Hello and welcome back! I know it has been quite awhile since my last blog…..I don’t even really know where to begin. I apologize if this blog is a little disjointed and all over the place
After debrief and The Awakening, I-Squad headed back to Bucharest, Romania for one night. From there we would be boarding a bus to Istanbul, Turkey. While in Bucharest my squad mate, Tara Reed, fell off a roof and fractured her pelvis. She spent almost all of October in the hospital in Romania recovering and just recently went back to the states. It’s been hard to be without Tara, she is such a joy and an encouragement for the entire squad. Please check her blog to read more about her and her story. She really is an amazing woman of God. http://tarareed.theworldrace.org
Onto Turkey!!!! As a history major I was stoked to be heading to such a historically significant city, but I realized that I really didn’t have a clue what modern day Turkey is like. I knew it was a Muslim nation and that was seriously about it. Within the first couple days of being there the people we worked with gave us a run down of Turkish history and present day life in Istanbul. Here a few statistics:
– Per capita Turkey has fewer believers, churches and missionaries then any nation in the world
– There are 72 million people in Turkey, 3600 of which are Christian
– There are only 64 Christian churches in all of Turkey
These facts make Turkey the most lost nation on earth. Although it’s not illegal to be a Christian in Turkey, it is not looked highly upon and most people view Christians or missionaries very negatively. This makes it hard to be a Christian openly and freely. To step out as a Christian could mean losing your job, being disowned by your family, and in some extreme cases, even killed for bringing shame to the family.
The people we worked with focus on relationship building and ethnography. What is ethnography you may ask? Well, it is the study of people and their stories in their own words. Basically, they study different people groups in order to better reach them with the Gospel. The main group that our contacts wanted us to study was the gypsy people. We spent 3 days with a translator wandering through the streets of Istanbul looking for gypsy people to talk to and hear their stories. One day we came across an entire gypsy village of over 500 homes! This community had been there for over 200 years! When we first wandered into their community we came across a wedding and a couple of us, myself included, were pulled into the center of everyone and taught how to dance like a gypsy. It was quite the experience! I felt instant love and acceptance from these people. When I look back on the two days we visited this gypsy community this question keeps coming to mind: Can you imagine how much more effective the church would be if everyone felt that same love and acceptance when they walked into a church or Christian community? Unfortunately, when people in America and throughout the world hear about the church or Christianity, they don’t think about love and acceptance. Many people probably think of judgment and self-righteousness. Isn’t that sad?
