What is the Coptic Church?

She is so much to so many.

Very near and dear to our hearts, she teaches us everything from the start.

The bride and body of Christ, she nurtures all of our inner parts.

A true mother to us all, I deeply cherish her embrace.

My first love and my resting place, she is a treasure I cannot replace.

In the middle of the first century AD, St Mark was evangelizing in Egypt. He successfully converted a shoemaker named Anianus, and others. The community that followed would create an enduring legacy of love, piety, theology, and persistent determination in the face of oppression. This church would endure through millennia of persecution, heresies, rejection, and obscurity. Yet despite her opponents’ best efforts, she lives on and flourishes.

The Alexandrian church gave the Christian world the wonderful gifts of monasticism and theological reasoning. She led the fight against the early heresies and shaped much of early Christian thought. In fact, these thoughts would become foundational Christian beliefs. Her champions—St Anthony, St Athanasius, St Cyril, to name a few—are celebrated throughout all of Christianity as foundational heroes. Yet the Coptic church does not get the credit she deserves. After the council of Chalcedon in 451 AD, this deeply spiritual and beautiful church, along with her sister churches, were thrown out of Christendom and rejected as heretics. That accusation, however, is false.

The Coptic church is the direct descendant of the ancient Alexandrian church. In fact, she is the ancient Alexandrian church. We can trace our unbroken lineage of patriarchs and traditions all the way back to St Mark in the first century AD. Our storied history tells us how we survived through countless attempts at extermination, and kept the lamp of Christian worship burning in an ever-darkening world.

So, I invite you, my dear reader, to join me in these meditations, and listen to my most precious story — the story of my Coptic church.