Spending Christmas in an Iranian Church

One may ask how in a year I went from spending Christmas in a rural Lutheran church in Marysville, OH to an Iranian Protestant church in Denizli, Turkey.


A few days before Christmas I asked my host  family about possible churches in Denizli. They told me the location of the only one in the whole city which was located in Yenişehir neighborhood. Only a 10 minute walk from my school, so the next day after school I went out looking for the church to inquire about the Christmas service. I arrived to a large house with a cross on the side and knocked on the door. It was completely enclosed in a fence and the windows were tinted.  I knew something was weird when I began talking to the man who opened the door, it seemed that he didn’t understand me at all. He never even replied and I didn’t think my Turkish could be so bad that this man couldn’t understand a word of it. He called back to another man in the back of the church who came over and greeted me in Turkish. He then invited me in for coffee where he explained to me that this is an Iranian Protestant Church and everyone here speaks mostly Farsi. 

One of the Iranian friends I made that evening

Many of the Iranians in this church came to Turkey to escape religious persecution and some of the families live in the 3rd story of the building. Iran has a very old and rich Christian history. However it has always been a minority religion in the region. Zoroastrianism being the majority religion before the Islamic conquest. Many of the Christian communities in Iran today are made up of old minority ethnic groups such as Armenians and Assyrians. These churches conduct they're liturgy in their ethnic languages and not Farsi. This church I was at however was made up of ethnic Farsi speaking Persians. In the 18th and 19th centuries there were a few attempts from Protestant missionaries to evangelize Iran. These efforts left a few convert churches to battle persecution for the rest of their existence in Iran. And when I say "a few" I'm not far off considering that Christians make up .155% of the population. So it is the descendants of these converts who make up this church.

The Christmas service would be packed with all of the Iranian Christian families in Denizli and the whole service would be in Farsi. This of course is something I would never turn down. When I arrived Christmas day I was greeted by many smiling and welcoming Iranians who spoke very little Turkish let alone any English. I was ushered into the crowded basement and while dodging running screaming Iranian children  I met and attempted to talk with many of the families. When the service began with Farsi songs that were read off the projector screen in the Farsi alphabet, I knew I was a long way from home. But as the service progressed with scripture readings, the sermon, and children sermon time I began to realize how close to home I really was. At the end of the service Santa Clause came bursting through the church doors and everyone erupted in the Farsi version of Jingle bells. I couldn't stop laughing at how incredible this whole situation was and I realized that finding situations that can be so different from my home but yet intimately related is what makes this cultural immersion so life changing.