As Missionary Era Comes to an End in Turkey, Protestants Look to West for Protection

Shortly after pastor Brunson’s release in 2018, Turkish authorities began deporting or effectively banning foreigners connected to the Protestant church.

Pastor Andrew Brunson and his wife Norine arrive at the airport in Izmir, Turkey, on Oct. 12, 2018. Umit Bektas/Reuters

When they arrested Andrew Brunson and his wife, Norine, in 2016, Turkish officials had an order to deport the American pastor, who ran a small Protestant church in the coastal city of Izmir.

Deportations of foreign workers happened occasionally, and the process for Americans, he figured, would be relatively straightforward. Maybe it would take a day.

“But with us,” Brunson told The Epoch Times, “somebody higher up decided to hold onto us to see what would happen.”

What happened was more than the Brunsons had bargained for. Officials released Norine Brunson after two weeks but charged Andrew Brunson with military espionage and terrorism, which resulted in his imprisonment and ignited a diplomatic crisis with the United States.

Pressure from the first Trump administration led to Brunson’s release in 2018—but not before U.S. sanctions and tariffs helped tank the Turkish economy.

Brunson had been in Turkey for 25 years, part of a wave of missionaries that helped nurture a fledgling Protestant community in the country, where Christians make up less than 1 percent of the population, according to the U.S. Department of State.

As of 2022, most of Turkey’s 83 million people are Sunni Muslim, and while the republic is nominally secular, religious minorities have long faced societal and state discrimination. Compared to Orthodox and Catholics, Protestants, who number around 10,000, are a relatively new presence—and are not legally recognized.

Shortly after Brunson’s release in 2018, authorities began deporting or effectively banning foreigners connected to the church with immigration codes that labeled them a “national security threat.”

“I was the first one, and I think that it brought enough negative attention and consequences that they decided it would be easier to just ban people,” said Brunson, who now lives in the United States.

Since then, hundreds of Protestants have been expelled, according to Alliance Defending Freedom International, a U.S.-based legal nonprofit that advocates on behalf of Christians worldwide. Many spent decades in the country and raised families there. Some were missionaries or church leaders, others simply had spouses active in the church.

President Donald Trump welcomes American evangelical Christian preacher Andrew Brunson (L) to the Oval Office a day after Brunson was released from a Turkish jail, at the White House on Oct. 13, 2018. Mark Wilson/Getty Images

While Turkish officials accused Brunson of ties to the Gülenists, the Islamic political movement it blames for a bloody failed coup in 2016, and ultimately convicted him of supporting Kurdish separatists, the indictment used against him at trial accused him of “Christianization,” according to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.

“All of the evidence they used was actually our ministry. And underlying it was the accusation of trying to divide Turkey, politically, through Christianization,” he said.

Brunson in 2019 published a memoir about his imprisonment, which he said the Turkish government used to paint Christians in a negative light.

“There was an awful lot of propaganda about me—‘the dark priest,’ ‘the terror priest, ‘the CIA priest.’ They were false,” he said, but it cast a long shadow on Christians as enemies of the state.

Such anxieties are deeply, historically rooted, and for Turkey’s tiny Evangelical community, a combination of social prejudices and intensifying pressure from the state is exacerbating an already precarious existence.

According to the European Center for Law and Justice, the deportations and entry bans on foreign Protestants are part of a broader attempt to eliminate Christian, and particularly Protestant, activity altogether.

Turkey has “regularly and increasingly failed to protect freedom of expression,” according to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, which has for more than a decade recommended adding the country to its Special Watch List for “engaging in or tolerating severe violations of religious freedom.”

Still, Brunson says, there is a “relatively high degree” of religious freedom in Turkey today. But as the foreign missionary era comes to an end, Turkish Protestants worry this is a fragile reality.

As a landmark case before the European Court of Human Rights will for the first time consider the expulsion of Turkey’s foreign Protestants, Turkish Christians are hoping the outcome reignites an interest in their struggle.

“Our problem is Western countries are not talking about it,” Ihsan Ozbek, national president of the Four Square Protestant Church in Turkey, told The Epoch Times. “They have stopped thinking about human rights and religious freedom in the country.”

‘The Honeymoon’

In the early years of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s rule—he first served as prime minister in 2003 after four years as the mayor of Istanbul—church leaders saw a kind of common cause between his Justice and Development Party, a conservative movement with Islamic roots, and their own struggle for religious freedom.

