Messeh would soon become an early advocate for a new kind of Coptic church—one that could appeal to American converts but maintain the core tenets of the nearly 2,000-year-old faith. By 2012, he decided to establish his own congregation. His services, with their chanted prayers, elaborate robes, and cymbal-playing, look traditionally Coptic Orthodox. But the English-language liturgy, crowded rows of ethnically diverse worshippers, and evangelical style of preaching feel rooted in the United States.

Messeh’s church, now 300 members strong, isn’t the only one of its kind: In the past decade, dozens of Americanized Coptic churches have opened across the United States, concentrated in Texas, California, and along the East Coast. In 2015, Bishop Youssef, one of 10 Coptic bishops in the country, founded the American Orthodox Coptic Church of Alexandria, which currently comprises five congregations from Arizona to Florida, and caters specifically to a U.S.-born audience. Church leadership has embraced the governing philosophy these changes represent: If the church wants to grow, it needs to part with some aspects of Egyptian culture and formally embrace its American identity.

But these moves have provoked some anxiety among the laity, who worry that dropping Egyptian culture will undermine the faith. A new conversation has emerged among the faithful: Can an Americanized church truly count as Coptic?

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While the Coptic Church doesn’t keep any formal tally on its global presence, many scholars estimate that there are over 500,000 Copts living in the United States, with many tens of thousands of others living in other English-speaking countries. There are no formal estimates on converts either. But their growing presence in established churches, as well as their membership in the new “mission churches” in the United States, is a widely acknowledged phenomenon. “There are now more and more non-Egyptian people in church, and I am getting to be less and less unique, which is great,” said Rachel Smallwood, a native Texan who was raised a devout Baptist and was baptized into the Coptic Church in Houston in 2012.

American converts often first encounter Coptic Orthodoxy through a friend, colleague, or romantic partner. Marriage is a common motivation for conversion, as both partners have to be baptized in the faith in order to be married in the Church. Many American converts are also drawn to the Church’s claims that it’s the oldest in the world, founded by St. Mark the Evangelist in the first century. “The Protestant circles I was in would say, ‘We are trying to be more like Jesus Christ,’” said Toni Svonavec, an elementary-school teacher in Maryland who was baptized in 2014. “But for me, that is exactly what the Coptic Church already has.”

While most ethnic Orthodox churches cling to linguistic fidelity and cultural continuity abroad, the Coptic Church has not resisted acculturation. Its first English liturgy, the prayers and rituals that govern different church services, was introduced in 1980, just a decade after the first Coptic churches were established in North America. By the 1990s, almost all of the 50-plus churches in the United States prayed mostly in English, a development blessed by the Coptic Pope Shenouda III. Some Egyptian customs—like standing throughout the entire service, or kissing the priest’s hand as a greeting—also began to fade away, and more converts joined.