But the God I have served in the dark for two decades did not bring the Iranian church through 47 years of K&A Iran to abandon it.

Now what was planted in living rooms with the curtains closed is coming up through the broken ground.

And nothing, not another regime, not another crackdown, not anything in earth or heaven is going to put it back underground.

I am aware that some people listening to this may be uncomfortable with a pastor speaking about spiritual harvest in the middle of a war.

I understand that discomfort and I want to address it directly before I say anything else.

It is not comfortable.

It is not clean.

There is nothing about the current situation in Iran that allows for simple, uncomplicated hope.

People are dying.

Cities are damaged.

Families are separated.

Children are growing up in the middle of something that will mark them for the rest of their lives.

To speak about spiritual opportunity in the middle of that requires a kind of carefulness that I want to be held to.

If at any point in what I’m about to say, I begin to sound as though I am treating human suffering as a backdrop for a Christian success story.

I ask you to call me on it because that is not what I am trying to do.

That is not what I believe and it is not what the gospel asks of me.

What the gospel asks of me is honesty.

And the honest thing, the thing I cannot look away from because it is happening in front of me and around me and coming to me through every channel I have in Iran right now.

Is this people are turning to Jesus in numbers and at a speed that I have never seen in 20 years of ministry.

That is the truth.

And I have a responsibility to say it truthfully with appropriate grief for the circumstances that have created the opening and with appropriate gratitude for the God who is walking into that opening with mercy instead of judgment.

Let me tell you what I am hearing from the ground.

House churches that had 12 or 15 members are reporting 30, 35, sometimes 40 people trying to attend.

The infrastructure that was built quietly over decades for a community of hundreds of thousands is suddenly being asked to serve what appears to be a community that is growing toward millions.

Leaders who were discipling 10 or 15 people are now fielding inquiries from 50.

Satellite ministry organizations that were receiving thousands of messages a month from Iranians asking about faith are now receiving tens of thousands.

People who had been watching Christian broadcasts for months or years in complete secrecy, not knowing how to reach anyone, are now reaching out through whatever channel they can find because the secrecy no longer feels as necessary as it did.

And the hunger has become too large to manage alone.

I received a message last week from a house church leader in a city in central Iran.

I will not say which city who told me that in a single week 14 people had been baptized in his network.

14 in a week.

In 20 years of underground ministry in Iran, the normal pace of baptisms in any given network is one here, two there, a slow and careful and precious accumulation.

14 in a week is not a pace I have ever heard of.

Not in Iran.

not under these conditions.

I want to be careful not to present numbers without acknowledging their limitation.

We are in the middle of a rapidly evolving situation in a country where careful recordkeeping has never been possible and is even less possible now.

I am not giving you statistics I can footnote.

I am giving you the testimony of people I trust from a network I have spent 20 years building who are describing the same thing from different cities and different contexts.

Something unprecedented is happening.

But I do not want to only talk about numbers.

Numbers are the smallest part of what I want to say.

I want to talk about why this is happening.

not the simple answer.

The regime fell and people are free now to explore because the simple answer is not fully accurate and it leaves out the most important parts.

The regime has not fully fallen.

The war is still going.

The situation is uncertain.

Freedom of religion in Iran is not yet a legal reality.

People who are turning to Jesus right now are not doing so in a safe environment.

They are doing so in a broken, dangerous, uncertain environment.

The turning is happening not because the path has become easy, but because something in people has become unable to wait any longer.

I have thought carefully about why this moment is producing what it is producing and I want to share what I believe for whatever it is worth.

The first reason is what I have already described the collapse of the regime’s version of God.

When a government uses religion as its primary instrument of control for nearly five decades and then that government collapses or begins to collapse, the religion it weaponized takes damage to.

Not true religion, not the real God, but the specific version of God that the regime manufactured and deployed.

The god of the Islamic Republic was a God who approved of executions and morality police and plastic keys around children’s necks.

That God is now exposed as what he always was.

Not God, but a tool.

And the people who were given that tool instead of the real thing are now in the rubble of everything asking for the first time in their lives, is there a real thing? Is there an actual God separate from all of that? And if so, where is he? The second reason is something I touched on in an earlier part of this testimony, but I want to say it more fully now.

Iranians are not, as a people, spiritually shallow.

This is an ancient civilization.

The land that is now Iran produced Cyrus the Great, who is the only non-Jewish figure in the Hebrew scriptures given the title of God’s anointed, the Persian king who freed the Jewish people from Babylonian captivity.

Persia produced Roomie whose poetry about the longing of the human soul for God is read by people of every religion around the world.

The Iranian people have a deep cultural memory of spiritual seeking, of the soul’s hunger for something real and transcendent.

