The Gülen Movement is a Turkish Muslim Educational Activist network with more than 1000 educational facilities across five continents. The schools, while staffed by pious movement members, purport to provide only secular education with an emphasis on math and the sciences. Despite the movement’s global success, its careful guarding of its internal operations has rendered it somewhat opaque and enigmatic. In tandem with the unusual mix of personal piety and the secular sciences, allegations have been made that the teachers are hiding behind a secular façade, and are teaching Islam in secret classes. As a result of these allegations there have been a number of inquiries, such as those in Russia and the Netherlands. However, these have yielded no evidence to support such claims and till date little is known about how the teacher-student dynamics unfold in the Gülen schools. In this paper, I present seminal empirical data to argue that the movement is a missionary organization – though not in the traditional sense. Drawing on interviews with teachers (19) and graduates from movement schools (20) from Turkey, Central Asia, Russia, Indonesia and Africa, I show that the movement is not interested in converting non-Muslims, and should be regarded as a revivalist movement, similar to Tablighi Jamaat. There is a complex web of relations between the students and the teachers, wherein the teachers are not the main agents of transmitting the message of Islam. Rather, this is undertaken by a select group of religiously inclined Muslim students that are identified and groomed in their formative years into belletmenler (study aides) that assist junior students in the dormitories and share houses, and act as proxies for the teachers; a process that allows the teachers to remain largely removed from the recruitment process, and maintain the outwardly secular appearance of their institutions. In other words, the schools are ostensibly secular in that they do not actively teach religion, but rather function as a staging ground for recruitment into the movement.