The patriarch stood facing east, his arms outstretched, his red-and-gold robe cascading down his back. Above his head was a marble dome on four pristine pillars, lit from inside to resemble sunlight. Preparing to celebrate the first Eucharist in a new cathedral, he intoned a liturgical chant in classical East Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic, the language of Christ. As he raised his hands to the heavens, the congregation behind him loudly responded, “Amen.”
Patriarch Mar Awa III, Catholicos-Patriarch of the Assyrian Church of the East (ACOTE), was not in Iraq, the Church’s ancient homeland, but in the West London suburb of Ealing, giving new life and purpose to a hundred-year-old red-brick building that formerly hosted an Anglican congregation. Purchasing the building had been a heavy lift—and a labor of love—for a community of six hundred families that has only been in the United Kingdom for two generations, yet whose ancient Church has links to St. Thomas and the prophet Jonah. In a short time, they raised more than four million dollars and contributed many hours of labor as electricians, engineers, bricklayers, decorators, and handymen, managing to refurbish the church in only a few months. Following the first Eucharist at the end of the two-day festivities, the Patriarch declared: “This isn’t just the opening of another church, but the continuation of the salvific work begun by our Saviour, Jesus Christ.”
ACOTE, which is headquartered in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, is a small but extraordinary piece of the jigsaw of the global Church. Some members trace their lineage to the ancient Assyrian Empire that for centuries dominated the Middle East and whose work adorns museums with dramatic sculptures and reliefs. By the time Saints Thomas and Bartholomew were believed to have arrived in what is now Iraq, in the mid-first century AD, tradition holds that the Assyrians, descended from Jonah’s converts in Nineveh, were practicing monotheism.
Christianity grew quickly there, but the Church of the East refused to condemn the fifth-century Patriarch Nestor. Nestor held that Christ’s divine and human natures were separate. His views—known as Nestorianism—were condemned as heretical by the Council of Ephesus in 431, as were Nestorian churches. Nonetheless, by the tenth century, after much missionary activity, what was then simply the Church of the East comprised more than one hundred dioceses that stretched from Egypt to China. But as a result of shifting temporal powers, the arrival of Islam, and bloody campaigns by the Turco-Mongol warlord Tamerlane, the eastern extent of the Church’s reach had receded to Mesopotamia by the sixteenth century.
Meanwhile, new links were forged with the West. Contact with European and Catholic powers had already been increasing, and following the Ottoman conquest of Baghdad and Basra, which established new trade connections, such contact only intensified. Under the Ottoman system, Christians and Jews were given dhimmi status, second-class citizenship in return for protection. That prompted some of them to seek the patronage and protection of Rome. These Christians entered into communion with Rome and called themselves Chaldeans, in a nod to their Babylonian heritage; they were soon strengthened by the arrival of Capuchin, Carmelite, and Dominican missionaries.
European involvement—or interference—subsequently increased. As Suha Rassam points out in her book Christianity in Iraq, the Church of the East and the larger Syriac Orthodox Church “had learned to live peacefully within the limits of foreign and Islamic rule and to coexist with their Kurdish and Arab Muslim neighbours.” However, political change and foreign influences “led to a disturbance of this balance.” British archaeologists in the nineteenth century were fascinated by the remains of Nineveh and in 1886, the archbishop of Canterbury launched a mission to the Assyrian Church, which included giving it a printing press. Foreign educators also arrived, and dhimmi Christians welcomed the new opportunities they presented. At around the same time, the Ottomans feared the fragmentation of their empire. Assyrians, along with Armenians and Greek Orthodox, suffered a succession of massacres as the old empire crumbled. In the chaos of World War One, these Christians’ Russian allies retreated, focusing on the revolution at home.
The British exploited Assyrians’ aspirations for an independent homeland, pledging to back their cause in return for the assistance of thousands of ground troops during the First World War. British officials had promised Assyrians and other minorities an independent homeland in the Kurdistan region, but reneged. Assyrians subsequently found themselves branded as traitors by their Arabic compatriots in the new Iraq. Then the British formed the majority-Assyrian Iraq Levies, who defended Royal Air Force bases on Iraqi soil and fought alongside the British in the Anglo-Iraqi War in World War Two. After the war’s end, the Assyrians petitioned the nascent United Nations for independent territory, to no avail.
