Small yet growing Christian group; Mar Thoma Church, its members of Indian descent, has added a fourth congregation in the area.
Philadelphia Inquirer, Sunday, December 18, 2005

Kristin E. Holmes

In the early 1960s, University of Pennsylvania professor Samuel K. Chacko met with a small ecumenical group of Christians who had emigrated from India. There were three families and a few bachelors - students mostly, who had come to the city to study. They gathered in Philadelphia periodically for prayer and support.

Christians of Indian descent are a small minority in their native country and an even smaller one in the United States. But now, 40 years later, Chacko's India-based church is a full-fledged denomination in this country. The Mar Thoma Church has been quietly but steadily growing, and today Chacko sits in a Havertown congregation surrounded by more than 200 people.

"We are in our second phase in the U.S.," said the Rev. Dr. K.A. Abraham, secretary of the Diocese of North America and Europe, based in New York. "We have established parishes and [priests] and our own church buildings in most places; now we have to ensure the future of the church."

Mar Thoma means St. Thomas in Malayalam, a language spoken in Southwest India. The church traces its origins to the apostle who church tradition says took a missionary trip to the region in A.D. 52 and converted Jews and Hindus living in what is now the state of Kerala. Christians make up only 2.4 percent of India's population of one billion, but more than 20 percent of the population of Kerala. In the United States, the denomination is minuscule, but as immigration has increased, the church has grown, not only by virtue of numbers but because of members' commitment to nurturing the faith as their youth become increasingly Americanized.

"The church becomes an identity marketer," said Selva J. Raj, religion department chair at Albion College in Michigan and coeditor of Popular Christianity in India: Riting Between the Lines (SUNY Press, 2002). "It helps to build and reinforce religious, cultural and ethnic identity."

The church began in the United States in 1972 when a small prayer group started meeting in Queens. That group eventually became the first Mar Thoma parish in the country. Today, the North American diocese has 52 parishes with their own clergy and 20 start-up congregations. The church, officially known as the Malankara Mar Thoma Syrian Church, has about one million followers internationally and 30,000 in the United States. The national church is headed by Bishop Euyakim Mar Coorilos; the international church by Metropolitan Philipose Mar Chrysostom.

In November, the church added three new parishes, all in the United States: the St. Thomas Mar Thoma Church of Delaware Valley in Havertown; one in Staten Island, N.Y.; and a third in Atlanta. The Havertown church held its first services last month. It joins the denomination's other area churches: the Mar Thoma Church of Philadelphia in Frankford (founded in 1976, 225 families now); the Bethel Mar Thoma Church in Lawncrest (founded in 1987, 230 families now), and the Ascension Mar Thoma Church in Northeast Philadelphia (founded in 1997, 160 families now). In March, the Ascension congregation will dedicate its new building, a $2 million sanctuary on Northeast Avenue.

With about 100 families, the new Delaware Valley church has the kind of packed-house weekly attendance that other, more established churches might covet. The congregation worships at the Trinity Lutheran Church in Havertown, renting space at the West Chester Pike building and outnumbering its host congregation.

"We felt this was a unique opportunity to reach out and live the gospel," said Trinity's pastor, the Rev. Dr. Delores E. Littleton, who is planning to do joint outreach programs with the Mar Thoma church.

The congregation is sharing the Rev. A.C. Kurian with the Ascension church, Kurian's regular congregation. The Delaware Valley church will get a new pastor who will arrive from India in May. The church's all-male clergy are trained at the denomination's Mar Thoma Theological Seminary in Kerala, although new training programs are in the planning stages at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, Abraham said.

"What is interesting is that the church has a Protestant reform emphasis in terms of its attention to preaching and the Bible," Raj said, "and its rituals are Eastern in tradition." The blend is a result of colonial influences on the St. Thomas Christians, which prompted a splintering of the church over time.

Most of the members of the newest Mar Thoma church, in Havertown, previously attended the Mar Thoma Church of Philadelphia. The group, most of whom live in the western suburbs, decided to start a new branch closer to their homes, and the move may have engendered some hard feelings, said Mathews T. Mathews, a trustee of the Delaware Valley branch.

On Sundays, women in flowing and vibrantly colored saris, men in suits and young people in shirts, khakis and sneakers gather for Sunday school, Bible study, choir practice, services and coffee hour.

Like other denominations, the Mar Thoma church is working hard to strengthen the church among young people with whom the future of the church lies. Services are held in Kerala's native language and in English. The denomination has a new youth chaplaincy program, new Sunday school curriculum, leadership training workshops and youth fellowships.

For engineer Sheela Zachariah of Berwyn, the church was an invaluable support for her and twin boys after her husband, John, died in 2002. In the case of three young men, Jobin Philip, Sini Mathew and Robert Joseph, the church helps keep them connected to tradition, but not without American influences. In India, women and men sit on opposite sides of the church. In the United States, everyone sits together.

Chacko, who 40 years ago was among only a few Indian Christians in Philadelphia, hopes the new church will become a beacon. "If an average American thinks of India, they think of Hindus, not Christians," Chacko said. "We hope this church will serve as an ambassador to the multicultural nature of India."