Greek Ban on Proselytism on Trial at Missionaries’ Hearing

A three-member appeal court began hearings this week in the case of three Protestant missionaries, including a Southern California man sentenced to a 3 1/2-year jail term for converting a Greek Orthodox youth.

Donald Stephens, 40, of San Pedro, a member of Youth With a Mission; Alan Williams, 52, a British teacher, and Costas Macris, 50, a Greek missionary who preached in Indonesia, are using their case to campaign against Greece’s constitutional prohibition of proselytism, a diplomat said.

“Our case involves a great injustice,” Macris said.

The Panhellenic Evangelical Alliance of Greece, an umbrella organization of Protestant organizations in the predominantly Greek Orthodox country, called for a worldwide protest against “this breach of human rights.”

American Consul Edwin Beffel; John Warwick Montgomery, dean of the Simon Greenleaf School of Law, Anaheim, Calif., and Cypriot lawyer Evangelia Efstratiou-Georgadi, a representative of the Geneva-based International Commission of Jurists, attended the proceedings as observers.

The three missionaries were found guilty in 1984 of trying to convert Costas Kotopoulos, now 20. Kotopoulos told the court Thursday he was not persuaded by the missionaries’ beliefs but enjoyed being with the group, whose 150 members lived in Greece while their 11,500-ton relief ship was being refitted in 1981.

“I liked their way of life, their politeness and kindness, the life they led aboard the ship. I wasn’t convinced by their faith,” said Kotopoulos.

But the young man’s mother, Katerina Douka, claimed that the missionaries tried to subvert her son’s beliefs. The missionaries said her legal action was part of an attempt to regain custody of Costas, who lives with his father following his parents’ divorce.

Tounga told the court her son had met the missionaries when with his father.

“After that, he began to change. He said icons were a form of idolatry,” she said.