Athens – Mars Hill

Tim Frodsham 8 March 2025

Serving as a missionary in Athens, Greece, we periodically trek to the Areopagus, or Mars Hill to welcome new missionaries to Greece and bid farewell to those returning home. We hear instructions from our mission president and on occasion, from an Apostle or another general authority. Powerful testimonies of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Greece was a hotbed of Christian evangelism in the meridian of time. Paul wrote two letters to the people of Corinth, two letters to the people of Thessalonica, another to the saints in Phillipi. He wrote two letters to Timothy, who was leading the church in Ephesus, now in modern day Turkey, but Timothy himself was of Greek and Jewish descent. He also wrote a letter to Titus, who led the saints on the island of Crete.

In the time of Paul, the Areopagus was the legal center of Athens. The supreme court of Athens tried criminal cases including murder, civil cases, and ruled over religious matters as well. Philosophers such as Socrates debated the issues of the day at this the philosophical and religious center of ancient Greece.

It was here that the Apostle Paul boldly revealed to the people of Greece, the unknown god. Luke summarized Paul’s speech in Acts 17, as there is no way our loquacious Paul would have given a discourse to the council in under three minutes.

Paul was not there to give a sermon, it is most likely he was on trial. In verse 19: “And they took him, and brought him unto Areopagus, saying, May we know what this new doctrine, whereof thou speakest, is?” They took him to the Areopagus, which implies he did not stroll up the hill willingly.

Paul was an apostle of controversy. He was accused in Thessalonia of turning the world upside down. In Ephesus, he was a threat to the god Artemis

In 339 BC Socrates was on trial for “impiety” and “corrupting the young.” He didn’t “acknowledge the city’s official gods, and also — here it is — that he was introducing new divinities.” Paul’s defense over 400 years later was brilliant. He did not introduce a new god, but declared to them one that they already worshiped.

Today, the Greek people embrace their Orthodox faith, or at least the traditions inherited from millennia of Christian worship in this historic country.

Greece has never seen a reformation, a renaissance. The people here have never searched for the hidden God of the Old Testament, and Jesus the Savior that was missing from the New. The first convert in modern Greece, Rigas Pofantis, was baptized in 1905. Not much more occurred until a visit by Church President Ezra Taft Benson, when church leaders organized a small branch in 1965, which was reorganized in 1967. The Greece Athens mission was established in 1990 and the first meeting house in Halandri in May of 1999. In 2016, Elder D. Todd Christofferson of the quorum of the 12 visited Greece. For a time, Greece was in the Adriatic South Mission, and is now in the Bulgaria Greece mission, which comprises Bulgaria, Greece and Cyprus.

In the 1990’s, there were six branches in Greece: The Greek Athens branch, the Thessloniki, Pireas, Faliro, Haldndri, Omonia. Today, after COVID and the exodus of saints after the Greece entry into EU, there are two small branches in the country. One in Athens, presided over by a native Greek convert, and in Thesssaloniki, where a senior missionary serves as branch president.

Something will happen to arouse the people of Greece. The Lord, in his infinite wisdom, will awaken the people of Greece to the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. Houses of the Lord now dot the world, and in the not to distant future, one of those dots will be in Greece, dedicated to the once unknown God.

We love the people of Greece. They are warm and engaging. From store clerks to people on the street, we enjoy the interaction. They are a good hearted people, and we will miss them terribly when we return home.