Dmitri Royster
Eastern Orthodox archbishop (1923–2011)
Archbishop Dmitri (born Robert Roscoe Royster; November 2, 1923 – August 28, 2011) was an American hierarch of the Orthodox Church in America. He served as archbishop of the church's Diocese of the South from 1978 to 2009 and was the ruling bishop of the Mexican Exarchate from 1972 to 2008. The territory of the former diocese covered fourteen states in the United States – Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. In Orthodox Christian circles he is sometimes called the Apostle to the South.
Birth
Robert Roscoe Royster was born in Teague, Texas on November 2, 1923, and was raised as a Southern Baptist, being baptized (by single immersion) in the name of the Holy Trinity at age 12. Though his father was non-practicing, his mother was devout. Robert was instilled with a deep reverence for the Holy Scriptures at an early age. It was, for this reason, that he and his older sister became convinced that the spirit of Protestantism and the spirit of the Holy Scriptures were incompatible.
Conversion to Orthodoxy
After finding incompatibility between Protestantism and the Holy Scriptures he and his sister began to search for "the original scriptural community and roots of the early church". He later stated:
We began to look around.
“Dmitri Royster” enters the record as eastern Orthodox archbishop (1923–2011). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Dmitri, Royster and Eastern can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dmitri Royster” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.