Kept in the Armenian Apostolic Church. Almsgiving is tied to the long fasting seasons, which are the longest kept anywhere in Christianity.
Kept in the Armenian Apostolic Church. Anointing of the sick is kept as a mystery of the church, administered to the living faithful and not reserved to the dying.
The Armenian Apostolic Church traces its founding to the apostles Thaddeus and Bartholomew and maintains its own independent catholicosate, distinct from Constantinople or Rome, since Armenia's conversion in 301 CE.
Kept in the Armenian Apostolic Church.
Kept in the Armenian Apostolic Church. Baptism is by threefold immersion and is followed at once by chrismation and communion.
Kept in the Armenian Apostolic Church. Baptism, chrismation and first communion are given together in infancy, as in the Byzantine churches.
Kept in the Armenian Apostolic Church. The Coptic, Ethiopian, Armenian and Syriac churches likewise ordain married parish priests while drawing their bishops from monasteries, and Egyptian desert monasticism is the ancestor of the whole Christian monastic tradition.
The Armenian Church has never separated the Nativity from the Baptism and keeps both together on January 6 as Theophany, so it observes no December 25 Christmas.
Kept in the Armenian Apostolic Church. The Coptic and other Oriental churches keep private confession to a priest, with the Coptic practice of a father of confession, a single priest to whom a person confesses habitually, and absolution before receiving the sacrament.
Kept in the Armenian Apostolic Church. Chrismation is given with baptism in infancy, using myron consecrated by the patriarch, and is not a separate later rite.
Kept in the Armenian Apostolic Church. Prayers of exorcism belong to the baptismal rite, and the Coptic and Ethiopian churches maintain a living deliverance ministry outside it.
Kept in the Armenian Apostolic Church. The Coptic and Ethiopian churches keep the longest fasts in Christendom, well over two hundred days a year of vegan abstinence, with nothing eaten until afternoon on fast days, and it is the laity who keep this and not only the clergy.
Kept in the Armenian Apostolic Church. The funeral offices differ by order and by day, and prayer for the dead is offered at the Liturgy.
Kept in the Armenian Apostolic Church.
Kept in the Armenian Apostolic Church. A married man may be ordained deacon or presbyter but not bishop, and bishops are drawn from the monasteries.
Kept in the Armenian Apostolic Church. The Coptic, Armenian and Syriac icon traditions are distinct schools with their own canons of proportion and colour, and are not branches of the Byzantine one.
Kept in the Armenian Apostolic Church. Infants are baptised and receive the full rite of initiation. Coptic custom sets the day at forty for a boy and eighty for a girl.
Kept in the Armenian Apostolic Church. Each of these churches keeps a full daily office. The Coptic form, the Agpeya, has seven hours and a midnight prayer of three watches.
Kept in the Armenian Apostolic Church. The marriage rite is a crowning, as in the Byzantine churches, with a distinct anointing of the couple in the Coptic form.
Kept in the Armenian Apostolic Church. The night office is kept, most fully in the monasteries, and in the Coptic use it is the Midnight Prayer with its three watches.
Kept in the Armenian Apostolic Church. Tonsure marks entry into the monastic life in the Coptic, Syriac, Armenian and Ethiopian houses alike.
Kept in the Armenian Apostolic Church. The monastic profession of these churches descends directly from the Egyptian desert and is the oldest continuous monastic observance in Christianity.
Kept in the Armenian Apostolic Church. Sunday is kept as the day of the Resurrection. The Ethiopian and Eritrean churches additionally keep Saturday, which sets them apart from the rest of Christianity.
Kept in the Armenian Apostolic Church.
Kept in the Armenian Apostolic Church.
Kept in the Armenian Apostolic Church. Pilgrimage to Jerusalem, to Lalibela and to the desert monasteries of Egypt is a settled devotion across these churches.
Kept in the Armenian Apostolic Church. Prayer follows a fixed daily cycle in each of these churches, the Coptic Agpeya, the Armenian Zhamagirk and the Ethiopian horologion, rather than a single common book.
Kept in the Armenian Apostolic Church. The Coptic, Armenian, Syriac and Ethiopian churches keep the same seven mysteries, likewise baptising, chrismating and communicating infants in one service, each with its own rites and its own reckoning of the details.
Kept in the Armenian Apostolic Church.
Kept in the Armenian Apostolic Church. Each of these churches has its own family of anaphoras, and the Ethiopian church uses more of them, fourteen in the received collection, than any other in Christendom.
Kept in the Armenian Apostolic Church. The epiclesis follows the institution narrative, as in the Byzantine rite.
Kept in the Armenian Apostolic Church. The fraction is an extended rite here, with a fraction prayer that varies by season and by anaphora.
Kept in the Armenian Apostolic Church.
Kept in the Armenian Apostolic Church. Each of the Oriental Orthodox churches keeps its own ancient liturgy in its own language, the Coptic of Saint Basil, the Armenian Badarak, the Ethiopian Qeddase, with a substantial fast required beforehand.
Kept in the Armenian Apostolic Church. The institution narrative stands within the anaphora in each of these rites.
Kept on January 6 as the single feast of the Nativity and the Baptism together, the oldest arrangement in the Church and the one the Armenians alone retained.
The church traces its establishment to his reign and to Gregory the Illuminator, whose family held the office of catholicos for generations afterwards.
Kept in the Armenian Apostolic Church. The Coptic, Armenian and Ethiopian churches keep their own iconographic styles and honour images in worship, though they were not party to the seventh council at which the East settled the question, having separated in the fifth century.
Kept in the Armenian Apostolic Church. The Coptic and Ethiopian churches keep an unusually heavy Marian devotion, with monthly as well as annual feasts and widely reported apparitions such as Zeitoun in 1968, and honour their own martyrs, of whom the Coptic calendar counts very many.
Kept in the Armenian Apostolic Church. The evening office is kept daily, and in the Coptic use the Raising of Incense at Vespers precedes the Liturgy of the following morning.