Church Door

The ministry training program we are coordinating gathers every day in the church building for morning worship and then classes until the afternoon.

The church is on the street level of an apartment building near downtown Ankara. There is a significant amount of foot traffic that passes by the church every day, and sometimes a curious passerby will knock on the door to ask questions or to request a Bible. Since the Malatya murders the custom has been to keep the door locked from the inside during the day with the curtains drawn. And it had been bothering me for months.


A few weeks ago the students and I prayed and decided that we wouldn't lock the door or keep the curtain drawn while we are in the building. We want our neighborhood to think of the church as an asset, a blessing to the neighborhood. We want them to think of the church as "their" church, and we want them to feel welcome. That's difficult to communicate while hiding inside a locked building. So we opened the door.


Immediately we noticed a difference. We had more visitors. And we took more time from class to answer their questions and show interest in our guests. Just a couple days later a group of men drove up to the church building after we had already left. There was one Turkish believer oustide the building cleaning a van and one other person inside the building. One of the men got out of the car wearing surgical gloves and carrying a gun. He threatened the Turkish believer and demanded to see the pastor. Fortunately, the pastor wasn't there, and after the man declared his intentions to kill the pastor he got back in the car and they drove off. No one was physically hurt.


The press and police were paying lots of attention to the building in the two days after the threat so we met in the pastor's office in another location. Then, when we returned to the building we had to decide whether to continue to honor our recent commitment about the door and the curtain. It didn't take long to decide. The door stays open.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Martyrdom.

The text from a recent message. The Impact of Martyrdom on the 21st Century Saturday April 19th 2008 I was invited to speak on the topic of martyrdom. Specifically its impact on the 21st century. Of course, my own experience with martyrdom is very narrow. So this is going to be a very personal account of the impact of martyrdom in the 21st century. It struck me that very little has changed since the first century. In the first century if you slit the throat of a Christian he died a painful death. His body was eventually collected and buried. His friends and would talk about his death and try to find meaning in his sacrifice. And I’m sure that most of you are aware of the events of last year in Malatya in Eastern Turkey. A year ago yesterday, in fact, three of our friends were killed, their throats slit. This is likely to be a difficult story for me to tell, even a year later. I apologize for that. Malatya is a city of 500,000 people. And it is almost entirely Muslim. We moved to Malaty...
Read more

Christian Fasting

Christian Fasting Ryan Keating I love good food. I love to cook good food and to eat good food. I spend a lot of time thinking about food and I have found that food has an important role in bringing people together. Good food is a manifestation of grace and God's abundance, in the same way that bad food is an expression of corruption and brokenness. But, Christians are asked to remember that food isn't what ultimately sustains us. We are dependent on God for our existence and we choose to depend on him to sustain us in every way. This truth is the foundation of fasting as a Christian discipline.  The Bible contains dozens of examples of fasting. Patriarchs and prophets like Moses and Daniel fasted in the Old Testament. And fasting continues as a spiritual discipline throughout the New Testament because Jesus also fasted. In Matthew chapter four Jesus is fasting when he is led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by Satan. When Satan tells him to turn stones in...
Read more

...But we like them

Image
Last week we moved out of our old city and we are now settling into our new home. With all of the news coverage here about the three martyrs in Malatya, many people in our old neighborhood had been treating us differently. Some people stopped greeting us on the street, some stopped answering their phones when we called, some made excuses why they couldn't see us. Our neighbors also stopped coming by and some of them even began looking at us with fear and contempt. I suppose some of them were afraid that having Christians close by might mean that something terrible might happen in their own building, others were afraid of being associated openly with Christians. They became more worried about what the other neighbors would think of them. And still others became convinced that we were part of a grand Christian conspiracy to undermine Turkey somehow... During this time, I was walking with my three year-old daughter down the apartment building stairs one afternoon. A middle-aged, conse...
Read more