Embark on a transformative 9-day biblical study tour in Turkey. Experience the Seven Churches of Revelation and the Early Church, with 6 full days immersed in the rich biblical context of these Lands of the Bible.

This journey will inspire your faith and enrich your biblical knowledge like never before!

Book now to secure your spot!

Most tours of the Seven Churches focus on the ruins.

Stones. Columns. Archaeological sites.

Those things matter, but they are not the heart of this journey.

The early church was not born in a museum. It was born in the middle of one of the most powerful, most seductive, and most dangerous empires the world has ever seen. Real people. Real families. Real pressure.

When you walk these ancient cities with their story in mind, something changes.

Stone faces become real.

• The Agora (marketplace) becomes the place where fellow Christians couldn't buy or sell because they refused to worship Caesar.

• The Guild Halls become the rooms where believers had to choose between their livelihood and their faith.

• The Temples become the world that surrounded them on every corner — offering counterfeit versions of everything Christ promised.

This tour is designed to help you enter their world.

Instead of simply visiting sites, we explore how geography, culture, and the crushing weight of Roman society shaped the first followers of the Way — and how they not only survived it but changed the world from inside it.

Because the New Testament church wasn't built by people who had it easy.

It was built by people who had everything to lose.

And that is exactly where we will walk.

Every city becomes part of a larger story that reveals what it truly meant — and still means — to be a Follower of the Way.

All travelers will depart from their nearest International Airport to arrive in Izmir, Turkey to join the tour.

All travelers will arrive in Izmir, Turkey Airport on Saturday September 12th at or before 4pm.

Topic: Going into all the World
When the Rabbi tells you to go...

We will spend our first evening as a community of believers coming together to hear the words of Rabbi Jesus, "Go, and make disciples...teaching them to obey." His disciples took the words of Christ and traveled the Roman Empire. We gather together to join them in their journey living out the words of Jesus.

Today we enter two of the most dramatic cities in the ancient world — and two of the most revealing in all of Scripture. From the wealthy port city of Smyrna to the magnificent acropolis of Pergamum, we begin to understand what it actually cost to follow Jesus in the Roman world. These are not simply ruins. They are the streets where the early church made impossible choices every single day.

Named after the most expensive spice in the ancient world, Smyrna was the crown jewel of Asia Minor — a deep water port city of 200,000 people where every trade route from India, Egypt, and Asia eventually arrived. Its streets were lined with wealth, its people wore crowns, and Caesar himself used it as a bank. It was also the city where Christians couldn't eat.

As we move through the ancient streets and into the vibrant outdoor markets of modern İzmir, the world of the early church begins to take shape around us. The smell of incense in the air, the vendors lining the walkways, the commerce flowing in every direction — this is the world that surrounded them. To buy or sell anything in this city required a sacrifice. A pinch of incense. A mark that said you had worshiped. Without it, you were locked out of the entire economy.

Here we begin to understand what Christ meant when He said "I know your poverty — yet you are rich." And here the imagery of the mark, the buying and selling, the crowns of Revelation stop feeling like distant prophecy and start feeling like Tuesday morning at the market.

We will also walk the ancient Golden Street — the magnificent road that ran from the harbor straight into the heart of the city — and stand in the place where Polycarp, disciple of John himself, refused to renounce his King.

Perched 1,800 feet above the valley floor, Pergamum was the most magnificent city in all of Asia Minor — the Hollywood, the Washington DC, and the Vatican of the ancient world rolled into one. It was also, according to Christ himself, the place where Satan had his throne. Today we find out why.

As we climb toward the acropolis, we enter a world where every single aspect of daily life was wrapped in religion. The altar of Zeus — the king of kings. The temple of Athena — the way, the truth, and the life. The library of 200,000 volumes where truth was pursued and stored. The Asclepion hospital where healing came through the voice of the god. The Festival of Dionysus filling the theater with 10,000 people, offering the body and blood of the god to all who would drink and eat.

Sound familiar?

