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Christian church may hold key to European Union

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  • Christian church may hold key to European Union

    Washington Times
    October 06, 2004

    Christian church may hold key to European Union

    By Julia Duin
    THE WASHINGTON TIMES

    DIYARBAKIR, Turkey - When a mentally deranged Turk showed up at Diyarbakir
    Evangelical Church one hot July day quoting verses from the Koran and waving
    a butcher knife, it took police a half-hour to get there.
    By that time, Medet Arslan, 27, had broken several windows, threatened
    the Christians who were inside the church, and burned New Testaments and
    other Christian literature, curtains, bookshelves, tapes, compact discs and
    whatever furniture he could find in the reception hall. Had church members
    not locked him inside the room, he might have gone to the sanctuary on the
    second floor to do more damage.

    Known in Turkish as Diyarbakir Kilisesi, the 11-year-old congregation just
    inside the ancient white-and-gray basalt city walls is the only evangelical
    Christian group in all of eastern Turkey. The closest similar church is at
    Adana, in central Turkey near the southern coast. House prayer groups exist
    in the cities of Sanli Urfa and Gazi Antep, which are respectively two- and
    three-hour drives west of Diyarbakir.
    However, this small congregation is playing a minor role in today's
    announcement in Brussels on whether talks can start regarding Turkey's
    admission to the European Union. Some governments - among them those of
    Britain, Greece, Finland and Poland - favor Turkey's admission to the union.
    Others, including Denmark and Austria, oppose it. Turkey's lackluster human
    rights record, especially regarding political prisoners, and slowness to
    allow religious freedom are two of the sticking points in the debate.
    Istanbul, formerly Constantinople, was the capital of the Byzantine
    Empire and a center of Christianity centuries before the birth of Islam.
    Scattered Armenian, Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic and other churches,
    monasteries, cathedrals and pilgrimage sites of the early centuries of the
    Christian era remain in use as places of worship.
    Sami Turgut, a diplomat at the Turkish Embassy, defended his country's
    actions.
    "We have already made huge changes," he said, "and we are still making
    some changes in our laws and [penal] code."
    Turkey's eagerness to be part of the European Union has dampened
    religious harassment aimed at evangelical Christians. In recent years, the
    national Committee of Culture and Protection of Historical Sites has filed
    two lawsuits to shut down the Diyarbakir evangelical Christian congregation.
    Now the church is being watched by Europeans - namely German, Dutch and
    British lawmakers, embassy officials and ambassadors who have visited - to
    gauge whether Turkey is serious about human rights for religious and ethnic
    minorities. Minor matters, such as slow police response to an attack on the
    church, concern them.
    Diyarbakir Kilisesi is made up of both Christians and Kurds, Turkey's
    main ethnic minority. Diyarbakir is in the heartland of a region known for
    its uprisings seeking self-rule for about 15 million Kurds packed into
    cities such as Diyarbakir, Van and Mardin.
    These cities became sanctuaries after the government destroyed hundreds
    of villages in the 1990s in search of members of the Kurdistan Workers
    Party. Caught in the middle were villagers who sided with neither group but
    who, after their homes were bulldozed by the government, had to leave their
    farms and live in urban ghettos.
    Because of their sufferings, the Kurds tend to be more open to
    Christianity, said Jerry Mattix, an American pastor who has been assisting
    the 40-member Diyarbakir Kilisesi since he moved his young family there in
    2001.
    "Kurds tend to be freethinkers," he said, "and they are more open than
    the Turks, who have a lot of baggage and preconceived notions about
    Christianity."
    Mr. Mattix, who acts as a church consultant and Bible teacher to the
    congregation and to chief elders Ahmet Guvener and Cengiz Bayram, estimates
    the country has 70 evangelical Protestant churches, comprising 5,000
    believers. Many meet in homes.
    A decade ago, there were 20 such churches, he said, and most of those
    gatherings were held in secret. The political atmosphere in Turkey has
    improved enough, he added, to allow Christians to meet openly, to have
    summer camps attracting several hundred people and to have public baptisms
    in the Mediterranean Sea.
    Some fears remain. During lunch at a local restaurant, several members
    of his church were openly nervous about being asked - within earshot of
    other patrons - how they had become Christians.
    One said he was directed in a dream to seek out the church. Others said
    they had responded to newspaper ads offering a correspondence course in
    Christianity. Respondents are directed to contact persons in nine Turkish
    cities.
    "We are relatively free and we are tolerated now," Mr. Mattix said.
    "What attracted me to Turkey is that here's a Muslim country that's
    relatively open to evangelism. We [evangelical Christians] ought to be all
    over this."
    Turkish churches have an abundance of single men, who do volunteer work
    daily at the church because of the lack of jobs in what is considered an
    outlaw province by other Turks. Bookshelves at the Diyarbakir church are
    loaded with free Christian books and tapes, and copious numbers are handed
    out to the 20 visitors the church sees on an average day.
    The two-hour Sunday service in an upstairs room with upholstered beige
    chairs and a blue tile floor look like any similar house of worship in an
    American storefront. Worship is led with a guitar, a narrow Turkish drum and
    a "saz," an instrument shaped like a mandolin.
    But conversions to Christianity are few. Of the 20 to 30 baptized
    members, Mr. Mattix says, maybe 10 are mature Christians.
    "There isn't a huge outpouring of the Holy Spirit here yet, but we are
    praying for it," he said.
    Unlike other mainly Islamic countries, Turkey does not follow provisions
    of Islamic law that forbid Muslims to change their religion or exact the
    death penalty on those who do. But conversion to Christianity is
    discouraged, and Diyarbakir Kilisesi has endured two lawsuits filed by the
    local governor's office to shut it down.
    The church won one lawsuit that accused members of interfering with the
    Meryamana Kilisesi, a third-century Aramaic church and convent across a
    narrow alley.
    A second lawsuit accused the evangelicals of illegally setting up a
    church in a home. Although Mr. Guvener does not live in the three-story
    building the church occupies, construction was halted for a few months until
    a court awarded the church the right to occupy its building last year.
    Before that, the congregation met in private homes.
    "But the laws aren't in place to make us fully legal," Mr. Mattix said.
    "We need full legality to function as a church and to run a children's
    program. But any work with children needs permission from the Ministry of
    Education. But this will take massive rewriting of Turkish law," involving
    directives that affect mosques as well as churches.
    The problem with legalizing religious buildings is that many of the
    mosques function illegally as well, he said, meaning that Muslims would have
    to join the Christians in making their ministries compliant with the law.
    Thus, Diyarbakir Kilisesi functions in a gray area between legality and
    illegality where any group that feels threatened by the church can file a
    lawsuit. Although Turkey has been a secular country since 1923, 98 percent
    of the populace is Muslim. Christians are mainly Armenian and Greek
    Orthodox, or evangelical Protestants who are converts from Islam.
    Events in Europe have tempered the religious harassment, Mr. Mattix
    said, which may be why the church has won in court lately.
    "We are optimistic," said Tuluy Tanc, another spokesman for the embassy.
    "We feel we will have fulfilled the Copenhagen criteria - demands made of
    Turkey by the EU several years ago - as a result of the wide-scale reforms
    we have undertaken. There may be some misgivings, but those aren't enough to
    put off negotiations."
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