That is something I did not know about your faith!
That's okay! Even if you had known, it's still very nice of you to offer. I do very much appreciate it; my particular church is just very strict in many things that most other churches are comparatively more lax about, even other churches in the same communion (like ArmenianJohn's). The stereotype about the OO is that the Copts and the Tewahedo (Ethiopians and Eritreans) are more 'strict' in matters like marriage and church attendance, while the Syriacs (Middle Eastern and Indian) and the Armenians are more 'lax'. Granted, this is all relative, and it does not in any way harm the communion shared by us all, since we are defined by our
common faith, not by how open or closed we may be to churches outside of our communion. The OO churches probably more so than any other communion are very much autocephalous (independent from each other in terms of ecclesiastical governance, as opposed to, say, the Roman Catholic model where there are a lot of different individual churches in the communion, but they all answer to the same bishop -- the bishop of Rome), so it does not harm us at all to have different standards, which after all only arose from different experiences affecting the Copts, or the Syriacs, or the Armenians, etc.
For the Copts in particular, we were lucky (?) to largely be forgotten by most other Christians outside of our communion for about a thousand years after Chalcedon (451 AD). There's even a recent book on the European 'discovery' (rediscovery) of the Copts in the Middle Ages,
The Copts and the West 1439-1822 by Alastair Hamilton (Oxford University Press, 2006). The opening date of that range corresponds to the arrival of Egyptian and Ethiopian delegations to Rome for the Roman Catholic Council of Florence (1431-1449), which was an attempted reunion council between Rome and the Oriental Orthodox (out of communion with Rome since 451/506) and Eastern Orthodox (out of communion with Rome since 1054). At that council, the Egyptians and Ethiopians agreed to be in communion with Rome again under the understanding that it would be a union of two equal churches (the Coptic and the Orthodox Tewahedo churches of East Africa being one church from the days of HH St. Athanasius the Apostolic, who sent the Kingdom of Axum her first bishops c. 330 after the conversion of King Ezana, until those of Pope Yusab II in the 1950s), while obviously the Romans themselves had a different idea of what the union would mean. Hence it never really got off the ground because it turned out that the two sides did not actually see eye to eye.
This is kind of symptomatic of Coptic engagement with Western Christianity in general, as the next major push of foreign Christian churches into Egypt was the Roman Catholics who sent Jesuit missionaries and explorers there in the 16th to 18th centuries with the idea of converting the Coptic people to Roman Catholicism. These provided Europe with some of the first accurate maps and other information on Egypt's monasteries, but did not really accomplish Rome's goals, due to again a misunderstanding between the foreign visitors and the Copts. (The patriarch of the time, HH Pope John XVI, even sent one of the Jesuit missionaries in 1703 to Ethiopia to carry the chrism/holy oil consecrated in Egypt to that country, as the Jesuits were using Egypt as a base from which to send Roman Catholic missionaries into Ethiopia; I'm not sure what to make of that...probably HH established cordial relations with them because it was easier to have foreigners take it than to have Egyptian Christians do so, since they still lived under the laws governing non-Muslim citizens and hence had restricted communications with their coreligionists.)
A little later on, beginning in the 1850s or so, the first Protestant missionaries came, from various parts of Europe and America. Unlike the earlier Roman Catholics, who had such trouble establishing a Coptic Catholic Church that this church had something like three false starts before it even got off the ground (including its once former leader, one Athanasius who had converted to Catholicism in Jerusalem in 1741, leaving it to return to Orthodoxy only three years later), the Protestants were actually quite successful in some regard, because they set up schools and brought European technology with them. This was the period when the printing press was first brought into Egypt (which was received with great ceremony at the patriarchate, which wasted no time in using it to set up a printing house for the standardization and propagation of Church materials -- the first ever printing house in Egypt), we first adopted the concept of 'Sunday School' (this was not known in Egypt until the Protestants introduced it), and there was a great leap forward in emphasis on education in general. (The Roman Catholics, too, had set up a college in Rome for the education of Coptic priests to be used in their uniate church.)