Every promise Christ ever made had a counterfeit version standing in this city. Satan's greatest strategy was never to destroy the church from the outside — it was to offer something close enough that the difference became hard to see.

We will follow the path of the ancient sacred way through the city, experiencing the sights, sounds, and atmosphere of a Roman festival day. We will stand at the altar of Zeus and hear Christ say "I know where you live." And we will read his letter to this church with fresh eyes — understanding for the first time that every one of his "I am" statements was a direct answer to the gods that surrounded them.

Today we leave the coastline behind and move inland — and everything changes. The massive port cities give way to river valleys, military outposts, and blue-collar towns. These are the churches nobody talks about. But for the early followers of the Way, these were the cities where the hardest questions lived.

Not the dramatic questions of persecution and martyrdom — but the quiet, daily ones.

How do you make a living in a world where your livelihood and your faith are on a collision course?

Small by the standards of the ancient world, Thyatira was a hardworking manufacturing city built to supply the Roman military machine. It had more trade guilds than any other city ever excavated in Asia Minor — and every single guild had its own god, its own feasts, and its own expectations of its members.

This is the city of gray areas. To work here meant joining a guild. Joining a guild meant attending the guild feasts. Attending the feasts meant eating meat offered to idols, participating in worship that was not your own, and compromising in ways that were easy to rationalize and hard to undo.

Here we explore how the early church in Thyatira wrestled with exactly the questions we still wrestle with today — where does faithful engagement with the world end and compromise begin? We will walk the ancient forum, explore the guild culture that shaped this city, and hear Christ's letter to this church in a way that makes every line suddenly personal.

We will also meet Lydia — the seller of purple from Thyatira who appears in Acts 16, a woman who somehow figured out how to follow Jesus in a city like this. Her story raises a question that stays with you long after you leave.

Perched above the breathtaking Hermus River Valley, Sardis was once the wealthiest city in the known world — where gold literally flowed in the river. It was the first city in history to mint its own coins. And it was a city that had fallen — twice — in exactly the same way.

When the people of Sardis received Christ's letter — "You have a reputation of being alive, but you are dead. Wake up" — they knew exactly what he meant. Every word of it.

We will explore the largest synagogue ever found in Asia Minor— a reminder that God was preparing this city for the gospel long before the apostles arrived. We will also visit the remarkable ruins of the Temple of Cybele, where pagan rituals and christian faith came into direct contact.

Of all seven churches, Philadelphia received the only letter with no rebuke. Christ had nothing against them. Not because they were powerful or prominent — but because despite having "little strength," they had kept his word and not denied his name.

Philadelphia was a city that knew suffering. Earthquake after earthquake had leveled it. Caesar had taxed it mercilessly. Persecution had worn it thin. And yet this small, exhausted, barely-surviving community of believers had held on.

"I have placed before you an open door that no one can shut."

We walk ancient streets Philadelphia and sit with that promise. Not the promise given to the strong or the successful — but to the ones who kept going when they had every reason to stop. It is one of the most quietly powerful moments of the entire journey.

Today we move through one of the most undervisited and underappreciated corridors of the entire New Testament world. From the ruins of Colossae to the breathtaking marble city of Aphrodisias, built entirely around the worship of the goddess of love, we discover what happens when the gospel of Jesus Christ collides head-on with the most seductive cultural forces of the Roman Empire.

Paul writes one of the most theologically rich letters in the entire New Testament, addressed to a church he had never personally visited, in a city he knew only through the reports of others.

Colossae sat in the Lycus Valley alongside Laodicea and Hierapolis — three cities, three churches, one river valley, and a web of relationships that shaped some of Paul's most important correspondence. The church here had been founded by Epaphras, one of Paul's disciples, and it was struggling. Not with persecution. Not with poverty. But with ideas — sophisticated, plausible, culturally acceptable ideas that were quietly pulling the community away from the simplicity of Christ.

Standing in the largely unexcavated ruins of Colossae, we read the letter Paul wrote from a Roman prison to a church he had never seen. "For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form." No philosophy. No mysticism. No angelic intermediaries. Just Christ — completely sufficient, completely supreme, completely enough.

