FLASH EPISODE: Reaching the Middle East through Armenia with Missionary Jacob Pursely
Charlie sits down with Christian missionary, Jacob Pursley, who is working among Armenians, Syriacs, Greeks, Kurds, Zazas, and Turks. Jacob gives a brief history of Armenia, the oldest Christian nation in the world, as well as the Armenian genocide. Jacob explains how a small Middle East nation, surrounded by Islamic nations on all sides has survived with its Christian identity in tact—even after being occupied and conquered multiple times throughout the millennia—and what this nation can teach us in America today. Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Flash Episode with Minister00:01:21
Hey, everybody, a flash episode of the Charlie Kirk Show, a special conversation I had with a minister doing work in the Middle East on behalf of Armenia, a wonderful country.
His name is Jacob Persley.
I think you'll really enjoy it.
He's a great person, and I really think you'll like this Saturday episode.
Email me your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com and subscribe to the Charlie Kirk Show podcast.
Open up your podcast app and type in Charlie Kirk Show and get involved with TurningPointUSA at tpusa.com.
Come to AmericaFest at amfest.com.
That is amf.com, amfest.com.
As always, you can email me your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com.
Buckle up, everybody.
Here we go.
Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
I want to thank Charlie.
He's an incredible guy.
His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.
Turning point USA.
We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
That's why we are here.
My name is Jacob Persley.
I'm from Northwest Arkansas.
And but that's not the extent of your ministry or your work.
Defending Christian Armenia00:11:52
You spend a lot of time in a far-off distant land that people need to learn more about Armenia.
That's true.
Yeah, I spent 15 years in Turkey and then been the last five years in the country of Armenia.
What work do you do there?
So in Armenia, our main job is my main work is to mobilize.
It's very similar to you.
I mobilize people, young people, and the churches there to love their neighbors as Jesus taught us to.
We need to love our neighbors as ourselves.
And one of the ways we can do that is by taking Christian faith to Muslims.
So it's really a lot of missions work.
So I mobilize, I speak in front of audiences, and then we equip them, mobilize them.
I'm a dean of a university for doing this type of work.
And then we send them to the surrounding Muslim nations so that they can declare the gospel and plant new churches.
So let's start with the country of Armenia, which I find to be a really important thing that most Americans don't know about.
Oldest Christian country in the world.
Yes.
I grew up with a bunch of Armenians.
I love them.
They're great people.
Yes.
They're also incredibly talented business people, great family people.
They're a wonderful addition to the American project.
Oh, absolutely.
Some of the most generous, some of the most philanthropic, some of the most creative people have come from Armenia.
But most people don't know about this history of Armenia and especially the Armenian genocide, which really doesn't get the coverage in the history books that it deserves.
You know, it's really sad.
I went to four, I went to four different schools, four different seminaries for my education.
We maybe covered the Armenian church at one paragraph.
But as you said, it was the very first declared Christian nation in 301 AD.
And that's a big deal.
And if you're learning church history, that's something that we should have focused on, but we did not.
And they've retained their Christian identity since that time, even with Ottoman or Islamic suppression and Soviet suppression.
They've maintained their Christian roots.
And the values, as you said, they're very similar to Americans because of the shared faith that we have.
They have a lot of shared values.
So it's true.
Tell us about the Armenian genocide.
So in 1894, there was a massacre of around 200,000 Armenians.
And this was done by Sultan Hamid II.
And he basically, the Christians living in the Ottoman Empire at that time were under this thing called Dimi-status, under Demitude.
And they had different laws they had to adhere to as second-class citizens.
So if any Arminian would transgress their law, they were collectively punished by the Ottoman government.
Not individually, collective punishment.
Because let's say, for example, it was illegal to share the gospel with a Muslim.
Or if you had a church and the cross kind of fell, if you wanted to put the cross back up, that was illegal.
You had to go through all of these.
There's a whole list of laws, a dimitude laws.
And they were not allowed to own weapons.
to defend themselves.
Their testimony was worth half than a Muslim.
So they had a lot of oppression.
And there was an incident happened in an area of Turkey where the Ottomans saying, we're just going to massacre these people.
And they did.
That started in 1894 to 1896.
Systemic planned murder.
Right.
