Eastern liturgy, evangelical reform, Anglican friends.
The reformed church of Kerala: West Syriac in liturgy, Protestant in doctrine, episcopal in order, and in full communion with the Anglican churches. It began with Abraham Malpan's revision of the Qurbana in the 1830s, was confirmed as a separate body by a court judgment in 1889, and holds the largest Christian convention in Asia on a dry riverbed every February.
Why it is filed this way
Classed here as a denomination inside the Syriac line it came out of. The church calls itself Reformed Oriental: it kept the West Syriac liturgy and the threefold ministry, dropped the invocation of saints and prayer for the dead, and is in full communion with the Anglican Communion rather than with any Oriental Orthodox church.
DeitiesOne God in three persons; the christology of the Syriac tradition read through a reformed lens, with no invocation of saints and no prayer for the dead.
Founded1889 CE · Maramon and Thiruvalla, Kerala
FounderAbraham Malpan
AfterlifeResurrection and judgment; the church does not pray for the dead, which was one of the reform's sharpest breaks.
TextsThe Bible in Malayalam · The reformed Qurbana of Saint James · The Mar Thoma Church Constitution
The map
The Malankara Mar Thoma Syrian Church’s corner of it — solid lines are descent; dotted lines are resemblance only, ideas held in common across unrelated faiths. Click a node to recenter; ✕ returns here. All 171 faiths →
c. 1000 BCE Judaism 30 CE Christianity 451 CE Oriental Orthodoxy 451 CE The Syriac Orthodox Church 1889 CE The Malankara Mar Thoma Syrian Church
Reformed, and still Eastern.
The church kept the West Syriac liturgy, the threefold ministry of bishop, priest and deacon, the church year and the fasts, and changed the theology inside them. It calls itself Reformed Oriental and is in full communion with the Anglican churches and with the Church of South India, not with any Oriental Orthodox church.
Go deeper — context →
No prayers to the saints, and none for the dead.
Abraham Malpan cut the invocation of saints, prayers for the departed and the offering of the Qurbana for the dead out of the liturgy, on the ground that scripture does not authorise them. Everything else in the service he left standing. It remains the sharpest doctrinal difference between this church and the Malankara churches it came from.
Go deeper — context →
A
Abraham Malpan.
A Syriac teacher at the Kottayam seminary who had read the reformers and worked alongside Church Missionary Society missionaries, he revised the Qurbana in the 1830s, celebrated it in Malayalam, and in 1837 publicly discredited a pilgrimage image. He was removed from the seminary. His nephew was consecrated metropolitan at Mardin in 1842, and the reform had a bishop.
Meet them — context →
The Maramon Convention.
Every February the Pamba river dries back and a pavilion goes up on the sand at Maramon for a week of preaching and Bible study, with attendance in the tens of thousands each day. It has run since 1895 and is described as the largest Christian convention in Asia. Nobody is baptised, married or ordained there; people come to listen.
Go deeper — context →