for a Catholic equivalent), Abeka Bible (roughly $25-$45 per grade for a Protestant evangelical equivalent), and the Orthodox Christian Education Commission's Lifelong Learning materials (varied pricing), Living Our Orthodox Faith is among the cheapest graded religious education series in the American homeschool market. The price reflects subsidy, not thin production.

An all-in annual religious education budget for one student using Living Our Orthodox Faith plus supplemental saint biographies and a children's prayer book: $50-$90.

ESA eligibility notes

Living Our Orthodox Faith is not a featured vendor on any major state ESA marketplace as of April 2026. The Archdiocese sells directly through orthodoxmarketplace.com, and ESA-funded families in Arizona, Florida, Utah, and similar states would typically purchase out-of-pocket and submit receipts for reimbursement where the state program permits. Because the content is explicitly religious catechesis, states that restrict religious materials from ESA funds may deny reimbursement; families should verify eligibility in their state before ordering. The low per-component price ($10-$20) means that reimbursement denials are not financially catastrophic even if a state declines.

Alternatives

• Orthodox Christian Education Commission (OCEC), a family would pick OCEC over Living Our Orthodox Faith if they want pan-Orthodox materials usable across jurisdictions (OCA, Antiochian, Greek, ROCOR) rather than specifically Greek Archdiocesan content.
• Ancient Faith Publishing children's books and curricula, a family would pick Ancient Faith because its catalog is broader (saint biographies, children's Bibles, family devotionals) and less Sunday-school-formatted, at the cost of being a compilation rather than a graded series.
• Seton Catholic Home Study Religion, a family considering Catholic alternatives for comparison would find Seton offers a more developed homeschool-specific religion spine with a similar traditional catechetical structure, inside a Roman Catholic doctrinal framework.

How we verified this

Our editorial team reviewed the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese Department of Religious Education's published scope for Living Our Orthodox Faith and the product listings on orthodoxmarketplace.com in April 2026, cross-referenced against the Archdiocese's catechetical resource pages at goarch.org. Pricing was pulled from the live orthodoxmarketplace.com store in April 2026. Release dates for individual grades were confirmed against the Archdiocese's own release announcements.