It did not take the Coptic people long to realize, however, that with education provided by Western Christian missionaries who regarded us basically as pagans came Western ideas about Christianity, Western doctrines, and ultimately apostasy. Knowing this, and knowing how many people in the Church were very poor and had no other options to provide their children with education, in the 1860s, HH Pope Demetrius II (r. 1861-1870), issued a papal bull condemning the missionary schools as unsuitable for the education of Coptic people due to their teaching foreign religious doctrines. The document reads in part: “But oh our children, our joy and rejoicing and the boast of our preaching, although the conditions of you all are joyous and pleasing, and ye are abiding in the true orthodox faith and established in the honoured sacraments of your church, and respecting exceedingly its spiritual ordinances, and rites and ceremonies, yet in this spiritual garden which the right hand of the Lord Christ planted by means of his priestly apostles, and their righteous disciples and successors, and in the spiritual cultivation of which they laboured, there are to be found two things which are displeasing, nay exceedingly grievous, and depressing, and heart-rending. The first of these is the reception by some of you of the doctrines of those opposers who follow the Protestants, sometimes by receiving and reading their books, and sometimes by hearkening to their words, and being made to doubt by them and follow them. The second, that it has not sufficed that the adults have looked upon these poisons, but with your own hands you have cast your little ones into their deadly snares, since one gives over his boy to their school, and another his daughter unto them, that they may cause them to drink from their childhood the milk of error.”
HH then issues the following warning: "Therefore, from this time henceforth, whoever transgresses and dares to take his son or daughter from his own church or school, and introduce him into the school of the Protestants, in order to abide therein and learn its detestable sciences, let him be under the excommunicating word of God."
What I hope for you to get out of this is that many of our interactions with foreign churches and foreign Christians were decidedly negative, as the (re-)establishment of these contacts carried with them the missionary imperatives of the Westerners who would like to see us leave our church for theirs. This is not so odd in itself (after all, we'd rather everyone be Orthodox
), but in the context of a situation wherein such unions are attempted without the two sides understanding each other to begin with, they can't really be said to be on solid ground whether you consider them good or bad. As the oft-repeated story of the Bishop of Asyut and the Scottish Presbyterian missionaries in the 1860s goes, the missionaries sought to 'convert the Copts to Christianity' (hahahahaha), and the bishop, after listening to their arguments in favor of their denomination, replied "We have been living with Christ for almost 2000 years; how long have your people been living with Him?"
Being as we have everything to lose and basically nothing to gain from responding to the overtures of those who do not understand us and who we do not agree with anyway, it has been the rule since the 1860s that the Coptic Orthodox people are not to attend non-Orthodox meetings. Everything in our faith is given to us by God and is sufficient for us, and so we approach everything with that in mind, faithful to what we have in recognition of what a
pearl we have been blessed to be the inheritors of -- not so that it not be shared with others, but so that
we treat it according to its priceless value. (Read: so it's not about the world being terrible and full of people who hate God or anything, but about loving God and acting accordingly.)
Now, with all that said, we do realize that we are not actually living in the 1860s anymore. For instance, I am not in Egypt (and never have been), and an increasing number of Coptic people who have immigrated out of North Africa since the 1950s aren't either. And the situation in America is really not comparable to the situation in Egypt. So I personally know Coptic people who have sent their children to Catholic schools with the approval of their bishops, who recognize that
in a Western context in particular, these are the best of the available choices (very, very few places have Coptic Orthodox schools which are accredited, since we are such a new church in the West). So we are not overly rigid or deaf to the needs of people, but in order to circumvent the more general rule of "no going to/participating in non-OO religious things", you need to have an actual reason beyond just wanting to or being offered (it's not that those are 'bad' reasons, necessarily; they're just not
doctrinally or
theologically substantial as the reasons for having this ecclesiology are). Closer to home, the community that I used to be a part of when I was in NM went some years without the necessary ecclesiastical structure around them in order to even hold liturgies (they couldn't get a priest sent to them by the nearest bishop, since there weren't enough people at the location). As a result, they received the approval of the nearest Coptic Orthodox bishop and Eastern Orthodox bishop to attend the liturgies at the local Greek Orthodox church (the Greek Orthodox Church is not a part of the Oriental Orthodox communion, so without such an agreement this would not be allowed). This arrangement ended when they got their own priest sometime later (when I moved away two years ago, the priest was still flown in on alternate weekends from Arizona; I don't know if that's still the case today).
