These churches are ancient, and most of them are now under pressure of a kind that has no equivalent in Western Christianity.
The Ethiopian church is the exception in scale: it is the largest of the family by a wide margin, with adherents usually estimated in the tens of millions, a majority or near-majority presence in its own country, and no minority status at all. Its recent trouble has been internal and political, the Tigray war from 2020, and a serious attempted schism in 2023 over the appointment of bishops on ethnic and linguistic lines.
The others are minorities. The Copts are the largest Christian community in the Middle East, generally put at around ten per cent of Egypt's population, and have faced church bombings, restrictions on building and repairing churches, and periodic communal violence. The Syriac Orthodox heartland in south-eastern Turkey, northern Iraq and Syria has been emptying for over a century, beginning with the massacres of 1915 that Assyrian and Syriac Christians call Sayfo, and accelerating through the Iraq war and the rise of the Islamic State. The Armenian Apostolic Church carries the memory of the 1915 genocide as a defining fact of its identity, and lost its ancient presence in Nagorno-Karabakh in 2023.
The consequence is that a large share of each of these churches now lives in diaspora, in Europe, North America, Australia and the Gulf, and that the diaspora parishes increasingly hold the money, while the patriarchates hold the authority. Whether that arrangement survives another generation is an open question inside these churches rather than an academic one.