Türkiye (MNN) — There’s a quiet targeting of Christians happening in modern-day Türkiye. It looks different than it did in 2018, when American pastor Andrew Brunson was arrested and spent two years in prison.
“The Turkish Government kind of went to school on that [Brunson] case,” says Todd Nettleton with The Voice of the Martyrs, USA. “They got a lot of negative publicity for arresting a foreign Christian. So since 2019, they have just begun kicking foreign Christians out.”
Nettleton says more than 140 Christians have been impacted by this in the past five years, including 50 in December 2024 alone. Some have been told to leave on a very short timeline. Others have been denied re-entry to Türkiye after traveling internationally.
“This is clearly sort of not an aberration. This is now a strategy that’s being used by the Turkish government to decrease the Christian influence and decrease Christian ministry in Turkey,” he says.
The current administration in Türkiye has taken the nation in a more Islamic direction.
“When I started working at Voice of the Martyrs, Muslim people would point to Turkey as a success story. ‘Look, democracy and Islam can coexist. Look, democracy and human rights can coexist. What about Turkey?’” Nettleton says.
Today, Türkiye’s population is majority Muslim and less than 1% Christian. “They have become more overt about, ‘No, we don’t want to be a secular republic. We want to support Islam. It is our religion. We are Turks. We are Muslims.’”
(Listen the story of one Christian no longer allowed back into Türkiye, Jerry Mattix, on the VOM YouTube channel or podcast.)
“They (Turkish government leaders) haven’t seen a lot of pushback from the world community since they’ve just been quietly letting people go,” Nettleton says. “So why would they change course, if it’s not costing them anything, and they see it as a benefit to have less Christian influence in the country?”
Hope and prayer points
Yet even as foreign Christians are being forced out of Türkiye, Nettleton says God isn’t leaving the local churches adrift.
Your prayers are powerful. (Photo courtesy of Voice of the Martyrs USA)
“It is depleting the number of Christian leaders in the country … but what we see happening… is Turkish Christian leaders are stepping up into those roles,” says Nettleton.
“So I think in the long-term, this is going to be a blessing. This is going to be a good thing. But it’s certainly difficult if a country you’ve lived in for a long time and raise[d] your family there says, ‘Sorry, you cannot come to what is really your home.’”
- Pray for the families and individuals no longer able to live in Türkiye. “There’s a lot of trauma and stress that these families have had to go through. Pray for the children who have had been uprooted in this process.”
- Please pray for the churches losing Christian leaders, who “need God’s blessing. They need His empowerment. They need His protection.”
- Pray also for the foreign Christians still living in Türkiye, who know what is going on and what they may face soon. “Pray for God’s peace to be on them as they are in the country, and for them to be lighthouses representing Jesus Christ, even in a police station, even in a courtroom. Pray that they’ll be able to represent Christ.”
Header photo of Turkish flag courtesy of Meg Jerrard/Unsplash.
