From Mountain Climber to Gospel Preacher in Turkey

Tell us about your background and how you came to know Christ.

Well, I grew up in a kind of nominal Muslim household… So I memorized some verses [in the Quran] because it was mandatory at the school, but I never really grew up with a religious feeling. And by age 12 or 13, I started to lose any interest toward God.

By the time I was 17, I was totally atheist, no interest in God or asking questions. I just wanted to be a mountain climber. That was my life goal: I wanted to climb the Himalayan Mountains or do expedition climbing. And so basically every weekend I was just running away from the house for two or three days and climbing the mountains by myself.

And during one of those climbs, I had an accident and I almost died. And that really scared me. And that was the moment, there for the first time in my life, I prayed. 

And somehow I felt that I was not alone there. And eventually there were people who came there that shouldn’t have been there on that day at that moment. So they helped me out. And that led me to search about God. 

Where did you start the search?

When I was a young kid, these short-term missionaries gave me this little booklet called The Word, and it was the Gospel of John. I was like eight or nine years old. And I remembered these people actually loved me.

They cared, they listened to me, they prayed for me, they spent time with me. They were very intentional, and that always stuck in my mind. And after the accident, I was searching.

So, first, I’m going to the imams, asking questions. Then there were Bahais and Jehovah’s Witnesses. I’m asking questions, but I did not want to go to a church. I knew that there was one church, but I mean, I thought Christians were enemies. Why would I be a Christian out of all the religions?

But I remembered that family who gave me this little book. So, I picked it up, read it, and then went to the church.

What did you think about church?

Well, until that day, I had been hearing all these religions always selling the same thing: Be a good person, believe in our book, and you’ll go to heaven. It was all basically the same idea.

So when I went to church, I told the pastor, “I’ve read your book and I’ve come to the church and I’m going to heaven.” And he said something like, “Well, with this attitude, you’re not going to heaven.”

Then he started to share with me, “You need a Savior. You’re a sinner. You know this deep down, Kerem.”

What did you think about that?

It offended me, but I went home and immediately just broke. I thought, “Yes, I know that I’m a sinner.”

A few days later, I went back to the church, and met with the pastor on a Monday. By Thursday, I had finished the entire New Testament and had two sleepless nights. So I went back to the pastor, and I was like, “I have a million questions.”

So, I went to my first ever church service on a Thursday, and I was sitting at the back and I started crying loudly—literally. And I’m just like, “I’m a sinner. I need a savior.”

The Lord’s Spirit was working in my soul and changing me, basically that day.

So, you stayed at that church, and started sharing the gospel with others who dropped by the building?

Yeah, people would show up every day. Some days I’d share the gospel with 15, 20 people who showed up. It was wonderful.

I stayed there a few years and by the time that my high school sweetheart came to the Lord. We married, and there was an opportunity for us to move to Canada to study in a Bible college there.

And then you went back to Turkey. Was that your intention from the start?

That was always the goal that I wanted to come back. We wanted to come back and plant the church here in Antalya, and basically we became the second church in the town. Now we have maybe 7 or 8 churches.

So we came back to Turkey in 2009, and planted a church in 2010. And so it’s been 16 years, and it’s been pretty encouraging.

So, tell us a little bit about the spiritual landscape in Turkey.

Well, it’s Muslim, obviously. Statistics say 99 %. In reality, many say they are Muslim but they don’t read their Qurans, they don’t do worship, and they don’t live their life like Muslims.

So, normally a Muslim needs to be praying 35 times a week—five times a day basically. If you come to Western Turkey, I would say, I would say less than 1% of people actually would do 35. There’s a different culture in the eastern part of the country, and they’re much more religious.

What about Christians in Turkey?

Obviously, there’s historical Christianity: Armenians, Greek Orthodox, Syrianic, Roman Catholic.

We see some writings of evangelicals during the end of the 19th century. And then among the evangelicals we see today, the first ones were after the 1960s. So that is very, very new here. People my age, mostly, I would say 90% are first generation Christian.

I would say we have around 7,000 evangelical Christians—and that’s out of 90 million people in the country.

Now we have a second generation of our children. But when I came to the Lord, we would do one youth event nationally, and literally all the churches would be there.

Have there been challenges as the church has grown?

Unity is a challenge. All of a sudden we don’t want to work with each other, and there are disagreements. So, as Christians, we are 7,000 people, but we have at least 5,000 different views.

What are other challenges?

Having a legal entity isn’t easy. It’s hard for Christians to find spaces to rent or buy. People sometimes lose their jobs and face rejection from family or friends.

That must be lonely, when there are already so few Christians.

We hear pastors saying the heaviest thing they face isn’t persecution or opposition or death. It’s loneliness. You feel like you’re the only Christian in your town, and pastors especially often don’t have anybody to share their lives and struggles.

I know you’re trying to help with that need through your ministry. One of your projects is called Miletus House?

Yeah, that name comes from Acts 20, where Paul invited the Ephesian pastors to come to him. And they talked and prayed. He taught them and charged them and sent them back to Ephesus, and said” You will not see my face again.”

So we bring pastors here for a study the Bible, retreat, and we encourage them, spend time with them, pray with them. We say, “We know we might not see each other’s faces again before glory, but let’s go back and serve.”

You’re also involved with church-planting through Acts 29 and other efforts through Via Christus Ministries. What are some of those other projects?

We have a publishing house, we have a theological academy, and this year we started a certificate program for women who cannot fly to Antalya to study with us. So we’re doing online ministries with them. I also started a podcast this year, interviewing Reformed pastors about practical theology. We know the gospel, but we need more teaching in our churches about marriage and parenting and singleness, and the ways we live biblical teaching.

And you’re close to buying a building?

So, Lord willing, we will be buying a building where all our ministries will finally have a home. And having a building is very important because here it’s hard for Christians to find places to rent.

This is going to change the ministry. It’s going to be a ministry hub not just for pastors here in Turkey, but we have pastors coming to our academy or our retreats and conferences from six different countries. And I think this is really the only soteriologically Reformed school, outside of Greece.

Our end goal is to have more pastors and plant more churches, but also to have Turkish academicians. We do need our own academicians from our own culture. We need to be able to stand on our feet, especially if things become even more restricted to outsiders here.

In the meantime, you also find time to be a tour guide, right?

Yes, I love archeology. I love reading early church history and about life back then. And these places are kind of in our kind of backyard.

So many American pastors, they come and bring their groups. They know the Bible, but they don’t know the city. They don’t really know Ephesus or Laodicea, where people live and where they worship and where they go to market.

And if you’re a Turkish guide, you know the history and archeology, but you don’t know the Bible.

And that’s kind of where I come in. I know both.

So our tours become more like a conference. I preach eight times, from Revelation 1, and then about the other seven cities in Revelation 2–3.
And we stop by Colossae and Hieropolis and biblical sites from the book of Acts that are very close—the place where Paul and John Mark separated, and where Barnabas and Paul sailed off. We learn about how early Christians lived in these cities and what early church life was like.

It’s connecting the Bible and history, and seeing beautiful places in our backyard. It’s really fun.