The ruins are raw and unpolished. There are no ticket booths, no tour buses, no crowds. Just a field, a hill, and the weight of a letter that still speaks.

If Pergamum was the political capital of Asia Minor, Aphrodisias was its cultural one. Built around the Temple of Aphrodite — the goddess of love, beauty, and desire — this city produced some of the finest marble sculptures in the entire Roman world. Its stadium seated 30,000 people. Its temple complex was among the most magnificent ever built. And its entire identity was built around the worship of love itself.

Aphrodisias is one of the best preserved ancient cities in all of Turkey — and one of the most stunning. Walking its colonnaded streets, standing in its extraordinary sculpture museum, and seeing the sheer scale of what was built here in the name of Aphrodite forces a question that the early church had to answer every single day.

How do you proclaim a gospel of love — real love, sacrificial love, the kind that lays down its life — in a city that has already built the most beautiful monuments in the world to a counterfeit version of the same thing?

The early church's answer was not to out-argue the culture. It was to out-love it. And here, surrounded by the marble remnants of a world that worshiped beauty and desire, that answer feels both ancient and completely current.

In the Roman world there was no Bible sitting on your nightstand. There was no prayer line. There was no still small voice whispering in the quiet of the morning. If you wanted to hear from the gods — and everyone did — you paid. You traveled. You waited. And you hoped the answer made sense.

Today we visit three cities that show us exactly what that world looked like. And by the time the day is over, you will never read the opening of the Gospel of John the same way again.

Built on a rocky cliff above the Meander plain, Priene is one of the best preserved Greek cities in all of Turkey — and a city that almost nobody visits. Which means today it belongs to us.

This is the world that gave us the vocabulary of the New Testament. Walk into the agora — the marketplace — and you are standing in the place where the ekklesia was born. Not a church building. Not a religious gathering. A civic assembly of people called out from their homes to conduct the business of the community. When Paul writes to the ekklesia in Ephesus, in Corinth, in Philippi — he is using a word every person in the Roman world already knew. He is saying the kingdom of God is not a religion tucked into the corner of your life. It is the governing assembly of a new humanity.

Walk up to the Temple of Athena — partially funded by Alexander the Great himself — and you are standing in the place where the city came to seek wisdom, truth, and divine guidance. Athena was the way, the truth, and the life. She was the one who led you. She was the one who knew.

Sound familiar?

John does not begin his gospel with "In the beginning there was a religion." He begins it with "In the beginning was the Word." He is speaking directly into this world — a world that already believed in divine wisdom, divine truth, divine guidance — and saying you have been looking for the right thing in the wrong place. The Logos you have been searching for is not a philosophy. He has a name. He has a face. He walked among us.

Twelve miles south of Priene, connected by a 15-mile sacred processional road lined with colonnaded structures, shrines, and stopping points for pilgrims — the Oracle of Didyma was one of the four great oracles of the ancient world. People traveled from across the Roman Empire to hear the voice of the god Apollo speak.

The Temple of Apollo at Didyma is staggering. Its columns are among the largest ever built — so wide that five people standing arm to arm cannot reach around them. Its doors were so tall they disappeared into the sky above the approaching pilgrim.

Standing here, the contrast with the Christian gospel becomes almost unbearable in its clarity. The God of the Bible does not sit in a cave dispensing riddles to the wealthy few who can afford the pilgrimage. He speaks plainly. He speaks personally. He speaks to everyone. And he does not charge admission.

"In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son."

The early church arrived in this world with that message — and it changed everything.

Here the story gets personal.

Miletus was one of the great port cities of the Aegean — a city of philosophers, merchants, and trade routes. It was also the place where Paul said goodbye.

He was on his way to Jerusalem. He knew what was waiting. He had sent word ahead to the elders of the Ephesian church — I cannot stop, come to me here in Miletus, I need to see you. And they came. And Paul stood before the people he had poured three years of his life into, and he told them the truth.

