History & overview · every faith gets one
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.
The founding
Abraham Malpan, a Syriac teacher at Kottayam, cut prayers to the saints and for the dead out of the Qurbana and celebrated it in Malayalam so people could hear it. His nephew was consecrated in Mardin in 1842 as a rival metropolitan. The Royal Court of Final Appeal in Travancore ruled in 1889 that the reformers could not hold the old church's property, and the Mar Thoma Church went out as its own body.
Its founding is bound to Abraham Malpan — 1889 CE.
What it holds
Reality. Created and given; the reform stripped the mediators without stripping the sacraments..
The divine. One 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..
Death and after. Resurrection and judgment; the church does not pray for the dead, which was one of the reform's sharpest breaks..