Updated Country Profile - Kyrgyzstan

Click here to access our updated Reaching the Nations country profile for Kyrgyzstan. The Church missed its window of opportunity to enter Kyrgyzstan in the 1990s when religious freedom laws better accommodated foreign, proselytizing Christian groups. Today, the Church has the virtually insurmountable barrier for 200 adult citizen members required for government registration. Although a mission branch exclusively services Kyrgyzstan under the Russia Yekaterinburg Mission, no official branch meets within the country. A member group has historically functioned to service American military personnel. A senior missionary couple on humanitarian assignment has served in the country since the mid-2010s. There are no translations of Church materials into Kyrgyz although there is a small number of translations of materials in Kazakh which is mutually intelligible with Kyrgyz.

New Locations for Humanitarian Service Missions

The Church publishes a weekly newsletter entitled "Senior Missionary Opportunities Bulletin" that contains up-to-date information on current needs for senior couples to serve full-time missions. All types of senior missionary couple opportunities are listed in the bulletin such as with the Church Education System, the Temple Department, Welfare Services, Auditing Department, and so on. The weekly newsletter can be accessed here.

Recently, the Church has added several new locations for humanitarian service missions in the bulletin. These locations include:

• Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan
• Kurdistan, Iraq
• Senegal

The Church has never appeared to assign senior missionary couples on humanitarian assignment to these three locations. Although these assignments are focused on humanitarian service and development projects, often times the assignment of humanitarian senior missionary couples proceeds or coincides with the establishment of an official church presence. Notable examples include Armenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Burma (Myanmar), Gabon, the Republic of Georgia, Kosovo, Laos, Macedonia (FYROM), and Turkey. Although the prospective assignment of senior missionary couples to these three locations is encouraging for the Church to expand its worldwide influence to meet humanitarian needs and lay the groundwork for an official LDS presence one day, only Senegal appears to have realistic prospects for proselytizing, full-time missionaries to be assigned. Iraqi Kurdistan presents many safety and religious freedom challenges, whereas the Church in Kyrgyzstan has experienced challenges with obtaining legal recognition for over a decade. However, the 2014 Kyrgyzstani court ruling that the law requiring 200 adult citizen members for a religious group to register with the government as unconstitutional suggests improved prospects for the establishment of a member group or branch in Bishkek (click here to access a case study on the Church in Kyrgyzstan).

Central Eurasian Mission to be Created in July

Today the Church announced that a new mission will be organized this July from a division of the Bulgaria Sofia and Russia Novosibirsk Missions. The Central Eurasian Mission will be headquartered in Istanbul, Turkey and include the following nations within its boundaries: Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkey, and Uzbekistan. Although the Church did not explicitly state that Turkmenistan will be included in the Central Eurasian Mission, a graphic supplied in an LDS Church News article suggests that this nation will also be included within the new mission. The realigned Bulgaria Sofia Mission will subsequently only administer Bulgaria whereas the realigned Russia Novosibirsk Mission will solely administer central Siberia. The Church currently reports four branches in Turkey, two branches in Kazakhstan, and one branch for expatriate members in Azerbaijan. Full-time missionaries have served in Kazakhstan since 2004 and Turkey since 2012.

The announcement of the new mission came as a complete shock to me. All but two of the countries (Kazakhstan and Turkey) have never been assigned to an LDS mission before. All of these nations experience governmental and/or societal restrictions on religious freedom. Governmental restrictions on religious freedom have intensified within Central Asia during the past two decades as a result of the resurgence of Islamic identify following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, political efforts to curb the emergence of radical Islamist groups in the region, and concern that nontraditional Christian groups pose threats to local cultures and national identities. The Church missed its window of opportunity to establish a presence in most Central Asian republics and Azerbaijan during the 1990s when conditions were more favorable to missionary-focused Christian denominations. Consequently efforts to establish the Church in Kyrgyzstan were unsuccessful in the mid-2000s. There have not appeared to be any recent efforts to establish the Church in additional nations in the region such as Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, or Uzbekistan.

The decision to organize the new mission stands as the most audacious and proactive initiative by the LDS Church to expand its outreach into vast unreached areas of the world since the 1990s. The Church has organized no new missions within an area with as few members and congregations since the organization of the Russia Vladivostok Mission in 1999. No LDS scriptures have been translated into languages indigenous to Central Asia or Azerbaijan and only the Book of Mormon has been translated into Turkish.  Many of the most commonly spoken languages have no translations of LDS materials available such as Azerbaijani, Kurdish, Kyrgyz, Tajiki, Turkmen, and Uzbek. The organization of the new mission will provide the Church an exciting frontier to pioneer Muslim-specific outreach if determined by mission and area leadership as the percentage of Muslims in the population range from as low as 70% in Kazakhstan to as high as 99.8% in Turkey.

The new Central Eurasian Mission will have over 150 million people within its boundaries. The mission will tie with the Uganda Kampala Mission as the mission with the fourth largest population in the world after the India New Delhi, Indonesia Jakarta, and India Bangalore Missions.

Case studies on cumorah.com pertaining to the nations within the new Central Eurasian Mission can be found below.

• Beginning LDS Missionary Work in Turkey
• Missed Opportunities for LDS Outreach in Azerbaijan
• Missed Opportunities for LDS Outreach in Kyrgyzstan
• Missed Opportunities for LDS Outreach in Tajikistan
• Missed Opportunities for LDS Outreach in Turkmenistan
• Missed Opportunities for LDS Outreach in Uzbekistan
• Recent LDS Church Growth Developments in Kazakhstan

I will write a case study on cumorah.com in the coming month or two providing further analysis of this exciting and unprecedented development.