The State of the Turkish Church
1) Fruitful Partnerships
The Turkish Church has matured, especially in recent years, in terms of its partnerships with organizations around the world. Early partnerships were characterized by "paternal" relationships where foreign organizations adopted an aspect of ministry in Turkey and tried to develop it by bringing in local believers. The foreign organizations acted as the experts and controlled the resources and the ministry agenda. These kinds of partnerships were valuable as a means of incubating new initiatives in evangelism, church planting, children's ministries, mercy ministries, etc. However, as the Turkish church has matured, there are now a number of examples of strategic partnerships on much more equal terms initiated by Turkish leaders. Many ministries in Turkey have mature Turkish leadership (churches, children's ministries, radio stations, television stations, evangelistic and teaching ministries, etc.) and are seeking out partners, not to parent them, but to increase their capacities and to join with the global church in serving the nations. There are at least two or three denominations with these kinds of partnerships in Turkey, working together in a way that honors the unique contribution that the Turkish Church has to offer the nations. These Turkish churches identify as members of a denomination and they have sought out those relationships for accountability and connection to the broader Christian world. It is now not uncommon for these Turkish denominational churches to be assisting other denominations to forge partnerships and establish themselves in Turkey. Until recent years it might not have been possible to engage in these kinds of partnerships, and this is an encouraging sign of real maturity.
As a result of this development it makes good strategic and spiritual sense for churches and organizations from other nations who want to work in Turkey to seek out partnerships with existing Turkish churches and leaders. The foreign church or organization can benefit from the experiences of the Turkish church and from the "transfer of trust" that occurs when a Turkish leader with an established reputation lends his support publicly to the new partner. An organization or church wanting to work in Turkey could build this kind of relationship just by visiting the churches in a few cities and meeting Christian leaders who are normally accessible and willing to talk about partnering.
2) Churches Planting Churches
Several churches in Turkey have taken initiative to plant new fellowships either in their own cities or in other cities, and several others are developing plans for that kind of outreach. There are many factors that have to come together for a church to be able to take this step. There needs to be a leader willing to carry the vision for church planting. The congregation needs to be mature enough to buy into the vision. Either a member of the congregation or someone working in partnership with them needs to be willing to invest in the long process of establishing a new church. And there needs to be some access to resources for ministry, even if that just means travel expenses to visit believers and seekers in another neighborhood or city.
One model for this kind of ministry involves making regular trips to another city to follow up with whatever believers and seekers are known there. Eventually seekers either become believers or drift away and in time the believers begin meeting together, usually with the help of the visiting workers. With the work of ministries like the Bible Correspondence Course and Silas, it is possible to have some initial contacts in nearly every city, although sometimes a new outreach begins because a believer in an existing church knows someone in another city that serves as the initial contact. It can take months or years of investing in relationships over monthly or bi-weekly visits, but we have seen fellowships emerge that way. Another related way that Turkish churches have been planting other churches is by regularly sending a team to hold meetings in another city and inviting local contacts to those meetings. Since the meetings are already going on it can be a safer way for people to express interest in the gospel without pressure.
Another model for a church to plant other churches is for a worker to move to the place to live and work toward the emerging of a new fellowship. Living in the place that you want to reach has obvious advantages. Relationships can be built much more naturally and the work of the church can happen in a deeper way than just coordinating meetings of individuals or small groups. However, it has proven very difficult to find Turkish or foreign workers who have the necessary gifts and abilities and who are willing to move to unreached places in Turkey. And in cases where we have had a Turkish worker willing to go it has been difficult to find good ways of sustaining them or helping them to sustain themselves. Still, sending Turkish or foreign workers from a Turkish church to start a new fellowship is worth investing in and praying for.
A third way that Turkish churches have added congregations to their number is by allowing existing churches to join their association or denomination. Some growing Turkish church groups have congregations from other cities asking to join them for the benefit of shared resources, accountability, and a sense of greater connectedness. This may not count as "planting" churches, but in some cases a fellowship which was just emerging has joined an existing Turkish church association which gave the necessary "boost" for the new church to get truly established.
The momentum for this kind of outreach is growing and I suspect that an increasing percentage of Turkish churches will come about through the efforts of existing churches and these groups of Turkish churches will grow in influence. One serious barrier to growth is the insufficient structure of most of the associations to sustain it. Leading a congregation is different from leading a group of churches, and churches will have to reevaluate their leadership structures to accomodate expanding in this way.
