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To have a place to meet is vital for a community of believers. Yet in Turkmenistan this issue poses one of the biggest challenges for the Church, as the government controls, obstructs and prevents the building, buying or renting of religious meeting-places and places of worship. Churches can obtain a meeting place only if they are registered; yet despite the fact that the number of members required for registration was reduced from 500 to only five in 2004, few Christian communities have actually been able to register. Many officials who approve registration are dismissed from their jobs.
Even churches that manage to register struggle. One registered church had to move its services at least ten times in 2008 as government officials continued to harass it. In numerous other cases owners of venues who had agreed to rent to a church received threatening phone calls from officials shortly afterwards, persuading them to cancel the arrangements.
Christians had hoped that their conditions would improve after the death of former President Niyazov, who created a cult centred on himself, wrote a sacred book, Ruhnama, and legally required all places of worship to have a room set aside for reading it. However, promises by the succeeding President to respect human rights have come to nothing: there are still severe restrictions on printing and importing Christian literature; sharing one’s faith in public is extremely dangerous; religious education, apart from at a basic level, is impossible; Christians have been fired from their jobs or evicted from their homes because of their faith and their children have been threatened with expulsion from school.
