Archbishop

Several self-governing Orthodox churches are headed not by a patriarch or metropolitan but by an archbishop holding, within his own church, authority equivalent to a patriarch's, a title reflecting each church's particular historical path to autocephaly rather than any lesser underlying status: the Church of Cyprus is led by the Archbishop of Nova Justiniana and All Cyprus, the Church of Greece by the Archbishop of Athens and All Greece, and the Orthodox Church of Albania by its own Archbishop of Tirana, Durres and All Albania. Each of these churches reached full self-governance along a distinct historical route, Cyprus through an ancient conciliar grant, Greece and Albania through nineteenth and twentieth century national church settlements tied closely to the formation of the modern Greek and Albanian states, rather than through elevation from an existing metropolitanate to patriarchal rank as Moscow and several other churches did.

A further, much smaller case is the Church of Sinai, centered on Saint Catherine's Monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai, whose head, the Archbishop of Sinai, governs what is sometimes described as the world's smallest self-governing Orthodox church, a single ancient monastery rather than a national territory, its archbishop historically also serving as the monastery's abbot, a combination of offices found nowhere else at this level of Orthodox church governance.

The Orthodox archbishop who heads a church lacking a patriarch sits atop one of two distinct kinds of self governing church, and the difference matters for how the office itself is filled. An autocephalous church, such as Cyprus or Albania, elects and consecrates its own primate entirely through its own synod of bishops, with no external church holding any formal say in the process; autocephaly is the fullest degree of Orthodox self government short of being a patriarchate outright. An autonomous church holds a lesser degree of independence: it manages its own internal affairs and elects its own head, but that election requires confirmation by the mother church from which it originated, and it may still commemorate that mother church's primate liturgically as a mark of the remaining tie.

Which status a given church holds, and whether other Orthodox churches recognize a particular grant of autocephaly or autonomy at all, has at times been contested between churches, since there is no single universally accepted procedure across all of Orthodoxy for granting either status, only long standing custom and the historical record of past grants. Disagreements of this kind are treated within Orthodoxy as unresolved questions of church order that individual churches answer differently, rather than as points any single body currently holds the recognized authority to settle for Orthodoxy as a whole.