3) A High Rate of Turnover in Church Attendance
An unfortunate characteristic that still seems true among all or at least most of the Turkish churches is a high rate of "turnover" among members. There aren't any official statistics about this, but my impression is that around 9 out of 10 people who make professions of faith in Turkish churches are no longer regularly attending church within two years of making their decision. And I think that similar statistics hold between baptized and non-baptized believers. There are several factors that contribute to this although I suspect that there are others that I am not aware of. I will describe just three factors here.
One factor that may explain the high rate of turnover is that the church is often drawing people "from the margins." A disproportionately high percentage of people in our churches are socially marginal in some way. The unemployed and unemployable, the poor, those with mental health issues, people estranged from their families, and those who are already disillusioned with Islam are often drawn to the church where they find acceptance and a new community. Sometimes these people may feel like they have nothing to lose in terms of social status by identifying with the church, and when they face difficulty in the church they may also feel like they have nothing to lose by leaving again. Of course, the church should always reach out to those that society has rejected and we should be willing to accept whatever consequences this will have on our congregations. Often people come to the church initially with less than pure motives, but they have a genuine encouter with God and they enter into a process of transformation. By making disciples and serving our neighbors faithfully, the gospel slowly gains acceptance as a live option for average Turkish people.
And the church should broaden its outreach to intentionally include mainstream Sunni Muslim families. While some more controversial strategies such as those labeled "Insider Movements" may not gain traction in Turkey because of the strategic and theological problems surrounding them, there is certainly room for a more thoughtful contextualization for a mainstream Turkish audience. I think we will eventually see a more "mainstream" Turkish Christianity, and the church will be faced with a new set of struggles related to that.
Another factor contributing to the high rate of turnover is the persecution and pressure that Turkish Christians face. People often face rejection by their families and friends; they may lose their jobs, and it becomes much more difficult to find a spouse. Sometimes families even threaten or forcibly sequester their relatives who have become Christians. Eventually some people succomb to those pressures and stop associating with the church.
Yet another factor has to do with relational difficulties. In fact, I think that most of the people who stop coming to church made that decision based on a conflict or tension with other people in the church. Wanting to reconcile, being willing to humbly confess faults, and knowing how to navigate a conflict seem to be particularly challenging issues in the church in Turkey. This is also the most "correctable" of the factors related to the high turnover rate in the church. For example, among graduates of Filipus, a year-long intenstive ministry training program for Turkish and Turkish-speaking Christians, the percentage who stop attending church is much lower, probably around 1 or 2 out of every 50. An intense program like that is able to give people a strong sense of belonging to a community, a deeper understanding of the gospel and its implications for our lives, and a context for character transformation so that people are slowly overcoming the weaknesses that would have made them run away from conflict or contribute to it rather than to face it and reconcile.
4) Unchurched Christians
With the gospel being spread more broadly in recent years and given the high rate of turnover in church attendance another feature of Turkish Christianity has emerged: unchurched Christians. Many of the people who stop attending the church still identify themselves as Christians. They may meet occasionally with other Christians and interact on Facebook and online forums, and some are even actively involved in evangelism and other kinds of outreach. For someone who leaves a church because of relational problems the sense of shame or pride makes it difficult to come back to church. In most cities there is only one congregation so going to a different church isn't an option, and even in the big cities where there is more than one church, the Christian community is still small enough that the impact of the conflict or relational problem would follow them to another church. There are several examples of new churches forming out of the gathering of alienated ex-members in cities or even in neighborhoods where there is an existing church, but many of the people who have left the church don't come back even if they continue to identify as Christians. It is difficult to have reliable statistics about people who leave churches and still consider themselves Christians, but there are probably at least 2,000 people in this category. The total number of Turkish Christians meeting regularly in Turkish churches is around 5,000.
The other major category of unchurched Christians are those who have made professions of faith but have never been members of a church. Internet evangelism has become much more organized and effective in recent years and television and radio ministries are reaching people in their homes even in cities where there is no church. Many of these ministries follow up with people who call or write in and some of them are partnering with each other to do that more efficiently. In some cases people are afraid of associating with the church because of the potential consequences they would face from their families and communities, so even if they make a profession of faith their only contact with other Christians is online or by phone or correspondence. In other cases, people have come to Christ in places where there is no church, so they have no choice but to be unchurched Christians. Because of the number of organized ministries working in this area it is actually easier to estimate the number of Christians in this category. There are probably 1500 - 2000 professing Turkish Christians who have never been members of a church.