Meanwhile, during the repressive regime of Saddam Hussein, the Assyrian Church began dialogue with the Vatican. After only a few years, in 1994, this resulted in Rome declaring the issue of Christ’s nature resolved. Catholic-Assyrian dialogue has continued—Pope Francis welcomed Mar Awa III to the Vatican last November, on the thirtieth anniversary of the declaration, and announced the inclusion of the Assyrians’ revered St. Isaac of Nineveh in the Roman martyrology—with a view to achieving full communion. One outcome has been to allow Chaldeans to receive Communion in Assyrian churches, a response to what the Vatican rather euphemistically termed the “dramatic circumstances” that have scattered members of both Churches across Scandinavia, Western Europe, Australia, and North America.
The global dispersal of Assyrian Christians only accelerated after the ill-fated invasion by U.S.-led forces in 2003. Following the toppling of Saddam’s regime, the country spiraled into lawlessness, with Christians first targeted by some compatriots and then by jihadists for supposedly sympathising with the “Christian” Western forces.
Since 1987, the number of Christians in Iraq has plummeted from 1.4 million to 150,000–200,000, according to Western-based religious charities. Murders of clergy and laity and stories of Muslims betraying non-Muslim neighbors to jihadists, or moving into homes from which Christians had fled, have given Christians plenty of reasons to leave and stay away from Iraq. Their fear is that although ISIS has been defeated, the hatred of non-Muslims that fueled it lingers.
All four of these Churches—ACOTE, Chaldean Catholic, Syriac Orthodox, and Syriac Catholic—have large diaspora populations, located mainly in West London, France, Germany, Belgium, the United States, Canada, and Australia. ACOTE’s most senior prelate in London is Mar Awraham Youkhanis, bishop for the newly created Diocese of Western Europe, which includes nine other parishes in seven other European countries. Mar Awraham’s life story reflects his community’s recent migrations: born in Basra, he left Iraq at the age of three, after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. His father, who had already served as an army surgeon for eight years in the Iran-Iraq War, was facing a new draft. The family fled to Greece before settling in Australia. The pattern is not uncommon—his current patriarch, Mar Awa III, was himself born in Chicago, home to a sizable Assyrian community.
It’s true that Assyrian churches in the diaspora enjoy greater political stability and freedom of worship. But their pleas for local recognition of the 1915 Assyrian genocide and their push for resettlement of the hundreds of Assyrian asylum-seekers stuck in limbo in Turkey have mostly fallen on deaf ears. In the United Kingdom, at least, places of worship can sponsor refugees, but they cannot choose where their beneficiary should come from, though this could change. In the United States, the Trump administration’s suspension of the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program has—with the notable exception of a small group of white Afrikaners from South Africa—barred all refugees and asylum seekers from resettlement.
What’s next for ACOTE in the United Kingdom? The new cathedral in Ealing allows more space for activities aimed at preserving identity, such as language classes for children, who may have Assyrian names such as Sargon or Asshur—or be named after Dad’s favourite soccer player. The challenge is to persuade Assyrian youth to hold on to their identity now that it is no longer threatened by Mongols, Ottomans, Arabists, or Islamists, and not to slip into the sometimes lukewarm spirituality around them.
Mar Awraham, for his part, is building ecumenical bridges. These tend to be based on practical friendship and shared experience rather than doctrine. One of the London-based Orthodox Churches, for instance, loaned them £100,000 for the church refurbishment. Canon Dr. William Taylor, chair of the Anglican and Eastern Churches Association, has included Mar Awraham in regular meetings with local Church of England, Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and nondenominational bishops. For Canon Taylor, the Assyrian congregation’s “vitality and vigour” are impressive, though he laments the Church’s past treatment by British foreign policy.
In addition, a new Anglican-Assyrian International Forum is in the works. It will be cochaired by Mar Awraham and Bishop Anthony Ball, director of the Anglican Centre in Rome and the archbishop of Canterbury’s representative to the Holy See. The forum’s task is to explore potential avenues of dialogue and fellowship, and so far there are good prospects for collaboration. The Chaldean patriarch, Cardinal Louis Raphaël Sako, has called for “unity” between ACOTE, his Church, and two relatively recent offshoots: a nineteenth-century Protestant denomination and the sixty-one-year-old Ancient Church of the East. How unity would be achieved remains to be seen, given clear areas of disagreement on topics such as papal authority.
Ecumenism can be a fraught, lengthy process, and the future of Christianity in the West seems far from clear. But if the inauguration of its new cathedral is any indication, ACOTE here in the UK seems likely to grow. The British context offers the Assyrians a Christian-heritage culture in which they can put down roots, as well as a multicultural landscape where they are seen not as separatists but rather as one more vibrant migrant community among the many who now call the UK home. Western Christians have a lot to learn from their history and their witness—including the isolating effects of schism and how to remain faithful amid difference and change. Filling a once-defunct English church with persecuted Middle Eastern worshippers full of vitality may itself be a metaphor for the Western Church’s reinvigoration.
