Missions Conference

Pastor Andrew Brunson
Andrew Brunson is an American pastor and a teaching elder of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church. Brunson was arrested in Turkey, where he had lived since the mid-1990s, in October 2016 during the purges occurring after the 2016 Turkish coup d'état attempt against Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (along with the arrests of tens of thousands of Turkish military personnel, civil servants, educators, academics, dissidents, and journalists). In October 2018, the Trump administration successfully secured the release of Brunson, after U.S. economic sanctions and tariffs were placed on Turkey. After two years, Brunson was released from Turkish custody and immediately returned to the United States. In 2019, Brunson published a memoir about his experience.