“At the beginning, we were thinking [of] Erdogan and his party as kind of aligned with us. They were very positive about religious freedom because they were suffering as well,” Ozbek said. “Secularism in this country was very radical.”

Those days, he said, were also the “honeymoon” for Turkey and the European Union.

“It was the era of EU membership negotiations, so it helped us a lot. I represented Evangelicals before the government,” he said. “And the EU was thinking about religious freedom and freedom of speech in Turkey.”

Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan heads an emergency meeting of the National Security Council in Ankara, Turkey, on July 20, 2016. Kayhan Ozer/Pool via AP

When the government introduced a law in 2004 penalizing efforts to prevent others from declaring or disseminating religious beliefs, it may have been Erdogan’s attempt to push back against the secularists and show alliance with Western ideals as he approached membership negotiations.

But Evangelicals saw an opportunity.

“He wanted to encourage the Muslims of Turkey to boldly re-Islamize Turkish culture and not be afraid of the secularists,” David Byle, a Canadian American missionary who lived in Turkey for 19 years, told The Epoch Times.

“But what he didn’t realize is that those of us who were not Muslims could also benefit from that rule. A bunch of us said, ‘Well, we need to go out and see if he means it,’” Byle said.

He began “classic street preaching” in downtown Istanbul.

At first, the reaction was harsh. He was arrested repeatedly.

“People said, ‘You can’t do that, this is a Muslim country.’ But we said, ‘the law says you can.’”

Slowly, Byle said, both the government and society softened to such demonstrations and realized “that this is what it means to be an open society.”

But violence against Christians spiked in the following years, and, as EU membership talks cooled around 2008, so did the West’s scrutiny of Turkey’s human rights values.

‘Totally Blindsided’

Before 2018, Byle managed to evade deportation.

“I had been arrested several times and they wanted to deport me because of the street evangelism,” he said.

He opened several court cases against the government.

“We won those cases because there was nothing illegal we had done. But by the time they forced me to leave in 2018, the judicial system had either been cleansed of secular judges or they had been silenced by intimidation,” he said. “What we were doing did not change at all. But by 2018, the judges wanted to get rid of people like me.”

Another American pastor, John, who asked to be identified by a pseudonym, told The Epoch Times he and his wife considered themselves well-connected and well-insulated from the purge.

“We thought we were fairly safe and were totally blindsided,” John said, referring to being barred from reentering the country. “It was 30 years of life. We raised our kids there. I was involved in numerous charities and had to close those down as well.”

Pam and Dave Wilson, also American, were banned from the country in 2019 after nearly 40 years.

“We felt that God had called us there,” Pam Wilson said. “Particularly in the 1980s, there were not a whole lot of people who were terribly bold in reaching out.”

The Wilsons developed a Bible correspondence course that became one of the most effective ministries in the country, she said, “because it was the only public way you could actually find out about Jesus or get a Bible.”

Wilson estimates nearly half of all believers in Turkey chart their spiritual journey through the course.

“It was very fulfilling,” she said. “And then it became home. We loved it there.”

Ozbek said deportations were not initially aimed at Evangelicals, and many missionaries had overstayed tourist visas or were using illegal reasons to stay in the country. But the government soon realized the bans had an impact on Protestants.

“They saw how easy it was to create obstacles against the church.”

Pam Wilson fills out a Bible correspondence course, with a Turkish New Testament. When the Wilsons developed their course in 1980, based on one begun by missionaries in the 1960s, it was one of the only publicly available ways to learn about Jesus or get a bible in Turkey, they said. Courtesy of Pam Wilson

Legacy of Missionaries in Turkey

An increasing number of Turks are non-observant Muslims, according to recent polls, including a 2024 survey from KONDA Research.

But Islam is more than a religion for Turks, Ozbek said.

“It’s a main part of their identity,” he said. “It’s a heritage which is coming from ages, from wars, from enmity between Western civilization and the Turks. So it has an effect on Turkish culture.”

In particular, a trenchant animosity toward missionaries is rooted in histories that pre-date the modern Turkish republic.

Wilson said tolerance among individuals grew in the 40 years she spent in Turkey, but stigma and suspicion of Christians remains deeply ingrained.

