Next week, New York City will host a showdown of biblical proportions. At heart is the question of self-determination and assimilation, as a reform wing of the Greek Orthodox Church in America challenges the increasingly authoritarian rule of the church patriarch in Istanbul. Amid a flurry of lawsuits and church edicts, civil relations have broken down between the church and its parishioners. Grandparents are being recast as revolutionaries and the effect of next week’s biannual clergy-laity congress at the Times Square Marriott could well be the acrimonious creation of a new American orthodox church, a move that would send shockwaves through a more than a millennia-old faith.

Perhaps it was inevitable. The Americans in the Greek Orthodox Church are acting, well, American – which is to say independent and unwilling to surrender their conscience and common sense to a ruler imposing unreasonable demands from abroad and trying to unilaterally roll back previous agreements. Specifically, a 1977 charter agreement – which stated that all amendments to rules concerning church governance in America must be approved in a membership vote – has been effectively declared invalid by the new patriarch in Istanbul. In its place, a new charter has been imposed that centralizes power in Istanbul, threatens to crush dissent, and disenfranchises individual parishes.

It’s a cultural conflict between democracy and centralized authority, spurred by faithful parishioners who no longer see themselves primarily as immigrants but as American citizens.

The church hierarchy want to roll back these previous reforms and get American parishioners in line with Old World standards – a process sometimes referred to as “re-Hellenization.” At a time when church membership is declining in America and more than 80% of marriages in the orthodox church are interfaith, this emphasis on rigid adherence to Old World culture is seem as increasingly, even dangerously, irrelevant. The subsidization of Greek folk dancing, for example, is not a solution to the challenges facing the contemporary church in America. Increasingly, however, disagreement is being greeted with the threat of virtual or literal excommunication.

The new rules pushed forward by the patriarch – and supported by New York’s own Archbishop Demetrious – appear to fit under the category of a power grab. If a parish is decided to be in disagreement with the archdiocese, it could be unilaterally declared in “canonical disorder,” which would make all the parish assets revert to the control of the central church. In all cases going forward, a required 15% of parish donations will be remitted to the archdiocese and all financial records will be turned over to the central church. If a parish is more than 30 days late in handing over these records, the parish’s financial commitment to the church will be automatically raised 25%. It smacks of extortion – once again, we’re seeing the unhealthy influence of money on religion.

Money is the trump card of the American parishes. The central church in Istanbul receives the bulk of its annual money from American parishioners. They literally cannot afford to have the American parishes walk away. So they appear to be pushing through a structure that will allow them to seize parish assets in the event of a split.

To stop this power grab, members of an organization called Orthodox Christian Laity – joined by distinguished members of the church called called Archons from states as far reaching as Ohio, Maryland, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Florida, and Arizona – put forward a legal action in February, currently under consideration by the New York State Supreme Court, to block the efforts to override the existing charter. The influence of the archdiocese in New York is formidable – to date they’ve refused to comment on this action other than to say it is without merit – and no decision has yet been given, but curiously no citywide New York papers have reported on this filing or the schism, despite coverage in other cities around the nation.

The president of the Orthodox Christian Laity, Peter Haikalis, characterizes the conflict in terms reminiscent of American uprisings of the past. “Parishioners are not sheep to follow blindly and unquestioningly in response to the misguided demands of their hierarchs,” said Mr. Haikalis, “Nor are our leaders monarchs to issue edicts and pronounce laws on all those who oppose their wishes.” In many ways, their pushback does seem to echo the original American war for independence: Former colonists resenting the reimposition of rule from abroad over what has become a distinctly American way of life.

And so it is that our city may be home to the next great Reformation, a conference with far more action and lasting implications than the comparatively sedate consensus of the Democratic convention in Boston next week. Greece is, after all, the cradle of democracy, but Byzantine machinations are counter to the democratic spirit of dialogue in an open society. In the struggle to retain self-governance and something approaching democracy in their church, these reformers are fighting their own war of independence, and Times Square next week might be the site of their Lexington and Concord.