And then there's this group that you have heard of called the Young Turks that come along.
I've heard about, I don't know if you know this in America.
Oh, yeah.
But there's a media organization called the Young Turks.
Oh, yeah.
When I heard along very well.
I was shocked, Kirk.
I was like, that's like calling your organization the Nazi, the Hitler Youth.
We're Nazis.
It's that bad.
Oh, it is that bad.
Absolutely.
And then this group, I was like, what is our Americans just ignorant?
We don't know about this.
I'm sorry.
No, it's okay.
And not to take too big of a tangent.
That group, they're some of the nastiest left-wing commentators that have a moral equivalent label of Hitler Youth.
Yeah, it's too bad.
Is that right?
Is that too far to say or no?
Well, are you talking about the original ones?
Well, like the young Turks.
Yeah, the original young Turks, they deceived the Armenians saying, we want egalitarianism, we want equality, we want this and that.
And the Armenians are like, oh, look, look at they're going to help us in our plight.
And then they lied and they shifted.
And they're the ones that initiated the true massacres that took place in 1915 to 1923, where they killed over 1.5 million Armenian Christians, but we cannot forget the Aramaean.
That's those that speak Aramaic.
Which was the same.
And also that's exactly right.
Also the Greek Christians, and that's another 500,000.
So we cannot exclude them.
Let me just pause here, though.
So these numbers, we just can't gloss them over.
No.
These are extraordinary numbers.
That's right.
Maybe you'll finish this in the story, but why does it not get the attention?
I mean, these numbers are shocking.
This should be right up there with the Holocaust in terms of our memorial, our recollection, and our introspection.
Well, it has to do with Turkey's status, I think, with the United States, because they're a NATO country.
And after World War I, they kind of went neutral.
And it became a democratic republic, no longer an Islamic Sharia law-led Ottoman empire.
And so I think that there was a lot of things that happened in that time.
So it wasn't really talked about in the United States one.
I would just say that would be that.
But another thing, too, is that, you know, you have to remember that Hitler actually said, he said this when he was planning a mass, the Holocaust.
He said when he was in his council, this is recorded.
You can go find this.
The council said, you know, we can't just do this like this.
We can't just do this Holocaust.
He said, well, who remembers the Arminians?
Nobody remembers them today.
So he used them as an impetus, as a reference point to do what he did to the Jews.
But can you just finish the totality of the murder and the suffering, the senselessness the Turks did against the Armenians?
Yeah, I mean, they did marches.
They actually marched Arminians in the desert and killed them along the way.
They marched them down to Deirzor, Syria.
And this is where Hitler learned to do gas chambers because the Ottomans would put them into caves and put poison gas in the caves and massacre them in a mass execution.
And I have actually seen some of these graves.
I've been in Syria.
I've been in Pakistan.
I've been all over that region.
And I remember one day I was with one of my friends in that region of Syria and there was this huge mound.
Then I saw bones sticking out.
I saw a human skull and bones.
I said, what is this?
And he said, oh, these are Armenian graves.
And I said, they're just sitting here like this?
And nobody's done anything?
He said, no, we just, we haven't done anything.
There was goats climbing on the bones of the Armenians in this region of Syria.
It was horrible.
Still there.
I mean, the crime scene is still there.
What was the total number of people killed in the Armenian genocide?
I mean, if you start in 1894, there was sporadic massacres.
There was also one in 1909 that happened in Adana, Turkey.
You're looking at over 2 million, maybe 2.5 even.
And so you're saying that would Turkey dispute any of the facts you just said?
Absolutely.
It is illegal in Turkey to say there was a genocide because you are defaming Turkishness.
God of Turkishness.
Turkishness, the idea of being...
But this is important for people to...
So Turkey is not a talked about country very often, but there is this ancestral narrative to try to restore the power of the once supreme Ottoman Empire.
That's true.
Since Tayyip Erdogan, the current prime minister, actually, he's kind of like a Putin.
He's been in power since 2002.
Very corrupt elections.
I mean, I don't know how that's actually allowed to happen now 20 years later.
But he started Islamifying Turkey.
And he started to say around eight to 10 years ago, in 2023, we are going to change Turkey.
And why is that significant?
Because when Mustafa Kimal Ataturk, the founder of modern-day Turkey, he disbanded the caliphate.
