The Assyrian Church of the East

Denomination·Founded 431 CE·est. 323,300 by the World Council of Churches figure; other estimates run to 400,000, and war and emigration have made counting harder since 2014.

Judaism → Christianity → The Church of the East → The Assyrian Church of the East

Assyrian Church of the East — Diocese of Western EuropeAssyrian Church of the East — Diocese of California

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Overview Belief 3How to Live 1Practice 1Stories & Scripture 1Community 1 You × The Assyrian Church of the East Discussion
Community of The Assyrian Church of the East

The see came home in 2015.

For most of the twentieth century the head of the Church of the East lived in the United States, the patriarchate was hereditary within one family, and the church split twice. All three of those facts have since been undone.

Add to My Beliefs →
How you joinBy baptism; in practice the church and the Assyrian nation are treated as the same body
Who leadsThe Catholicos-Patriarch of the Holy Apostolic Catholic Assyrian Church of the East, with the Holy Synod
The unitThe parish, and the diocese — Erbil, Chicago, Sydney, Modesto, Stockholm
Understanding it — context, not catechism: how this passage is held

Mar Shimun XXIII Eshai — numbered XXI in some lists — became patriarch as a boy in 1920 under a hereditary system in which the office passed from uncle to nephew, was expelled from Iraq in 1933, and was assassinated in San Jose, California in 1975 by a member of a family that had traditionally guarded the patriarchal line. His 1964 calendar reforms had already provoked the split that produced the Ancient Church of the East, and he had resigned in 1973 to marry. The synod abolished hereditary succession in 1976. Mar Dinkha IV led the church from Chicago until 2015; his successor Mar Gewargis III moved the patriarchate to Erbil that year, and Mar Awa III, elected in 2021, is the first patriarch in nearly a century to be based in Iraq — and the first born in the United States.

The same ground, other faiths

claims that share this one's ideas
The splits. Christianity Go deeper →
Councils, not one bishop, speak for the Church. Eastern Orthodoxy · core tenet Go deeper →
In communion with Rome, not absorbed by it. The Eastern Catholic Churches · core tenet Go deeper →
The whole quarrel may have been about words. The Coptic Orthodox Church · core tenet Go deeper →
Who leads, and who is allowed to. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church Go deeper →
The Catholicos of the East sits in India. The Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church · core tenet Go deeper →

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