Turkey is literally the #1 unreached country in the world. A country is
considered unreached if less than 2% claim to be Christian. In Turkey,
the percentage is 0.05. Out of 73 million people, only 3000 are
Christians. I would say this is the darkest place we’ve been so far.
We have been in here for about 10 days now. our focus here has been street evangelism and possibly going to do ethnothgraphy (facilitating groups of people to tell their stories in words) in northern turkey. This would involve searching for a specific people group and then interviewing them and collecting research for our local contacts. For now we are basically, hitting the streets of Istanbul to prayer walk, talk to people, and distribute Bibles to them. We have gotten creative in our approach to evangelism here. We created a survey that we give the people we meet, which gives us an easy open door to talk about their beliefs. This also allows us to be more listeners and hear where people are coming from and their beliefs, and learn about their culture, rather then just preaching at them directly. The town we went to yesterday, had no Christians or missionaries living there and the people we came into contact with or walked past, may have had their first encounter with Jesus ever! None of them spoke a word of English but we still managed to build realtionships in that town and distribute some Bibles after being invited into a few places for tea. It was a great day! We also are doing ministry in the town we are living in. I met a guy named Serkan, that I gave the survey to who was a modern Muslim. At first, he was very hesitant about talking with me or answering any questions. by the end of our conversation, he seemed to really enjoy being forced to come up with answers to tough questions. He was very open and that gave me the opportunity to open up a little bit. I ended the survey by telling what I was doing this year and why I was here. Also, I had a gift for him if he wanted it that had some of the answers to these big life questions. I left him with a packet that contained the gospel of Luke, a cd, and a movie about Jesus. Please continue to pray for our team, as well as Serkan and the country of turkey!