That's the secession of caliphs from Muhammad, Muslim leader, right, up until that time.
So from Muhammad up until Mustafa Kimal Ataturk, there was this line of caliphs that was unbroken.
And all of a sudden, Ataturk just changed the Islamic world.
And now he's saying, we're going to bring back this neo-Ottoman empire.
And he's wanting to unite Turkey with Azerbaijan, with Turkmenistan.
And he has this thing, even a portion of Iran, they call it the Turkish Golden Bridge.
And that's the northern part of Iran that they want to take over.
And this is common knowledge.
This isn't conspiracy theory.
Iran can't be in favor of that.
Of course not.
But the problem is the area that they want to take over, there are 20 million Azeri Turks living in that region.
So it's very possible that it could happen because of the ethnic makeup in that region.
So if I'm not mistaken, Turkey uses a lira, is that right?
That's correct, yeah.
Yeah, and it's crashed terribly.
It's absolutely, I've never seen it.
It's 18 to 20 lira per dollar.
I mean, the economy is crashing.
People are in a crisis.
Same in Iran.
It is absolutely a nightmare there right now.
Wow.
How does that impact Armenia regionally?
That can't be good for Armenia.
No, it's not because you have Azerbaijan to the west, excuse me, to the east, Turkey to the west, and they have attacked the little tiny country of Armenia that has 3 million people.
And these countries have 110 million people surrounding them, and they've been attacking them, trying to take over land, trying to take over cities.
And it's been largely ignored in the Western media.
This is a Christian country that needs to be defended.
But let me zero in on something.
So you said that one of the reasons that Turkey is not held accountable for this genocide is because they're in NATO and their proximity to the United States.
Well, yeah, I would say that.
They've also threatened.
I remember when the Syrian Kurds were coming to Turkey as refugees, basically Tayyip Erdogan threatens the West and Western Europe and saying, if you don't do what we do, we're going to release them all to you.
Let them go into your countries.
We're not going to take them anymore.
No, they don't.
Because our Christian prolongs.
That's right.
Our ministry was primarily among Kurdish people.
That's northern Iraq, right?
They're in northern Iraq, but there's more Kurds living in Turkey than any other.
It's kind of this like crescent-shaped Kurdistan.
Right.
That's right.
Yeah.
Very old.
Of course, predated these country boundaries.
Well, that's right.
Well, and the Kurds, the Armenians, and the Persians were the original land owners, not the Turks.
The Turks came from southwestern China, the Uyghurs, and so forth.
Really?
Absolutely.
Yeah, we're talking about Selchuk's 1300, 13th century.
Okay, so, but I totally believe this, by the way, that the United States has made a major mistake in kind of making a deal with the devil of honoring Turkey's wishes to not talk about the Armenian Genesis while they get some intelligence partner, I guess.
There's a lot of very sloppy, very sketchy things that are laundered through Turkey.
Unfortunately, that's true.
You know, they always say a stopped clock is right twice a day.
Well, it was right once a day with Biden because he actually did acknowledge the genesis.
I don't know if that was a gaffe, if he even knew what he was saying, but he did acknowledge it, but there was nothing to back up the acknowledgement.
And that's true that there's been nothing.
And we have an Air Force base there, but after a little bit...
You have an Air Force base in Armenia?
No, no, in Turkey.
Oh, yeah.
In Turkey, we have an Air Force base there.
Converts from Islam to Faith00:05:10
And we also, this is one thing that I saw is that I would watch the news.
I read six newspapers every day when I was living in Turkey for 15 years.
And I speak Turkish fluently, of course, Kurdish and Armenian.
But when I would read the papers, they were like, get out of here, America.
We don't want you.
You are the enemy.
They would say our top enemies are Israel, Germany, England, and America.
Introduce your organization too for our people listening.
Absolutely.
I grew up in the PCA Church, Presbyterian Church of America.
I'm sent by my home church from Fayetteville, Arkansas to the Middle East to proclaim the gospel.
I'm also supported by many other denominations, and I love them all.
And the thing that has united all of us Christian denominations is one thing, the mission, to spread and advance the kingdom of God through spreading the gospel and starting churches.
So I work interdenominationally with so many churches.
And so.
