These excommunicated brethren immediately requested help from the missionaries. A meeting was held in Constantinople, made up of delegates from the different mission stations in Turkey, at which Dr. Pomeroy, later one of the secretaries of the American Board, was present. At that meeting, plans were drawn up for an organization among the evangelical Armenians of Constantinople. Consequently, on the first day of July, 1846, they came together and were organized into the First Evangelical Armenian Church. The church numbered forty members, of which thirty-seven were men. One week later an Armenian pastor, a former student in the school of Pashtimaljian, was ordained over the church. A pamphlet in Armenian was issued, containing their confession of faith and setting forth the reasons why, through the compulsory measures of the patriarch, they had been compelled to organize themselves into a separate body. During the same summer, similar Armenian churches were formed in Nicomedia, Adabazar and Trebizond. The Mohammedans showed themselves sympathetic. A Moslem judge before whom some of the evangelicals had been hauled, said, “We cannot interfere to protect you from excommunication, but so long as you abide by the declaration you have made we will protect you civilly. Your goods shall be as our goods; your houses as our houses; and your persons as our persons. Go in peace.” All subjects of the Turkish empire were registered as members of some recognized religious community. Each various Christian community like the Armenian, the Greek, and the Roman Catholic, had its recognized head at the Porte and through this head individual rights were protected. Every non-Moslem was compelled to claim his rights at the hand of his religious political head. If his claim were there denied, he had no redress. The Armenian patriarch was the recognized political superior of the Armenians. He had violently excluded all evangelicals from the Church and from all their inherited rights as Armenians. He no longer recognized such as members of his race, and not only refused to protect them and secure for them justice but he devised methods to direct a bitter persecution against them. These excommunicated “Protestants,” as they were sometimes called, were the legal possessors of no rights or privileges in the empire that any one was bound to respect.