Apostle to the Turks

The two on the left; not me. :) We had dinner and spent the evening with Hanspeter Tiefenbach and his wife Anne.Having met in a Bible School in Switzerland, it was in 1989 (give or take a year) that they felt called to plant a church in Turkey. So they packed up and moved to Antalya and began to have meetings in their apartment. For two years it was just the two of them - faithfully worshiping and praying. No Turks. For 104 Sundays the Turkish house church was just them. He bought, sold and repaired rugs and motorcycles to earn a living. Even shined shoes. In fact, there is a typical shoe-shine box one sees on the street every day sitting in their entry room that is still ready to be put to use in the event extra income is needed. Then, after two years - one or two or a few Turkish people began to show curiosity, interest, or simply have a need for the company of two caring people. A strange lot of folks comprised the 'church' at the beginning, not the kind of people two struggling missionaries would like to showcase to the Muslim as a "city on a hill," but they persevered, amidst all the fluctuating, ups and downs of attendance, commitment and visible transformation of lives.

We saw the scrapbook. It starts with just pictures of Hans and Anne, then has one or two Turks, then a handful, eventually it actually looks like a small group (you know, the size of a group we would expect to show up to a meeting for us to feel like it was successful on the first night of some program...only this was after YEARS of faithfulness and trust that they were, indeed, doing what God called them to do), eventually, near the end of the book, we saw a fully-worshiping congregation.

Seriously - I'm sitting there looking at this simple, unpretentious, godly couple and thinking, "This is what the book of Acts was like...except Paul and Barnabas and Mark and Silas and Philip and Peter and all the rest didn't have to wait for two years before a single seeker responded to the gospel." I was embarrassingly convicted of my ridiculously feeble faith in the power and trustworthiness of the gospel in comparison. I whine (silently to God, of course) when I don't see immediate fruit from my efforts, and am reluctantly faithful to living out the truth of my convictions in a culture that is only mildly offended by the gospel in comparison to Turkey. Just sitting in the living room with these people was a phenomenal lesson in what love for Jesus and loyalty to his mission looks like. And there are people like Hanspeter and Anne all over Turkey.

In addition to everything else Hans is doing, he stands next to me for three hours every time I teach the parenting class and interprets my every word, and every word in the video that is not sub-titled. Plus both my sermons. And English is the least fluent of the three languages he speaks, including German and Turkish.

İsa'nın Rab olduğunu. (Jesus is Lord.)

With dubious faithfulness,

Charlie