In the 19th century, blossoming constitutional movements in the Middle East drew participants from different ethno-religious (Tunisia and Mount Lebanon, Jews and Greeks), cultural, and ideological backgrounds. These individuals relied on debate and interaction with one another to form coherence out of movements from a range of disparate views. For this reason, a full understanding of these constitutional processes must consider the discourse in the empire in order to discover how and to what extent domestic actors perceived Ottoman reforms as a synthesis of local traditions and western examples. This paper explores these two concepts: constitutional reform and the discourse generated around its applicability in the Ottoman-Armenian community. Contextualizing the Armenian National Constitution as an element within the wider framework of Ottoman social, religious and educational reforms in the 19th and 20th centuries, would not only weave together Armenian and Ottoman histories, but would also pave the way for a better understanding of communal behavior towards constitutional practices on the micro and macro levels. Tracing the development and the ways in which communal institutions functioned in the center as well as in the provinces, I explore processes of solidification of communal boundaries and the rigidification of religious identities during a period of major communal reorganization. By focusing on a few examples from the capital and beyond, I examine how constitutionalism was practiced on the micro-community level, and what were the debates and struggles around its application. While the inclusion of laymen into the ecclesiastical apparatus of the Armenian Patriarchate of Istanbul was a change that 19th century brought about, a history of the Armenian National Constitution contributes to the growing literature on secularism in the Middle East. In other words, addressing the issue of the Patriarchate’s changing role in the administration of the community leads to questions about the transformation of identities (religious or otherwise) in relation to the shifting nature of millets in the 19th and early 20th centuries.