Istanbul Turkey, Summer of 2006.
This summer I had the opportunity to live in Istanbul, Turkey for 5 weeks amongst 15 million Muslims. I was taking part in a cultural learning program set up with the Turkish government through the International Missions Board. There were 37 of us all from different parts of the Canada and the US. We were working along side a group of long-term missionaries. There are 80 million people in Turkey, 20 million in Istanbul alone. 99% of the population is said to be Muslim, although Turkey is a secular country. There are only 3000 believers in Turkey and 600-800 in Istanbul. It is said to be the largest unreached nation in the world. So you can imagine it was a little overwhelming getting there and realizing just how few Christians there were. My first day there I remember having an image of how impossible the great commission must have sounded to the 12 disciples. We usually spent half our day in class learning about culture, religion, history and taking Turkish language class, and the rest of it doing cultural assignments, meeting Turks and basically just spending time with people.
I realized very quickly that this wasn’t going to be what I had expected. I assumed that I was going to go to Turkey, meet lots of Turks, have lots of opportunities to share the gospel with them and see lots of transformed lives. I went to Turkey knowing a lot about Islam. I went expecting to get into many discussions and debates with people about religion. I was ready for that. What I wasn’t ready for was coming up against people who were just plain indifferent, who didn’t know much about their own religion, and coming up against a culture of people who have been taught all their lives that the one sin Allah will not forgive, is believing that Jesus is Lord.
A good example of a typical Turk is my friend, P.... She is friends with many of the 2-year missionaries I worked with. She obviously sees something in them that she likes. She is drawn to them; she sees a joy in them. And yet she would say that believing that Jesus is God is stupid, crazy, ridiculous. This is a huge barrier for Turks. They can’t connect that something they see in us, with our relationship with Christ. Actually, one of the Turkish pastors told us that this is the biggest thing that keeps them from believing in the gospel.
What I saw there was the amazing work of the Holy Spirit in the lives of the Turkish Christians we met. We got to hear testimonies of Turks who had become Christians and who now were involved in the church. The one thing all of these testimonies had in common was God’s revelation through dreams and visions. This is something that weirded me out a little at first because it’s not something I was used to hearing or talking about and I couldn’t help being a little skeptical at first. But it was undeniable the way the Spirit was working to reveal Jesus to them and give them an understanding of who He is. This is something that no amount of persuasion on our part could accomplish.
Over the course of my trip and after that I had to work through my feelings of inadequacy and lack of seeing the fruit of my labor. The work in Turkey is very slow. Most of the missionaries I spoke with had never seen a Turk come to believe in Christ. This was really hard for me. Because I went expecting to see people start to have a better understanding of the gospel. I struggled a lot with knowing my purpose there. We talked a lot as a team about how the things that made us special, the things that held our status in our communities back home meant nothing there.
There’s a story in 2 Kings about a guy named Naaman; he was a leper who wanted to be healed. He had to be humbled, to have faith and to obey in order to be healed. I saw that as a huge example for how to go about my trip. I learned to be humbled in the sense that the things that were important and effective in ministering to the Turks, were not the things I was good at. I really had to work at it. I don’t like going up to random people in coffee shops and in the metro and on the street and talking to them, inviting them to hang out, asking them to help me work on my Turkish. It was a daily struggle to trust in the Lord that this is where I was supposed to be and I needed to rely on His strength to be an effective disciple for Him. We were called to be the “aroma of Christ” to the Turks (from 2 Corinthians 2:14) and that means living out lives that show that our treasure in life is Christ and nothing else. I learned to abide in Christ if I wanted to have an impact there; because if we are empty, we can’t share with others but if we are full of the Spirit, we will naturally overflow into the lives of others.
I learned to praise God for the “little” things: B... was a young Turkish man, who my team became good friends with. One Saturday we were on one of our outings, a boat cruise of the Black Sea. We all got to invite our Turkish friends to spend the day with us on a boat. At one point one of my teammates picked up a guitar and started singing some worship songs. B... and his sister, S... came and sat with us and just listened to our songs. At one point B... asked, “what does the blood of Christ mean?” and we were able to share with him the mearning of the words. God showed me that day just how us worshipping God can be a ministry to the people around us. We were also able to share with him one day about John the Baptist and how he paved the way for Jesus.
Although Turkey is a secular state, the call to prayer still sounds five times a day from speakers on the sides of the mosques. Most people do not observe the call to prayer, except on Fridays. One day, we were riding on the tram to meet a friend, when the call to prayer went off, the tram stopped and many people got off the tram to cross the street to the mosque to pray. We got off to the sounds of the call to prayer and this is what we saw. The inside was full and so people had spilled out onto the stairs and then the open area in front. It was sad and yet beautiful at the same time. Beautiful because of the idea of so many men, side by side, shoulder to shoulder, rich and poor, praying in unison. My teammates and I were all quiet for the time of the prayer, I think we were all struck with the realization that these hundreds of people were all praying to a God that is not our Lord, a God that does not concern himself with the petty worries of man, a God who takes a toll of their good deeds and their bad and in the end weighs them to decide who get into heaven.
One day we were challenged to stand on the busiest street in downtown Istanbul and let the masses of people just pass us by and as they did to pray for as many people as we could. Our teacher said that if we stood there all day, for a whole week and prayed for everyone that walked by us, that we might have prayed for one person who has ever been personally prayed for. I think that’s a pretty strong image. And it really shocked me. And it really broke my heart for the people of Turkey and for the people of Quebec. Through this image, I was challenged to not allow myself to become numb to the people around me, to be the aroma of Christ in Montreal, at my work, with my family, and friends.
