Arabic heritage in our parish isn’t about ethnicity. It’s about history.
The Antiochian Orthodox Church is named for Antioch, the city where St. Peter served as first bishop and where believers were first called “Christians” (Acts 11:26). That’s in modern-day Turkey. But for over a thousand years, the faithful who kept this Church alive through Muslim conquests, Crusader violence, and Ottoman rule spoke Arabic. They copied manuscripts in Arabic. They sang the liturgy in Arabic. They passed down the faith in Arabic when doing so could get you killed.
When your great-great-grandfather arrived at Ellis Island from Lebanon or Syria in 1905, he brought that heritage with him. So did thousands of other Arabic-speaking Orthodox Christians who settled across America and started parishes. They didn’t have church buildings at first. They met in homes, in rented halls, above storefronts. And they prayed in the language they knew.
What That Means for Us Now
Walk into our parish on a Sunday morning and you’ll hear some Arabic. A hymn here, a response there. It’s beautiful. It connects us to those centuries of faithful witness. But you’ll hear mostly English, because that’s what most of us speak.
This isn’t compromise. It’s mission.
The Church at Antioch didn’t stay in Antioch. It sent out Paul and Barnabas to the Gentiles (Acts 13). It spread the Gospel to people who didn’t speak Aramaic or Greek or anything the apostles grew up speaking. The whole point of Pentecost was that everyone heard the good news in their own language. So when we worship primarily in English here in Southeast Texas, we’re doing what Antioch has always done, making the faith accessible to the people God has placed among us.
Some of our families have Arabic surnames and recipes for kibbeh that go back generations. Some of us are converts from First Baptist or St. Anne’s or nowhere at all. We’re all Antiochian Orthodox. The heritage isn’t about bloodline. It’s about continuity with a Church that survived when survival seemed impossible.
I think about this sometimes when I hear the deacon chant “Amen” in Arabic during the Liturgy. That same word, in that same language, was chanted in Damascus in 1300 when being Christian meant paying extra taxes and accepting second-class status. It was chanted in Aleppo in 1850 when the Ottoman Empire was crumbling. It was chanted in a rented hall in Brooklyn in 1920 by immigrants who worked twelve-hour shifts and still showed up for Vespers. Now it’s chanted here, and the guy chanting it might be named Michael Johnson, and that’s exactly how it should be.
Why It Still Matters
We don’t preserve Arabic elements out of nostalgia. We preserve them because they remind us that Orthodoxy isn’t a recent import or an American invention. When someone walks in here for the first time and hears a language they don’t understand, it signals something true: this faith is ancient, it’s bigger than Texas, and it connects you to Christians across centuries and continents.
But here’s what we don’t do. We don’t make Arabic heritage a barrier. We don’t act like you need a Lebanese grandmother to belong here. We don’t privilege ethnic customs over the Gospel. St. Paul was pretty clear about that: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). If he were writing today, he’d probably add “neither Arab nor Anglo.”
The Antiochian Archdiocese in North America figured this out decades ago. Early parishes were Arabic-only because that’s who was there. But as second and third generations grew up speaking English, and as converts started showing up, the Church adapted. Not by abandoning its heritage, but by distinguishing between what’s essential (the apostolic faith) and what’s cultural (the language and customs that carried it).
You can love both. You should honor both. But you can’t confuse them.
So yes, Arabic heritage matters in our parish. It’s woven into our history, our music, our connection to the Patriarchate of Antioch and its faithful in Syria and Lebanon who still worship in Arabic today under circumstances we can barely imagine. When we remember them, we remember that we’re part of something that doesn’t depend on political stability or cultural dominance or any earthly power.
But you don’t need to speak Arabic to be Antiochian Orthodox. You just need to be willing to become part of this living tradition, to let it shape you, to carry it forward in your own life and language. That’s what the Arabic-speaking immigrants did when they came here. That’s what we’re all doing now.