This makes the total number of "unchurched Christians" in Turkey probably around 4,000. This number doesn't include the possibility of Turkish people who consider themselves "secretly Christian" and have no contact with other Christians either in person or online. It's hard to know how this statistic should impact our strategies for evangelism and church planting but maybe we can at least say that these unchurched Christians represent a challenge to create church structures that will include more of the professing believers and to develop an atmosphere of discipleship that will bring about deep character change that may prevent people from abandoning the church. The church would look different in Turkey if all of these people were engaged in church life.
5) The Family Obstacle
Many Turkish Christians still deal with rejection or persecution by their own families, and the realization of that inevitable persecution prevents many people from openly identifying themselves as Christians.
One of the clichés that I hear often about the relationship between the gospel and Turkish culture has to do with the value of family. It is usually assumed that this "family value" is an advantage to the gospel or that it brings a kind of natural understanding of church life that "Westerners" miss because of their individualism.
The irony here is that very few of the Turkish Christians that I know have experienced this family value as an advantage in their Christian life. Family persecution is among the most powerful obstacles to the gospel in Turkey. Parents employ shame and manipulation, and sometimes force, to try to bring people back to Islam.
Many Turkish families are also plagued by the same disfunctions that affect families everywhere. These problems have increasingly come on to the "radar" of Turkish churches. Instances of domestic and sexual abuse are tragically common in Turkish families, with some statistics showing that at least half of women are victims of domestic abuse and at least 5% of children are victims of sexual abuse. Alcohol addiction is also a serious problem in many Turkish families, and in 2013 the divorce rate was around 20%. In discipling Turkish men and women over the years, one of the most common issues we face is estrangement or conflict between children and their parents. And most of these problems stay concealed because of the fear of bringing shame to the family.
This is not to say that the Turkish values surrounding family are totally negative. Family is important in Turkey, and many Turkish people do grow up in healthy families. And there are aspects of the gospel which are especially relevant to Turks because they share similar understandings of family with the original audience of the New Testament.
Still, the brokenness of families, the temptation to conceal, and the reality of pressure and manipulation make for an obstacle in discipleship and church growth. But there is a redeemed Turkish family value emerging as some families come to Christ together and a generation of Christians matures. While the "family obstacle" seems as urgent today as it ever has, a growing number of Christian families have been forming and having children, and now second and third generation believers are taking ministry roles in the church alongside their families. They are modeling a new way of being family in Turkey.
And with increased attention on societal problems related to family, new efforts to address them are emerging. new counseling initiatives, book translation projects, and teaching curriculum are focusing on these issues. There is still a deep need for more trained Turkish counselors, but the number of foreign Christian counselors is growing as existing workers pursue training in this area and as recruiting efforts target qualified people from other countries. The church has an opportunity to be a source of healing in this area, not just for its own members, but also for the communities around us.
6) Maturing Positions on Doctrine and Strategy
As Turkish churches grow in number and depth, their stances on issues related to doctrine and ministry strategy also mature. Many of the same kinds of distinctions that characterize churches in other parts of the world are evident in Turkey. And many of the same debates have emerged among Turkish churches. For several years debates between between charismatic and non-charismatic churches have continued. In some cities there has been sharp conflict and tension over this issue. For example, when Benny Hinn was invited to hold a series of meetings in Turkey there were long debates that played out on facebook, over email, and in person between leaders and members of churches. Sometimes the debates devolved into ugly fights and reconciliation was needed in some corners.
The conflict is unfortunate, and not good news in itself, but there is also an encouraging factor. As more and more Turkish leaders and believers think deeply about their faith, they are articulating their positions, and in the end the Turkish church is gaining a voice of its own, one that is diverse and increasingly nuanced. And some of the conflict emerges out of the fact that the churches are committed to interact with one another, even if they are on opposite ends of the spectrum on issues like this one.
More recently, debates about the "Insider Movement" and issues related to strategy had a season of urgency. The debate was originally triggered by the release of a Turkish translation of the New Testament that uses language intended to minimize the typical objections and misunderstandings that Muslim readers have. The translation opted to use alternative expressions for core New Testament concepts such as "Son of God," Father," and "baptism." Through a series of email exchanges, articles, and debates at various meetings the overwhelming agreement of Turkish church leaders in opposition to this translation and to Insider Movements as a strategy revealed itself. At the same time church leaders were given occasion to think more intentionally about ministry strategies. I think that the initial debates were a knee-jerk reaction without much thought about the issues, but the articles and letters that emerged showed a maturity of perspective and a depth of critical engagement with theological and strategic questions. I think there is still room for a deeper contextualization for the gospel in Turkey, and I have hope that that road leads through, and not just around, the deep thinkers within the Turkish church.
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