Church Fights to Stay Open in Turkey
By
A legally recognized church in Turkey is fighting to stay open after police last week delivered a letter from the government stating that it will be closed within days.
The letter said Batikent Protestant Church in the capital city Ankara would be closed because it is meeting in a building that is not approved as a place of worship, according to International Christian Concern on Tuesday.
But the church argues that it had won a court case last year against the local government over zoning code violations, and was essentially fighting a legal battle over a case it had already won.
“It is very obvious that what is happening to our church is a pre-meditated, continuous and jointly orchestrated direct attack against the Church as a whole in Turkey by the right-wing Islamic government (AK Party) that is currently in control in Turkey,” said the church’s founding pastor Daniel Wickwire, according to ICC.
*Â Turkey: Extortion Gang Takes Real Estate From Non-Muslims
Wickwire, who has been a missionary pastor in Ankara for the past 23 years, and his lawyers opened a court case to challenge the police notice on June 4. He accused the Yenimahalle Municipal Government and the national Ministry of the Interior of trying to shut down the church.
The government has also been the source of the pastor’s personal legal difficulties. Turkey refuses to give Wickwire a residence permit or a work permit as a missionary, so he has been forced to stay in Turkey as a tourist for the past 19 years, having to leave the country every 90 days.
Also, his applications for a work permit at the Turkish Consulate in Chicago were mysteriously “lost,” Wickwire claims
“The consulate officials became very nervous and said that they would lose their jobs if they were to give out this information,” said the pastor, recalling when his wife had returned to the consulate to ask for updates on his application process. “They said that if we were Muslims we would not be having this kind of trouble.”
Turkey’s population is nearly all Muslim, with 99.8 percent of its people reportedly followers of Islam, according to the CIA World Factbook.
* Right. And how do you think this came about? Only 150 years ago nearly 50% of the inhabitants of Turkey were NOT Islamic…
The country has a history of Christian persecution, including the gruesome murder of three Christian workers last April. Muslim extremists had slit their throats in the Bible publishing house where they worked.
The murders had raised serious concerns within the European Union as to whether Turkey, which is applying for entry into the 27-member bloc, can protect the religious freedoms of its Christian population, which numbers only about 100,000. The issue of religious freedom in Turkey has been an issue since talks on Turkey’s entry began in 2005.
In ICC’s latest report, Pastor Wickwire said he has been involved in over 15 court cases in the last six years to keep his church open.
Incredible! The savages do this and much worse in their countries, and then whine about hurt feelings in our countries–with a straight face! It’s the traitor liberals’ fault, they are as much the enemy as the savages.
Indeed they are the traitors!
The suffering that the Orthodox Christians, Armenian, Greek, and others in Turkey have endured is far, far worse. You in the West cannot imagine what it is like. If you actually knew you would stop all Muslim immigration into the West and kick all Muslims back into the Middle East. I consider Islam nothing more than a disease that civilized humanity should sterilize from the face of the earth.
Can one day pass by, without reading an article about an other incident/
Is their ever a pleasant story.
When people say, we love dying, like you like living.
How in the world, can you communicate with people, who have such bizare thinking.
You are born, so you can dye. How insane can you get.
May be I would rather dye than live, if Islam would rule, with their Sharia law and have total control over the lives of women.
If their has to be a war over Religion, why don’t we start right now. Don’t let any more of these kind of people move into the West.
If I had to dye, so my granddaughters would never have to live under Islam rules, so be it.
What has to happen, that it sinks in by people, what is happening in the Western World???
Starting a War about Religion, never thought, that I would think about something like this or write about it.
I am so sick and tired of living like this, wondering what their next move will be.