The Islamic Republic tried to channel all of that hunger into a narrow, controlled, politically useful form, but you cannot permanently contain a people’s spiritual capacity within a political project.

The hunger is too old and too deep.

When the political container cracked, the hunger came out in every direction.

The third reason is the most personal to me, and it is the one I want the global church to hear most clearly.

The underground church stayed.

When the arrests came, the church stayed.

When the raids came, the church stayed.

when friends went to prison and colleagues were killed and families were fractured and the cost kept rising.

Year after year, the church stayed in Iran.

We did not all leave.

Some left, many left.

And I do not judge anyone who left because I know what the cost of staying was.

And I know it was not a cost every person could reasonably be asked to pay indefinitely.

But many stayed.

Pastors stayed, women stayed, young people who came to faith and immediately understood the risk stayed.

And we built something over those years in the hidden spaces of Iran.

Not a building, not an institution, not anything visible from the outside, but a presence, a community, a network of people who knew each other and trusted each other and had paid the same price to be part of the same thing.

When the doors began to open, Iranians knew where to find us because we had not left.

When your Muslim neighbor wants to ask about Jesus, he knows to come to you because you are still there.

You were there through the hard years.

You are still there in the hard years that are now different hard years.

And that presence, that faithful unmoving presence is worth more in evangelism than any program or strategy or well-funded campaign.

It is simply the presence of the church in the place it was called to be.

That is what we have.

That is what by God’s grace we did not give away.

I want to speak now to the global church to Christians in America, in Europe, in Africa, in Asia, wherever you are hearing or reading this.

I want to ask you for something and I want to be specific about what I am asking.

I am not asking for your triumphalism.

I am not asking you to turn what is happening in Iran into a talking point in debates about the war or in political arguments about American foreign policy.

The people converting to Jesus in Iran right now are not arguments.

They are human beings in the middle of one of the most disorienting experiences of their lives.

Discovering a new faith in the ruins of an old one in the middle of a country at war with no guarantee of safety and no certainty about what tomorrow holds.

They need care.

They need disciplehip.

They need pastors and teachers and communities that can hold them and walk with them through what it means to follow Jesus when you have never done it before.

And the cost of doing it is still very real.

The infrastructure of the underground church in Iran is overwhelmed right now.

The people who have been doing this work for decades are exhausted in a way that is hard to describe.

We are running on what God gives us directly because what we have in terms of human resources and structures was built for a community of a certain size.

And that community is growing at a rate that our structures cannot currently keep up with.

the need for support, financial support, prayer support, the support of trained teachers who can create disciplehip materials in Farsy, the support of diaspora Iranians who have the language and the cultural knowledge to help.

That need is urgent and real.

Pray.

I ask this first because I believe it.

First, pray specifically for the safety of new believers who have no idea yet what they have stepped into.

For the leaders who are trying to disciple them.

For wisdom for house church networks navigating a security environment that is still genuinely dangerous even as it is rapidly changing.

and for Iran’s political future to move toward a constitution that protects the freedom of every Iranian to believe and worship as their conscience leads them.

I want to say something about that last prayer for Iran’s political future because I think it matters very much how Christians outside Iran understand what they are praying for.

I am not praying for a Christian Iran in the sense of a theocracy that replaces one form of religious compulsion with another.

I have lived inside a religious compulsion for most of my life.

I know what it does to a person, to a nation, to faith itself.

Faith that is compelled is not faith.

It is performance at gunpoint.

What I am praying for, what I have been praying for for 20 years is an Iran where a Muslim and a Christian and a Jew and a Zoroastrian and a secular person and an atheist can all sit at the same table and none of them is afraid.

where the law protects every person’s right to believe what their conscience leads them to believe and to change that belief if their conscience leads them somewhere new.

Where no one hangs from a rope for apostasy where no one’s door comes in on a Thursday evening.

I believe Christianity will grow in Iran.

I believe it is already growing in Iran at a rate that history will record as remarkable.

But I am a pastor, not a conqueror.

I do not want Iran for Christianity the way the regime wanted Iran for its version of Islam.

I want Iranians to meet Jesus the way I met Jesus.

In a moment of genuine personal encounter, through words that found the hollow room inside them and did not leave, through a community that loved them at real cost.

Not through pressure, not through the absence of alternatives, through love, through presence, through the patient, relentless, costly, ordinary work of the church being the church.

If Christianity becomes the faith that shapes Iran’s future, and I believe it will, I believe it more certainly today than I have ever believed anything.

It must be because Iranians chose it freely because they encountered something in Jesus that they could not find anywhere else.

Because the church that survived 47 years of persecution earned their trust, not through power, but through love.

Bombs break things.

Love builds them.

And the church’s business has always been building.

Let me speak now to anyone listening to this who does not follow Jesus.

