Editor’s Note: (This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

Kerem Koc was born into a Muslim family in Turkey, but became an atheist and a mountain climber determined to scale the highest peaks on earth. An accident during a solo climb made him reconsider everything.

For the first time, Kerem cried out to God. And God sent help. Kerem was rescued by people passing by in the remote area. And then he began a different quest.

He remembered a little book a couple of short-term missionaries gave him when he was a child. It was the Gospel of John. He found a local church and started asking questions. Soon, everything changed.

Kerem has served as a pastor in Antalya, Turkey for 15 years. He’s the head of Via Christus Ministries and regional director for Acts 29. And he wants to raise up more local pastors to serve more local churches. Because the needs are still great.

In the land of the Bible, people desperately need the message of the Bible.

Jamie Dean:

Tell us about your background and how you came to know Christ.

Kerem Koc:

Well, I grew up in a kind of nominal Muslim household…So I memorized some verses [in the Quran] because it was mandatory at the school, but I never really grew up with a religious feeling. And by age 12 or 13, I started to lose any interest toward God.

By the time I was 17, I was totally atheist, no interest in God or asking questions. I just wanted to be a mountain climber. That was my life goal: I wanted to climb the Himalayan Mountains or do expedition climbing. And so basically every weekend I was just running away from the house for two or three days and climbing the mountains by myself.

And during one of those climbs, I had an accident and I almost died. And that really scared me. And that was the moment, there for the first time in my life, I prayed.

And somehow I felt that I was not alone there. And eventually there were people who came there that shouldn’t have been there on that day at that moment. So they helped me out. And that led me to search about God.

Jamie Dean:

Where did you start the search?

Kerem Koc:

When I was a young kid, these short-term missionaries gave me this little booklet called The Word, and it was the Gospel of John. I was like eight or nine years old. And I remembered these people actually loved me.

They cared, they listened to me, they prayed for me, they spent time with me. They were very intentional, and that always stuck in my mind. And after the accident, I was searching.

So, first, I’m going to the imams, asking questions. Then there were Bahais and Jehovah’s Witnesses. I’m asking questions, but I did not want to go to a church. I knew that there was one church, but I mean, I thought Christians were enemies. Why would I be a Christian out of all the religions?

But I remembered that family who gave me this little book. So, I picked it up, read it, and then went to the church.

Jamie Dean:

What did you think about church?

Kerem Koc:

Well, until that day, I had been hearing all these religions always selling the same thing: Be a good person, believe in our book, and you’ll go to heaven. It was all basically the same idea.

So when I went to church, I told the pastor, “I’ve read your book and I’ve come to the church and I’m going to heaven.” And he said something like, “Well, with this attitude, you’re not going to heaven.”

Then he started to share with me, “You need a Savior. You’re a sinner. You know this deep down, Kerem.”

Jamie Dean:

What did you think about that?

Kerem Koc:

It offended me, but I went home and immediately just broke. I thought, “Yes, I know that I’m a sinner.”

A few days later, I went back to the church, and met with the pastor on a Monday. By Thursday, I had finished the entire New Testament and had two sleepless nights. So I went back to the pastor, and I was like, “I have a million questions.”

So, I went to my first ever church service on a Thursday, and I was sitting at the back and I started crying loudly—literally. And I’m just like, “I’m a sinner. I need a savior.”

The Lord’s Spirit was working in my soul and changing me, basically that day.

Jamie Dean:

So, you stayed at that church, and started sharing the gospel with others who dropped by the building?

Kerem Koc:

Yeah, people would show up every day. Some days I’d share the gospel with 15, 20 people who showed up. It was wonderful.

I stayed there a few years and by the time that my high school sweetheart came to the Lord. We married, and there was an opportunity for us to move to Canada to study in a Bible college there.

Jamie Dean:

And then you went back to Turkey. Was that your intention from the start?

Kerem Koc:

That was always the goal that I wanted to come back. We wanted to come back and plant the church here in Antalya, and basically we became the second church in the town. Now we have maybe 7 or 8 churches.

So we came back to Turkey in 2009, and planted a church in 2010. And so it’s been 16 years, and it’s been pretty encouraging.

Jamie Dean:

So, tell us a little bit about the spiritual landscape in Turkey.

Kerem Koc:

Well, it’s Muslim, obviously. Statistics say 99 %. In reality, many say they are Muslim but they don’t read their Qurans, they don’t do worship, and they don’t live their life like Muslims.

So, normally a Muslim needs to be praying 35 times a week—five times a day basically. If you come to Western Turkey, I would say, I would say less than 1% of people actually would do 35. There’s a different culture in the eastern part of the country, and they’re much more religious.

Jamie Dean:

What about Christians in Turkey?

Kerem Koc:

Obviously, there’s historical Christianity: Armenians, Greek Orthodox, Syrianic, Roman Catholic.

We see some writings of evangelicals during the end of the 19th century. And then among the evangelicals we see today, the first ones were after the 1960s. So that is very, very new here. People my age, mostly, I would say 90% are first generation Christian.

I would say we have around 7,000 evangelical Christians—and that’s out of 90 million people in the country.

Now we have a second generation of our children. But when I came to the Lord, we would do one youth event nationally, and literally all the churches would be there.

Jamie Dean:

Have there been challenges as the church has grown?

Kerem Koc:

Unity is a challenge. All of a sudden we don’t want to work with each other, and there are disagreements. So, as Christians, we are 7,000 people, but we have at least 5,000 different views.

Jamie Dean:

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