Team Report – #373S
| Location: | Turkey (Black Sea Region) |
| Date: | Oct 4-Oct 19 2002 |
| Sending Partner: | STEM SHARE, Bemidji, MN |
➢ Centuries of rich Christian history
➢ 70 million Muslims
➢ Hundreds of glasses of tea
➢ “No trees. No telephones. No Jesus.” —National Geographic, September 2002 (1)
Q: What could these possibly have in common?
A: The setting a STEM SHARE team entered in Turkey in October 2002!
Roused each morning by the Muslim call to prayer, our team found themselves in a land of extremes. Bordered on one side by Iraq and Iran, on the other by Europe — Turkey is pulled in both directions.
This land that once held the 7 churches of Revelation is now listed by Operation World as “the largest unreached nation in the world”.(2)
Our primary purpose for traveling to Turkey was to pray for the nation. In the course of fulfilling that mission, the Lord arranged for us to meet and pray for:
- People from 3 distinct unreached people groups
- Several local believers
- 420 middle school & high school students
- Most of the long-term Christian workers in the region
- Friends being witnessed to by our “national hosts”
Whether we were prayerwalking the streets of the city or worshiping from mountain-tops, a theme that we repeatedly returned to was God’s desire to revive the “remnant” in the land.
In the classrooms . . .
We received many blunt questions from the Muslim children:
Do you have an Injil (New Testament)? Do you go to church? How often? Do you love your wife? What do you think of Osama bin Laden?
For many of them it was the first time they had met a Christian. Please pray with us that the love of Jesus and the presence of the Holy Spirit which the children witnessed in us will continue to impact their lives in such a way that one day they will be drawn into God’s family.
Our receving hosts were encouraged by the number of divine appointments that occurred, attributing them to the team’s desire to pray here, there, and everywhere! These divine appointments allowed the team to assist our hosts in establishing and strengthening relationships with Turkish people that will help them in their work of planting the church in this unreached region.
1 Crucible of the Gods by Erla Zwingle, National Geographic, September 2002
2 Operation World, 2001, by Patrick Johnstone and Jason Mandryk
