Assyrian Church of the East

Heritage

The Church of the East grew up inside the Persian Empire, beyond Rome's borders, under the Catholicos of Seleucia-Ctesiphon; separated from the imperial church's councils after Ephesus (431), it built the medieval world's most far-flung missionary church, reaching India and China — the Xi'an stele of 781 records its presence at the Tang court. Genocide in the First World War and the 1933 Simele massacre drove the Assyrian people into diaspora, and the patriarch himself lived in American exile for much of the twentieth century — Mar Dinkha IV led the church from Chicago — before the see returned to Erbil, Iraq in 2015. Mar Awa III, elected in 2021, was born in Chicago, the first American-born catholicos-patriarch in the church's long history. US parishes cluster in Chicago, Detroit, California's Central Valley and Arizona.

Theological family

The East Syriac tradition: two natures in Christ confessed in the language of Theodore of Mopsuestia's school — a Christology long caricatured by outsiders under a fifth-century label the church itself rejects. The 1994 Common Christological Declaration signed by Patriarch Mar Dinkha IV and Pope John Paul II affirmed that this church and the Catholic Church confess the same faith in Christ, retiring fifteen centuries of mutual suspicion in two pages.

Who decides what

Hierarchical: the catholicos-patriarch in Erbil with metropolitans and bishops over diaspora dioceses; parishes are led by priests, many of them married.

What a first-time visitor would find

The Liturgy of Addai and Mari — among the oldest eucharistic prayers in continuous use anywhere, ancient enough that it lacks the institution narrative in the form other churches expect; Rome formally recognized its validity in 2001. Worship is chanted in Syriac, the language family of Jesus' own speech, with Assyrian neo-Aramaic and English; the bare cross, without a figure, is the church's distinctive symbol.

What it has always cared about

Survival with identity intact — language, rite and people held together through genocide and dispersion; the memory of a missionary golden age that once stretched from the Mediterranean to the Pacific; sober, unornamented reverence.

Its gift to the wider church

Living proof that the church was never only a Roman-imperial story — Christianity's first great expansion eastward was this church's work — and the 1994 Declaration with Rome, which showed that even the oldest divisions can turn out, on patient examination, to be smaller than they seemed.

Commonly confused with

With the Chaldean Catholic Church — the larger branch of the same East Syriac heritage, in communion with Rome since the sixteenth century; with the Syriac Orthodox Church (West Syriac rite, Oriental Orthodox — a different family); and with a fifth-century theological label the church rejects, which still appears in older reference works.

Range of views inside it

A small, tight communion; parishes vary mainly in language mix and diaspora generation. The Ancient Church of the East, separated since 1968 over calendar and governance, is treated in its own record.

Where Assyrian Church of the East churches are on the map

7 Assyrian Church of the East congregations appear on The Church Map, across 4 states.

• Arizona — 2
• California — 2
• Illinois — 2
• Connecticut — 1