The bottom line is that as a Church our history of interaction with those of other confessions has been at best mixed and given us plenty of reason to maintain that we stick only to our own services, seminaries, schools, etc., as far as is possible, and that when such is not possible, we only make other arrangements via very strict guidelines, and then only for as long as is necessary until we may resume our normative practice.
I should also say that I have been personally told by my own priest that I am not to go to the local Eastern Orthodox churches in my home area (OCA and Bulgarian), so I cannot rely on some kind of exception as was allowed in NM to be applied to me here in CA when the context is different (there it was a community; here I am one individual). So I too would have a very high bar to meet were I to write to the nearest Coptic Orthodox bishop about the situation here, and I cannot conceive of any situation on the earth that would arise so as to make it appropriate for a Coptic Orthodox person such as myself to attend Mormon meetings when there are services of other communities that are much more mainstream (and hence closer to us in matters of faith, doctrine, and liturgy) which would be available.
An aside on the other churches in our communion: Just FYI, to my understanding the Armenian openness to other churches is a result of their own unique history which included interaction with Western Christians during times when we did not have any, such as the interactions with the Romans during the Crusades, as well other more recent calamities such as the horrific events of the Turkish genocides which killed something like 90% of Armenian clergy and sent the Armenians into a worldwide diaspora which to this day is quite a bit larger the total population of Armenians in Armenia proper. The Copts never experienced anything even close to that, though fourteen centuries and counting of Islamic rule and about two centuries before that of Chalcedonian rule is no picnic, either.
I also understand that the Syriacs, for their part, allow for a wide cultural latitude, as their nation is divided among many different Christian confessions, and so it is not uncommon to find places in their homeland like Bakhdida (a town in Iraq) which in its many centuries of life has passed in confessional allegiance from the Church of the East (4th century-6th century), to Syriac Orthodox (7th century-18th century), to Syriac Catholic (18th century-present). It is possible and I'm sure is the case for many in the area to have family members of all three confessions without any of them having converted to or from anything in their lifetimes. Such is also the case for Syriac Christians in India.
So you see, everything has its own reasons for being, rooted in the history of particular peoples and places. To be true to the resulting ecclesiastical realities is to be true to those histories.
I love attending other faiths and do so as often, including participating when appropriate (in the local tradition and when we're on the same page).
That's great! I wouldn't want to discourage that just because I can't return the favor. We never had any Mormon visitors during my four years at St. Bishoy in NM, but we did have Lutheran, Greek Orthodox, Jewish, Roman Catholic, and other visitors, and they were all welcomed with open arms provided that they were respectful of our customs and did not try to receive communion with us (in the Orthodox Church, anyway, you
will be turned away if the priest does not know you to be a baptized Orthodox Christian who abides by the rules of the Church with regard to participation in the fasts, confession, and so on; when I visited the monastery of St. Shenouda the Archimandrite in New York some years ago, for instance, since I was coming from the other side of the country to stay with people who didn't know me from Adam, I first had to have my priest call and send a letter to them, and I'm told that this was a concession to the fact that our priest just happened to know the priest of the monastery for many years; I'm told that usually such visits require a letter from the bishop, as you are being in a sense temporarily transferred from the care of one bishop to another while you are in his territory).
The visitor to the average Sunday Coptic liturgy could do many things that don't include receiving the Eucharist, reading the epistles, or the other relatively few things that are reserved for believers only. You would still give the same responses (or I should say be encouraged to, but not expected to; even the Greek Orthodox visitors we had found our liturgy a challenge, and they themselves use a variant of the liturgy of St. Basil in their own Church), receive the same blessing upon your head that the priest prays for each individual as he goes about the church with the censer and the same general absolution prayed over all the people, be sprinkled with the same holy water at the close of the service, take the same orban/antidoron as is given to the believers, and be welcomed at the same table for the post liturgy Agape meal (where you too can have Egyptians talk your ear off...oh joy!
).
So again, even though the rules for governing
ourselves are rather strict, we are not that way toward others at all. The doors of the church are open to
everyone -- it's the communion line (and the confessional chair, the marriage ceremony, etc.) that requires conversion to be a part of, and rightfully so.