So you say that you're seeing the gospel spread in Iran?
Yes.
Absolutely.
You know, one of the, so my PhD is in intercultural studies.
It's another way to say missiology.
And so I get to look at statistics, but I also get to see firsthand what is happening and how the gospel is spreading.
And we see converts from Islam to Christianity every day right now.
And this is the most liberal number, the most conservative number they would say is 500,000.
But I think that's much too low.
We have around 7 million converts in Iran to Christianity.
And that is significant because when the last 40 years, they've been under this Islamic suppression under Sharia law.
And these young people are looking at this saying, if this is what God is like, I don't believe in God.
They're turning to atheism, but it's not atheism in America.
It's Muslim atheism.
And as soon as they're introduced to Jesus.
Yeah, Muslim atheism is that they're rejecting the God of Islam, which is not the God of the Bible.
And because that's what they've grown up with.
What is the difference then?
The difference is that the Muslim God is a monotheistic God.
In all of the Quran, God is not mentioned as love one time.
Is that right?
Not one time.
And he's only mentioned as kind once, but that is in the context of that when you go to heaven, you get virgins.
So God is kind, because that's the context.
That's the only good thing you can see there about that.
And it's also a religion of conquest by the sword.
It's by jihad.
And in the Bible, it's the opposite.
You go, you love your enemies even.
You pray for those that persecute you.
And Islam is the opposite.
If you truly want to be a fundamental conservative, real Muslim, then you're going to apply it the way that is.
It's a God that requires submission.
That's right.
Right.
Which literally is what the word means.
That's right.
So you say, sorry, I interrupted you.
You said Muslim atheist.
Yes.
So I call them atheists from a Muslim background.
And what happens is, is they've rejected the Muslim God because they think, well, the Christian God must be the same because they don't know.
I mean, if it's illegal to convert from Islam to Christianity, it's a capital punishment in Iran, like it is in Pakistan.
You'll be killed for it.
And so they don't have the option to even find a Bible, find a Christian.
And so when they do, they're like, oh, this is not the God of Islam.
This is a good God.
This is a God of love.
He even sent his son to die on the cross for our sins.
He loved us that much.
And it's his work, not our work.
And it changes them.
I've seen so many conversions, even in Turkey.
You know, in Turkey, we've seen, you know, since 1970, I would say, there was one Turkish Christian.
One.
Now we have over 8,000.
And we actually can quantify that.
We can do studies.
We have 175 churches.
8,000 Christians in Turkey.
That's right.
These are converts, though.
Got it, okay?
From Islam.
Are there any churches allowed in Turkey?
Yes.
Yes, there have been.
But just don't get too loud, is what they say, right?
Right.
That's right.
Stay in your corner.
They're still trying to make them live as a second-class citizen.
If you proselytize, you're going to be shut down.
Yeah.
And they try to do it a little bit in the shadows.
They don't want to have an international press problem, but they're good, right?
I don't know what Andrew Brunson, he's one of my friends.
He was in prison, a Turkish prison for two years as a missionary with the EPC church.
And it took Trump to get him out.
Obama wouldn't do a thing at that time.
That's true.
That's true.
So in closing here, do you see hope for the gospel in the Middle East?
Oh, absolutely.
There's one of my favorite verses is Jeremiah chapter 51, verse 44.
And God prophesies saying he is going to take all that the God Bel has swallowed and take them back.
He says that he's going to remove all of the worship that was going to Bel.
And Bel was a God.
You don't even know what Bel is today because God's word is true.
And I truly believe that as the gospel goes forth in these regions and it's happening, that there's going to be a day that Islam is no longer remembered.
And those that have been going to the false God of Islam, they're going to be taken back to the true God, Jesus Christ.
And I see that happening wide scale.
God's Prophecy and Bel00:00:37
And this can be found on the internet.
Anybody can study this.
Your name and organization one last time.
Yeah, my name is Jacob Persley.
And I'm not with an organization.
Why should people contact you?
So I'm on Instagram at Ambassador of the King.
I'm also on Facebook.
They can follow me on Facebook and also on YouTube.
So I have channels and I do things.
Thank you so much for the Lord's work.
That's true.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email me your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
Thank you so much for listening.
God bless.
For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk dot com.