Source: World Watch Monitor, April 1, 2015
On a Saturday in late March, a group of 20 volunteers went to an abandoned church in Turkey’s southeastern city of Mardin. They cleaned out broken chairs, a cracked pulpit, and books that haven’t been opened in decades. In the corner sat a 100-year-old organ.
The church, in the heartland of Assyrian Orthodoxy, has recently been transferred to a Protestant congregation. Although only big enough to hold 50 people, the building’s transfer represents the first steps of reconciliation between Protestantism and Orthodoxy in a city where the denominations have been bitter rivals for nearly two centuries.
When American Protestants first came to the Ottoman Empire in the 1800s, they drew tens of thousands of the empire’s ethnic Christians away from their original churches and baptized them as Protestants. Within decades, the Western missionaries had set up hundreds of churches along with hospitals and schools where foreign languages were taught. Orthodox patriarchs threatened excommunication for anyone who fraternized with them or went to their churches.
» Readers might also be interested in an article on The New Faces of Christianity in Europe, as demonstrated by a visit to St. Denis Cathedral in Paris on Palm Sunday (The Schuman Centre for European Studies).