Anyone who is outside the faith, curious or skeptical or simply trying to understand what is happening in Iran and why a pastor is speaking about it this way.

I am not going to shout at you.

I am not going to threaten you with consequences.

I am going to tell you one simple thing.

I was where you are.

I was a man in Tehran who thought Christianity was a foreign religion for people who had been colonized into believing it.

I thought Jesus was a figure from ancient history who had been used by Western powers as a cultural tool.

I thought the people who followed him were at best well-meaning and confused and at worst agents of an agenda I wanted no part of.

I believed all of this with the confidence of someone who had never actually examined any of it because I had been given a version of the world in which examining it was not necessary and not safe.

And then in a hollow room on an ordinary afternoon, I read six sentences on a piece of paper and something happened that I have spent 20 years trying to describe and have never fully managed to.

Not lightning, not a vision, a stillness, a sense of being heard by something that had always been there and that I had never been quiet enough to notice.

I am not standing here at 51 years old, having lost my family’s approval, having been arrested, having spent two decades in hiding, having raised my children inside a secrecy that no child should have to live inside, having paid every price this life has asked me to pay because of a feeling.

Feelings pass.

Feelings are not enough to sustain a person through 11 days in a detention facility or 30 years of quiet questions or a mother’s voice asking you on the phone whether this is worth dying for.

I am here because of a person.

His name is Jesus.

I have never once regretted meeting him.

And if there is anything in your life that resembles the hollow room I described at the beginning of this testimony, if there is an emptiness that the things you have been given to fill it have not filled.

If there are questions that the framework you were raised inside has not answered.

If there is a ceiling you have shouted at and gotten silence back, then I am asking you to do one thing.

Not to believe.

Not yet.

Not to pray a prayer or join a church or make any decision at all.

Just to ask honestly with whatever is left of your honesty in whatever private space you can find.

whether there is a God who knows your name, whether the stillness that I am describing is something that is available to you.

I asked that question in a hospital corridor at 2:00 in the morning.

I asked it with nothing left and something answered that something has not left me since.

Finally, I want to speak directly to my brothers and sisters inside Iran.

I know some of you are listening to this or reading this right now.

In cities whose names I cannot say in rooms with curtains that may or may not still need to be closed.

In a moment that is unlike any moment we have lived through before.

I want to say to you, do not be afraid.

I know that is easy to say from wherever I am and harder to live where you are.

I know the situation is still dangerous.

I know the uncertainty is real.

I know that some of you are leading communities that have tripled in size overnight and you are exhausted and underresourced and sometimes you look at what God is asking you to do and you wonder whether you have enough.

You do not have enough.

None of us ever have enough.

That has never been how this works.

What we have has always been what God gives us as we go.

And he has never once given it in advance.

And he has never once failed to give it when we needed it.

You know this.

You have lived it.

Every Thursday evening for years and years, you went into rooms where you did not have enough and came out having been given enough.

This is the same.

only larger.

The church that met in living rooms with the curtains closed for 40 years is not going back into hiding.

What was planted in the dark is coming up into the light.

What was whispered for decades is now being spoken out loud.

What was held by 12 people in a borrowed apartment is now being held by thousands and soon by more.

Keep going.

Keep gathering.

Keep baptizing.

Keep praying.

Keep being present in the broken places of Iran’s life the way you have always been present.

Because that presence is the only argument for Jesus that has ever actually worked and is the only one that will continue to work.

Not arguments, not strategy, presence, love, the willingness to stay.

God did not bring us through 47 years to abandon us.

Now I have to go.

There are people waiting for me.

New believers who need to be taught.

Conversations that need to be had.

Prayers that need to be prayed.

The work does not pause because I have been telling you about it.

The work is always going.

I want to leave you with one thing.

Early in this testimony, I described a hospital corridor where I asked a ceiling if anyone was there.

I described it as the bottom of something.

The place where the hollow room was at its most hollow, and the silence was at its most silent.

I have been back to that corridor in my memory many times since then.

I have gone back to it in prayer the way you return to a place that changed you.

And what I see now when I return to it is not a man shouting into emptiness.

What I see is a man being listened to.

What I see is a God who was in that corridor the whole time.

Who had been in every corridor before it.

who had been waiting with the patience that only God has for a man to finally run out of his own answers and simply ask.

He was there.

He has always been there in Tehran in Evan prison in the bathtub where I was baptized in the interrogation room in the hollow years and the full ones in the living rooms with the closed curtains in the broken ground of Iran.

right now walking among the millions of people who are asking for the first time whether he is real.

He is real.

He is in Iran.

He has always been in Iran.

He was there before Kmeni and before Kam.

And he will be there after all of this.

When the war is over and the ground has settled and Iran becomes whatever it is going to become, he will be there.

I have staked everything I have on that.

I have no regrets.

 

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