"I have not hesitated to preach anything that would be helpful to you. I am going to Jerusalem not knowing what will happen to me there. I only know that in every city the Holy Spirit warns me that prison and hardships are facing me."

Then he knelt on the shore and prayed with them. And they wept. And they held onto him. And they walked him to the ship.

We stand on that shore today. We read those words from Acts 20 in the place where they were first spoken. And something happens that is difficult to explain to someone who has not experienced it — the words stop living on the page and start living in the air around you.

This is why we come. Not for the ruins. For the moment when the story steps out of the text and into the world where it actually happened.

We have been building toward this all week. Every city we have visited, every guild hall and oracle and counterfeit temple — all of it has been preparing us for this moment. Today we walk Ephesus. The largest city in Asia Minor. The third largest city in the Roman Empire. The city John called home. The city Paul spent three years in. The city where the gospel took root in the middle of one of the most powerful, most seductive, most religiously saturated urban environments in the ancient world.

And the city where Christ looked at a church that was doing everything right — and said "I have this against you."

You left your first love.

Today we find out what that means.

Almost nothing remains. A single reconstructed column rises from a marshy field on the edge of the modern town of Selçuk — a lonely marker of what was once one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

And that is exactly the point.

The Temple of Artemis was larger than a professional football field. Sixty feet high. One hundred and twenty seven columns. The goddess of fertility and purity, carried through these streets every year in a procession that drew crowds from across the empire. Chanting. Incense. Worship. "Great is Artemis of the Ephesians" — the same chant that echoed through the great theater for two solid hours when Paul's preaching threatened the silversmith trade in Acts 19.

Today a single column stands in a field. A stork has built a nest on top of it.

We stand here first — before we enter the magnificent ruins of the city — because this is where the story of Ephesus begins. Not in the grandeur of the marble streets but in the religious world that surrounded the early church on every side. They did not live in a secular city. They lived in a city where the goddess owned the economy, the culture, the calendar, and the identity of every person who lived there.

And into that city, a handful of believers decided to follow Jesus anyway.

Before we walk the ancient city, we stop at the Ephesus Archaeological Museum in Selçuk — one of the finest archaeological museums in all of Turkey.

Here the world of Ephesus comes off the ruins and into sharp focus. The statues of Artemis - towering, covered in symbolic fertility images, staring across the room at each other — are here. You stand before them and you understand immediately feel the presence of this god. There is something in the air.

The museum holds artifacts from across the ancient city — coins, inscriptions, sculptures, household objects, and the everyday evidence of the world the early church lived inside. By the time we walk out of here and into the ruins of Ephesus, we are no longer tourists reading information plaques. We are people who understand the world we are about to enter.

Ephesus is extraordinary. There is no other word for it. The Library of Celsus. The great theater that seats 25,000 people. Harbor Street stretching toward what was once the sea. The agora where Christians couldn't buy or sell without a sacrifice. The terrace houses where wealthy families lived — their frescoed walls and mosaic floors still intact — revealing a domestic world of extraordinary beauty and complexity.

We walk these streets slowly. We read Acts 19 here — the riot, the confusion, the crowd pouring into the theater shouting for two hours. We read Ephesians here — "For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world." Paul wrote that from a Roman prison, to people walking these exact streets.

We visit the site of the theater where Paul is believed to have preached. We walk Harbor Street — the grand colonnaded avenue that connected the city to the sea — and imagine the trade, the noise, the life that poured through it every day.

And then we read the letter. Christ's letter to this church. The church that had done everything right — the hard work, the perseverance, the doctrinal precision, the refusal to tolerate wickedness.

"Yet I hold this against you. You have forsaken the love you had at first."

Standing here, in the city where John spent the last decades of his life, where he wrote his gospel, where he wrote his letters — all of them about love, all of them circling back to the same singular command — the rebuke lands differently than it ever does in a pew.

The tour comes to an end after experience the beauty Israel and timeliness stories of the Bible.

The group will be departing Izmir, Turkey airport around midnight or very early in the morning to arrive back in the states the following afternoon.