Category:Christianity in India

Christianity is India's third largest religion, with approximately 24 million followers, constituting 2.3 per cent of India's population.

Orthodoxwiki states:

"The faith and tradition of the small community of early Christians in India remains alive and vibrant nearly two thousand years.

The Indian Church was autonomous then, and is now, like all Orthodox Churches. This is clear from the fact that no name of any church in India is seen in the now available list of bishoprics of the church in Persia from the fifth to the seventh century.

The Early Church in India remained one and at peace, treasuring the same ethnic and cultural characteristics as the rest of the local community. Its members enjoyed the goodwill of the other religious communities as well as the political support of the Hindu rulers. The Thomas Christians welcomed missionaries and migrants from other churches, some of whom sought to escape persecution in their own countries. The language of worship in the early centuries must have been the local language probably a form of Tamil. In later centuries, the liturgical language mingled with East Syriac received through the churches of Seleucia and Tigris.

The Early Christians of India (mainly on the Southern coast) were known as Thomas Christians and indeed by no other name until the advent of the Portuguese in the 16th century followed closely by the British.

By the 7th Century, specific references of the Indian church began to appear in Persian records. The Metropolitan of India and the Metropolitan of China are mentioned in the consecration records of Patriarchs of the East. At one stage, however, the Indian church was claimed to be in the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan of Fars but this issue was settled by Patriarch Sliba Zoha (714-728 AD) who recognized the traditional dignity of the autonomous Metropolitan of India.

"Even amidst periodic storm, from one source or another, across these centuries of change, the community has maintained an inner calm, in the safety of the spiritual anchor, cast in the original concept of the word Orthodox, that is the "right glorification of God".

http://orthodoxwiki.org/India