Almsgiving is tied to the long fasting seasons, which are the longest kept anywhere in Christianity.
Anointing of the sick is kept as a mystery of the church, administered to the living faithful and not reserved to the dying.
The end of the age and Christ's return in judgment are confessed in the creed and kept in the liturgical year of each of these churches.
Each of these churches traces its episcopate to an apostolic founder, the Coptic see to Mark and the Armenian to Bartholomew and Thaddeus, and orders are conferred on that understanding.
Baptism is by threefold immersion and is followed at once by chrismation and communion.
Baptism, chrismation and first communion are given together in infancy, as in the Byzantine churches.
Senior leadership office of Oriental Orthodoxy.
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.
Christian eschatology, the doctrine of last things, is affirmed across Nicene Christianity, including this tradition.
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.
Chrismation is given with baptism in infancy, using myron consecrated by the patriarch, and is not a separate later rite.
The Coptic rite is one of the liturgical families of this communion, with the anaphoras of St Basil, St Gregory and St Cyril.
The covenant given to Abraham and fulfilled in Christ is read here in the patristic manner, as one economy running through both testaments.
The creed opens by confessing one God, maker of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible.
The Oriental Orthodox churches are each governed by their own patriarch or catholicos with a synod of bishops, self-standing bodies in communion with one another rather than under a common head.
Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo, within the Oriental Orthodox family
Prayers of exorcism belong to the baptismal rite, and the Coptic and Ethiopian churches maintain a living deliverance ministry outside it.
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.
The Oriental Orthodox keep some of the longest fasts in Christianity, the Coptic and Ethiopian churches abstaining from all animal products for well over a hundred days of the year.
The funeral offices differ by order and by day, and prayer for the dead is offered at the Liturgy.
The doxology recurs through the daily offices of each of these churches.
Grace is understood as God's own uncreated activity toward creation rather than a created gift, the Eastern reading these churches share.
These churches use anathema and the language of heresy in their own conciliar acts, and their separation from Chalcedon was itself argued in those terms.
A married man may be ordained deacon or presbyter but not bishop, and bishops are drawn from the monasteries.
The Holy Spirit as the third person of the Trinity is affirmed across Nicene Christianity, including this tradition.
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.
The creed confesses the Son as incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and made man. This communion receives it in the form settled at Constantinople in 381.
The Oriental Orthodox baptise infants and give chrismation and communion in the same rite, so the child enters full membership at once rather than in stages spread over later years.
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.
Each of these churches keeps a full daily office. The Coptic form, the Agpeya, has seven hours and a midnight prayer of three watches.
The creed confesses the Son begotten of the Father before all ages, through whom all things were made. Cyril of Alexandria's Word-centred christology is the frame this communion reads him in.
The marriage rite is a crowning, as in the Byzantine churches, with a distinct anointing of the couple in the Coptic form.
The night office is kept, most fully in the monasteries, and in the Coptic use it is the Midnight Prayer with its three watches.
A single united nature in the incarnate Christ, miaphysitism, is this tradition's own Christological position, distinct from the Chalcedonian formula.
Miaphysitism is the doctrine that separated these churches from the rest of Christendom at Chalcedon in 451, confessing one incarnate nature in which divinity and humanity are united without confusion or division.
Tonsure marks entry into the monastic life in the Coptic, Syriac, Armenian and Ethiopian houses alike.
The monastic profession of these churches descends directly from the Egyptian desert and is the oldest continuous monastic observance in Christianity.
Twenty-seven-book New Testament canon, shared across Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Protestant traditions alike, including this tradition.
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.
The creed opens by confessing God the Father almighty.
God is confessed as present everywhere and filling all things, in common with the wider patristic tradition.
God is confessed as knowing all things, in common with the wider patristic tradition these churches share with the Greek and Latin East and West.
Pilgrimage to Jerusalem, to Lalibela and to the desert monasteries of Egypt is a settled devotion across these churches.
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.
The creed confesses the Holy Spirit as the one who spoke by the prophets.
Redemption through Christ's sacrifice is affirmed across Nicene Christianity, including this tradition.
The Oriental Orthodox recite the Creed without the Latin addition, having parted from the wider church before the phrase arose, so their rejection rests on the original text rather than on the later Byzantine dispute.
The bodily resurrection of the dead is affirmed across Nicene Christianity, including this tradition.
Salvation through Christ is affirmed across Nicene Christianity, including this tradition.
Christ as the Son of God is affirmed across Nicene Christianity, including this tradition.
The oldest surviving text of this prayer is a Greek papyrus from Egypt, and it remains in use in the Coptic church that produced it.
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.
The epiclesis follows the institution narrative, as in the Byzantine rite.
The fraction is an extended rite here, with a fraction prayer that varies by season and by anaphora.
Among the earliest surviving illuminated Christian manuscripts anywhere, produced and continuously held within the Oriental Orthodox communion's own Ethiopian tradition, radiocarbon dated to a period within two to three centuries of the family's founding Ecumenical Councils.
The Oriental Orthodox confess the Trinity as defined at Nicaea and Constantinople, the councils they accept, since their break with the rest of Christendom concerned the person of Christ and not the Trinity.
The creed confesses a kingdom that shall have no end.
The creed confesses that Christ shall come again with glory to judge the living and the dead.
The Lord's Prayer opens every hour of the Agpeya and each of the corresponding offices in the Armenian, Syriac and Ethiopian books.
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.
Mary is called Ever-Virgin throughout the liturgies of these churches, and the title is not treated as an open question.
The Oriental Orthodox confess the resurrection and celebrate it with the ancient liturgies of Egypt, Armenia, Syria and Ethiopia, whose Easter observance is the summit of their year.
The virgin birth of Christ is affirmed across Nicene Christianity, including this tradition.
The institution narrative stands within the anaphora in each of these rites.
Evil is read as privation rather than substance, the patristic account these churches hold in common with the rest of the ancient tradition.
Theosis, deification through participation in the divine life, is central soteriology shared with the wider Eastern Christian tradition.
The Oriental Orthodox teach deification as the purpose of the incarnation, and their miaphysite Christology sharpens the claim, since the union of natures in Christ is the pattern of what the believer is drawn into.
The Council of Ephesus in 431 is one of the three this communion receives, and Cyril of Alexandria, who carried the title there, is its own patriarch. The word is used without qualification in its liturgies.
Ethiopia's church belongs to the Oriental Orthodox communion.
The distinction between God's unknowable essence and his presence to creation is carried here as it is in the Greek East, with the same apophatic caution.
The doctrine of the Trinity, one God in three persons, is affirmed across Nicene Christianity, including this tradition; the Oriental Orthodox churches accept the first three Ecumenical Councils, at which Trinitarian doctrine was defined.
The evening office is kept daily, and in the Coptic use the Raising of Incense at Vespers precedes the Liturgy of the following morning.