Alexius set out to reform the church institution of the charistike dorea (donation), which recent research dates to the period just after the Feast of Orthodoxy (843).

[1] Alexius tried to temper the worst abused of the notorious charistike by appointing through Synodal legislation the patriarch's chancellor, the chartophylax, as the official to serve as the final point of approval for all grants under the system.

The fact that Alexius sought reform over abolishment of the charistike dorea likely shows the inability of the Church to claim back many of these properties from the powerful land-owning elite who held them.

[2] Alexius promoted the zealous actions of John of Melitene whose interest it was to limit the influence of the Syro Jacobite Church in the south east of the Byzantine Empire, especially in the newly conquered themes of Mesopotamia and Telouch.

For this reason, the Syro-Jacobite Patriarch John VIII bar Abdoun was arrested and brought to trial in Constantinople and then forced into a monastery on Mount Ganos.