Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church (Amharic: የኢትዮጵያ ኦርቶዶክስ ተዋሕዶ ቤተ ክርስቲያን, romanized: Yä-ityop'ya ortodoks täwaḥədo betä krəstiyan), also sometimes known as the Abyssinian Church or the Church of Abyssinia, is the largest of the Oriental Orthodox Churches. The EOTC is the first indigenous Christian church from sub-Saharan Africa and precedes the arrival of Western and European colonizers, who mostly followed Catholic and Protestant denominations, to the region by more than a millennium. It is also one of only two universally recognized Oriental Orthodox churches in Africa alongside the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church, as the status of the Tigrayan Orthodox Tewahedo Church is still disputed by the broader Oriental Orthodox communion Dating back to the Christianization of the Kingdom of Aksum by Coptic Orthodox missionaries in 330; it has between 38 million and 51 million adherents in Ethiopia, and 60 million members worldwide. It is a founding member of the World Council of Churches. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church is in communion with the other Oriental Orthodox churches (the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church, the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria, the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church, the Armenian Apostolic Church, and the Syriac Orthodox Church).

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church had been administratively part of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria from the first half of the 4th century until 1959, when it was granted autocephaly with its own patriarch by Cyril VI of Alexandria, pope of the Coptic Orthodox Church.

Tewahedo (Ge'ez: ተዋሕዶ täwaḥədo) is a Geʽez word meaning "united as one." This word refers to the Oriental Orthodox belief in miaphysitism, meaning one perfectly unified nature of Christ, i.e., a complete union of the divine and human natures into one nature is self-evident to accomplish the divine salvation of mankind, as opposed to the "two natures of Christ" belief commonly held by the Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran, Reformed, and most other Protestant churches (which are predominant among Christians in Europe, the Americas, and most of Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia), but not by the Church of the East or many Restorationist denominations. Oriental Orthodox Churches adhere to a miaphysite Christological view followed by Cyril of Alexandria, its leading proponent in the Christological debates of the 4th and 5th centuries, who advocated "mia physis tou Theou logou sesarkōmenē", or "one (mia) nature of the Word of God incarnate" (μία φύσις τοῦ θεοῦ λόγου σεσαρκωμένη) and a hypostatic union (ἕνωσις καθ' ὑπόστασιν, henōsis kath' hypostasin). The distinction of this stance was that the incarnate Christ has one nature, but that one nature is of the two natures, divine and human, and retains all the characteristics of both after the union.

Miaphysitism holds that in the one person of Jesus Christ, divinity and humanity are united in one (μία, mia) nature (φύσις - "physis") without separation, without confusion, without alteration and without mixing where Christ is consubstantial with God the Father.