She recalled surveys within the past decade or so asking whether people would rather live next to a drug dealer or a Christian.

“Most people said drug dealer,” she said. “There’s a lot of fear and prejudice that is not actually based in reality.”

“Missionaries are considered a couple steps below rapists and pedophiles,” John said. “In the Turkish mind, a missionary is an agent of a foreign government whose purpose is to undermine and destroy the government. First come the missionaries, then come the businesspeople, then come the soldiers. It’s all part of a Western plot.”

Istanbul's iconic Hagia Sophia, a former Christian patriarchal basilica, later an imperial mosque, and now a museum. It is considered the epitome of Byzantine architecture. Arild Vågen/Public Domain

It’s not so much the religious element, he said, but the political connotations attached to it.

“Being a Christian in Turkey is okay. Being active in your faith is okay,” he said, adding that deeply religious Muslims tend to respect someone who takes their faith seriously more than nominal Christians.

“It’s when they think that you’re a missionary. All of a sudden, that’s deeply evil,” John said. “And that makes you political and that makes you dangerous. They would look at a missionary like we would look at a Taliban member.”

In the Turkish education system and in state and social media, propagation of Christianity is portrayed as “a political action that challenges Turkish Muslim identity rather than an expression of personal faith,” according to reporting from Evangelical associations submitted to the U.N. Human Rights Committee in 2021.

When such portrayals reached a fever pitch in the mid-2000s, violence, including murders of Evangelicals and priests, followed, according to Turkish Minute.

Since then, other incidents—including a 2016 arsonist attack on the Istanbul office where Pam and David Wilson published and distributed Christian educational materials—have kept Protestants on guard.

Incidents of hate speech directed at Protestant individuals or institutions increased in 2024 over the previous year, according to a human rights report from the Association of Protestant Churches in Turkey, released in June 2025.

The Wilson's office following an arson attack in 2016. Courtesy of Pam Wilson

Turkish Protestants

Like nearly all Turks, Uğur Mutlu, 40, was raised Muslim. But when he was 18, he developed a theological curiosity.

“I read many books about Christianity and other religions, because Islam was not answering my questions. And after eight years of research, I decided to accept Jesus, because I found my answers in the Bible,” Mutlu told The Epoch Times.

His family were not particularly religious and didn’t object to his conversion.

“I am very lucky,” said Mutlu, now a pastor and Secretary General of the Association of Protestant Churches. “I know many people who accepted Jesus and were rejected by their families.”

Ozbek was not rejected by his family, but lost all his friends.

“People were saying my identity had changed. They said, ‘you became an Armenian by accepting Christ.’”

When Ozbek became president of the Turkish Evangelical Alliance in 1995, there were only a handful of Turkish leaders. But Protestants became more visible when they spearheaded relief activities following a devastating 1999 earthquake, he said.

That year, he began seeing anti-Evangelical sentiment on television and in other mass media, and believes the 2007 murder of three missionaries at one of his organization’s churches was a culmination of that.

“It was another turning point in our history. Even our [national] security council was thinking about us as a threat. We read from newspapers that the first threat was Islamic fundamentalists, then Kurdish separatists, and then us Evangelicals,” Ozbek said.

At the time, there were only around 2,000 believers. Now, he notes, there are more than 10,000—all of whom are Muslim converts.

“When we went there in 1993, most of the churches had been started by foreigners,” Brunson said. “And the goal was always to have Turkish leadership.”

Now, as Turkish Protestants take up the mantle, there is some apprehension that, as foreigners have been targeted and forced out, they will be next.

“You can say there are storm clouds on the horizon. And our Turkish brothers in leadership, some of them expect to go to prison,” Brunson said.

‘No Legal Protestant Church’

Evangelical Christians and other non-Muslim minority religions face a range of challenges: They cannot train clergy or open religious schools—hence the reliance on foreign clergy—can only legally organize as foundations or associations, struggle to find spaces to congregate, and are not allowed their own cemeteries.

“There is no legal Protestant church in Turkey,” Mutlu said. “So our churches are becoming foundations and associations. But if someone complains about you and you tell them you are practicing Christianity in this association, they will just come and close the church.”

Generally, he said, society is “almost always” against the church.

“When we are starting to gather in a building, we try to be very careful about our relationships with the neighbors, because if we get any complaints we can be in trouble,” Mutlu said.

According to the Association of Protestant Churches, there are 214 known congregations in 2024; only 12 worship in a traditional historical church and 27 have their own stand-alone or independent building. The rest use shared buildings, rented facilities, or private homes.

These congregations don’t get the tax breaks and free utilities that officially recognized places of worship do, and, the report notes, “when they introduce themselves to the authorities as a church, they receive warnings that they are not legal and may be closed down.”

A Last Resort

Advocates say cases brought on behalf of Christians fighting deportation are predictably lost in lower courts and go through several appeals before landing with the nation’s constitutional court. Meanwhile, several cases that made it to the European Court of Human Rights have stalled.

Kelsey Zorzi, senior counsel with Alliance for Defending Freedom International, told The Epoch Times that Wiest v. Turkiye, a case currently before the European Court, is “hugely significant for us in that it’s finally moving forward—this is the first time the Court will decide this issue.”

Turkey is party to the European Convention on Human Rights, and the court’s decisions are binding, although some advocates say Erdogan has a recent tendency of not implementing the “essence of a decision.”

Ken Wiest lived in Turkey legally for more than 30 years and had a valid residence permit at the time he was barred from reentering, a decision based on undisclosed information obtained by the National Intelligence Agency, his lawyers claim.

Advocates told The Epoch Times they were hoping the court would consider whether Turkey violated their clients’ religious freedom, but so far is only considering violations related to disruption of family life and whether Wiest benefited from fair procedure in domestic courts.

“It’s possible they’ll say this is an immigration issue and outside our jurisdiction. But we’re very hopeful they will not say that because the whole point is that Turkey is hiding behind that immigration line of argumentation so they can basically kick out all the missionaries and not have to provide any proof as to why they’re doing so,” Zorzi said.

Even at this level, she said, lawyers cannot see the government’s file on the individuals in question.

“Imagine you’re charged with a crime. You need to be defended and there’s no evidence presented against you. You don’t even know what you did to allegedly commit this crime. That’s the situation all these foreign missionaries in Turkey are finding themselves in,” Zorzi said.

Advocates say they caught a glimpse of the government’s strategy when a 2019 decision on an appeal brought before the Turkish Constitutional Court referenced a state intelligence report.

It revealed a sweeping surveillance scheme targeting individuals associated with an annual conference organized by the Association of Protestant Churches, which it said was “conducting federation efforts” to represent Protestant interests before the state, and therefore posed a national security threat warranting immigration restrictions. The Turkish intelligence agency identified around 120 individuals who participated in the conference, according to court records.

Protestant missionary David Byle practices "street evangelism" in downtown Istanbul, Turkey. (Courtesy of David Byle).

‘They Don’t Talk About It’

Evangelicals, Ozbek said, appear to be lost in any discussion of Turkey’s human rights obligations.

“They don’t talk about it. They write some annual report, and most of the time they don’t mention Evangelicals because we don’t have any political power. They mention the Greek Orthodox church, their struggle is long lasting, and Armenians, because [of] their connection with the U.S. and France. But nobody is talking about Evangelicals.”

Protestant leaders told The Epoch Times they had hoped Pope Leo XIV’s recent historic visit to Turkey would have been more inclusive. The Pontiff preached Christian unity and focused on bridging historic divides between Catholics and Orthodox Christians, but didn’t meet with any Protestant leaders.

“Everyone tends to have a blind eye on Turkey,” a human rights advocate told The Epoch Times. He spoke on condition of anonymity, as he fears government retribution. “In the old days, 10 to 15 years ago, everyone listened. Now no one does, not even in Europe,” he said.

Brunson ascribes this to a shift in the last decade or so, in which religious freedom has become coded as a “right wing” issue.

“You know, they’re the ones who care about religious freedom and therefore it’s something the left views with suspicion,” he said.

In the past, he noted, religious freedom was more broadly viewed as a human right.

“The West has historically driven the interest in that. But you don’t see them doing it anymore,” Brunson said. “They’re just not interested. And so, as that happens, there’s going to be increased persecution.”

As the foreign missionary era ends in Turkey, Brunson said he is inspired by many of the country’s own young leaders.

“The church is losing people with valuable experience who have a deep love for the people there. But it’s also going to be okay. It’s going to stand on its own feet.”